Aleijar a gestão como crítica à ideologia gerencialista: pessoas com deficiência no mercado formal de trabalho

Abstract

This master’s thesis analyzes how compulsory able-bodiedness is articulated with managerialist ideology, especially with the notion of performance, affecting the experiences of people with disabilities in the formal labor market. The research addresses a gap in Organizational Studies, a field in which disability still appears in a peripheral position, often linked to diversity management, accessibility, or the normative fulfillment of inclusion policies, without being taken as an analytical category capable of interrogating the very foundations of management. Grounded in a critical, decolonial, and situated perspective, the study draws on Crip Theory, critical disability studies, and the critique of managerialism to call into question the ideal of the efficient, autonomous, and permanently available worker. Methodologically, it adopts a qualitative approach based on the life histories of four workers with disabilities, analyzed through the axes of compulsory able-bodiedness, managerialist ideology, performance, and cripping. The findings indicate that compulsory able-bodiedness operates in organizations as a silent norm that defines which bodies are recognized as fit for work, shifting onto people with disabilities the responsibility for proving competence, adapting themselves, and sustaining their permanence at work. In the axis of managerialist ideology, the narratives show that practices of evaluation, career progression, control, flexibility arrangements, and diversity management may reproduce inequalities under an appearance of neutrality, transforming institutional barriers into individual problems. In the axis of performance, the research shows that productivity does not appear only as a metric, but as a moral demand for recognition, belonging, and the continuous proof of capacity, often sustained by self-surveillance and by the need to demonstrate professional value. In the axis of cripping, the narrated experiences reveal refusals, acts of denunciation, negotiations, everyday inventions, and the production of situated knowledge about accessibility, work, and organization. The interviews also show that participants do not merely suffer the effects of management, but critically reflect on their presence in organizations, producing their own readings of recognition, accommodation, exclusion, permanence, and resistance. Another important finding is care as an analytical category, ethical principle, and collective responsibility, since permanence at work depends on support, accommodations, interdependence, and institutional conditions for participation, and not only on individual effort. As a contribution, this master’s thesis proposes “cripping management” as a critical lens for Organizational Studies, shifting disability from a peripheral place in inclusion debates to the center of the analysis of body, work, performance, care, and organization.