disabling accounting

Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 1–16

Disabling accounting

Mary Bishop a,1, Rebecca Boden b,∗a Bristol Business School, UWE, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK

b Institute of Social Innovation, UWIC, Colchester Avenue, Cardiff CF23 9XR, UK

Received 26 January 2006; received in revised form 25 July 2006; accepted 30 August 2006

Abstract

This paper extends existing analyses of the role of accounting in two dimensions: the constructionof bodily identities and of notions of disability. It seeks to make a contribution to both the accountingand the wider literature on disability. Utilising a broadly Marxist approach, the paper explores theorigins of UK medical classificatory regimes relating to disability in the transition from feudal tocapitalist societies. Such a transformation placed new emphasis on the maximisation of the surplusvalue of labour from normalised bodies utilising accounting technologies. The paper then explainshow UK legislative regimes were designed to support and sustain such classificatory regimes andwere, again, reliant upon accounting discourses. Close examination of a critical legislative incidentin the 1990s enables the explication of the role of accounting in sustaining such regimes.© 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Accounting; Disability; Disabled people; Self; Employment; Compliance cost assessment; Parliament;Medical model; Social model; Individual

Bodies, then, are not born; they are made. Bodies have been as thoroughly denat-uralised as sign, context and time. Late twentieth-century bodies do not grow frominternal harmonic principles theorised within Romanticism. Neither are they discov-ered in the domains of realism and modernism . . .. Organisms are made; they areconstructs of a world-changing kind. (Haraway, 1991, p. 208)

∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 2920 417 218.E-mail addresses: [email protected] (M. Bishop), [email protected] (R. Boden).

1 Tel.: +44 117 9656261.

1045-2354/$ – see front matter © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2006.08.005

mailto:[email protected]

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dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2006.08.005

2 M. Bishop, R. Boden / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 1–16

. . . like racism, sexism, heterosexism and other forms of institutional prejudice, dis-crimination against disabled people is institutionalised in the very fabric of Britishsociety. (Barnes and Oliver, 1995, p. 114)

1. On bodies

Connell (1995) asserts that ‘social theory for the most part still operates in the universecreated by Descartes, with a sharp split between the knowing, reasoning mind and themechanical, unreasoning body’ (59–60). He argued in contradistinction that our identitiesare in part a product of ‘bodily-reflexive practices’. That is, our bodily experiences, socialworld of lived experience, what we do with/to our bodies and culturally specific readingsof those experiences combine to shape our sense of our identities. It follows then, as hasbeen argued by cultural theorists such as Butler (1993) and Haraway (1991), that our bod-ies, or at the very least the way in which they are classified or ‘read’, are discursivelyframed.

There is scope here for the hidden or overt operation of power. For instance, classificatoryregimes such as ‘race’ may represent no more than a desire to categorise, amongst otherthings, certain groups as ‘other’. A brief recollection of some of the definitional twists andturns of the former South African apartheid regime’s attempts to define the ‘right’ people as‘white’ (for instance, those of Japanese heritage) illustrates the power of such theorisations.

Accounting has been identified as playing a central role in a wide range of such discursiveregimes of classification and control. Surprisingly little work has been done to date exploringthe role of accounting in the construction of our very bodies. But that which has been doneindicates the powerful role that accounting can play in shaping how bodies are perceivedand behave. Thus, Preston’s (1992) analysis of the birth of clinical accounting highlights therole played by accounting regimes in the ‘birth of the clinic’ and, following Foucault (1979),thereby the framing and disciplining of individuals. Similarly, Jeacle (2003) investigates theimpetus provided by accounting for the standardisation of clothing sizes, leading inexorablyto changes in the ways in which people perceive their bodies and are perceived.

Theorisations of bodily identities as a product of discursive framing (Foucault, 1979)have now been taken up and successfully utilised and developed by researchers from manydisciplines exploring the idea of ‘disability’. The aim of this paper is to extend this analysis ofdisability by exploring the role of accounting in the creation of a classificatory and discursiveregime of control, with particular reference to paid work. We argue that accounting isconstitutive of a discursive assemblage that has created and sustained both the classificationof certain people as disabled and legitimised discrimination against them (see also Preston,1992). Accounting had a dual role here, in both the creation of notions of the normalisedproductive working body and in the facilitation of legislative frameworks that sustainedsuch demarcations and discrimination. Accordingly, our argument has two elements. First,we trace the historical development of work and the accounting measurement of productivelabour that led inexorably to the development of notions of ‘dis/abled’ bodies. Second, theconstruction of and debates over legislative frameworks are explicated. In particular herewe draw upon a critical incident of the 1990s that clearly demonstrates the newly contestedoperation of accounting in this arena.

M. Bishop, R. Boden / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 1–16 3

This paper is organised into three further sections. In Section 2 we discuss the dichoto-mous medical and social models of disability in order that the role of accounting in sustainingthem (or otherwise) can be explicated. Section 3 explores the manner in which capitalismengendered a requirement for the classification of normalised bodies and traces the develop-ment of associated supporting legislative frameworks. Section 4 explores a critical incidentthat clearly illustrates the contemporary role of accounting in disability issues. This isfollowed by a discussion and conclusions.

2. Defining bodies—models explored

It is necessary first to set out the rivalrous conceptualisations of disability that still pertainin order that the role of accounting in sustaining one of them can be properly understood.Conceptualisations of disability fall into two main groups. The ‘medical model’ of disabilitycharacterises it as a condition that arises from some inherent characteristic of the body itself.For example, under the medical model, a person with no legs has a physical impairmentthat disables them because they cannot enter a building via steps unaided – their disabilityis a direct consequence of their impairment.

The pathologisation of disability under the medical model renders the socially excludedposition of disabled people non-contestable: it is their inability to be included by virtue of thetragedy of their impairment that disables them. It also precludes discussion of the ‘why’ ofexclusion. Because the cause of disability lies with the individual’s own body, discriminationis legitimised whilst charitable acts on compassionate grounds can be promoted.

The positivistic approach implicit in the medical model has all the accoutrements ofrationality: the empirical assessment of physical and mental impairments and their effects(i.e. what can impaired people not do?) permits the adjudication of who is ‘normal’ andwho is abnormal on an apparently objective basis.

Meanwhile, more contemporary ‘social models’ construe disability as an identityascribed to or adopted by certain people with particular bodily impairments. Such iden-tities are the result of culture, classificatory regimes or social discrimination. Utilising asocial model, an individual with no legs who cannot enter a building via steps is construedas having been disabled by a society that orders itself (for instance, through its architecturalpractices) in such a way as to exclude them. This turns disability into an issue of power/rightsand, unsurprisingly, social model approaches have therefore had a strong appeal to cam-paigners in the radical disabled rights lobbies. The reconceptualisation of disability as asocial construct rather than a medical fact in this way opens up fertile new ground for socialenquiry, facilitating for instance an exploration of the operation of power in the particularclassification/identification of some bodies as disabled.

At least two important influences on the development of social conceptualisations ofdisability are evident. Ontologically, the majority of the researchers who developed suchtheorisations from the 1970s onwards classified themselves as disabled (Barnes and Mercer,1997; Oliver, 1996). Second, other rights-based social movements developing contempo-raneously were important, especially ‘the similar rise of movements of black people andwomen, and the passage of anti-discrimination legislation in these areas’ (Oliver, 1985, p.35). Oliver puts these two factors together thus


The gradual recognition by disabled people that neither party politics nor charitableand voluntary organisations were serving their interests appropriately or well is akey factor in the emergence of the movement. There were also a number of externalinfluences such as the civil rights movement and feminism, both of which had suc-ceeded in getting the outlawing of discrimination on the grounds of race and genderonto the statute books in Britain. This in turn influenced the emerging consciousnessof disabled people, who were beginning to recognise that the problem of disabilityis externally located and that our exclusion from society is a human rights issue.(Campbell and Oliver, 1996, p. 60)

Tom Shakespeare, a radical disabled activist and academic, explores issues of disabledidentity in his work. He offers a radical critique of the social model developed by Oliverand others, whilst simultaneously recognising its value and extending it. In ‘Exploring theDivide’ (1996) he explicates five conceptualisations of disability as a social process. Hesees the social model, as developed by writers such as Oliver, as focusing only on disabilityas a relationship between people with impairment and a discriminatory society. As such,he argues, it fails to distinguish between people with impairments, the degrees of impair-ment experienced and other ways in which those with impairments may face prejudice.This conceptualisation can co-exist with what Shakespeare identifies as the minority groupapproach, where disabled people are seen as an oppressed group and as such may needspecial affirmative measures. Shakespeare fears that this may reinforce marginalisationof disabled people. He argues that his third identified conceptualisation, the Weberian orFoucauldian approach, limits disability to a category of social policy. This shifts attentionfrom the individual with an impairment to the statutory or policy processes that constructhim/her as ‘officially’ disabled (for instance, by registration schemes). Shakespeare, a vehe-ment political campaigner, lays great personal store on the fact that he has a very visiblydifferent body and does not want that to be made invisible. Disability can also be seen,Shakespeare argues, as the outcome of definitions inherent in social research methods.Examples of this include the UK government’s Office of National Statistics disability sur-veys which construct, to Shakespeare’s mind, arbitrary categories of disability that he findsmethodologically unsatisfactory because of ‘the weakness of such empiricism’ (page 87).Finally, Shakespeare considers disability as a cultural category, utilising notions of ‘oth-erness’ in cultural constructions of disability (see Sontag, 1979) and Foucauldian conceptsof discursive formations.

In offering these five different ways of exploring disability Shakespeare claims:

I do not thereby intend to abandon the social model’s stress on material, environmentaland policy factors. But rather than reducing the category ‘disability’ to a straightfor-ward social relation, I think an analysis of discursive practices offers a richer andmore complex picture of disability. It is in this sense, rather than the narrow phe-nomenological sense, that I would say disability is socially constructed, and wouldhighlight the benefits of a Foucauldian analysis, regarding disability as a process ofsubjection. (Shakespeare, 1996, p. 89)

Shakespeare argues that whilst social models of disability differ from the essentialistapproach of the medical model by using a social constructionist analysis


[i]n practice, social constructionism may not be as politically effective as essentialism,due to a lack of rhetorical power. Some have asked why they should deconstruct theirown identities when the oppressors identities are still so strong, and questioned whatsocial constructionism can offer them. (Shakespeare, 1996, p. 90)

In such statements Shakespeare appears to be reflecting Spivak’s notion of ‘strategicessentialism’ (Spivak, 1985).

The contribution of this paper is to explicate the role of accounting in the ‘discursivepractices’ that Shakespeare perceives as central to understanding disability as a social con-struct. By doing so, our aim is to lay bare some of the presumptions and processes that ledto the creation of the discriminatory category of ‘disability’, thereby giving the arguments‘rhetorical power’.

3. Working bodies

We turn first to the definition of the ‘normal’ body through labour processes.This has two elements: the power of accounting to normalise bodies on the basis of

productive capacity in industrial economies and second, the creation of legal and accountingprocesses that constituted associated regimes of control over bodies. We deal with each inturn, and then demonstrate how they were brought together.

3.1. The value of labour

Economically, the capitalist project hinges upon the extraction of the surplus value oflabour. In Wages, Price and Profit, written in 1865, Marx argues that the value of a commod-ity is dependent upon the amount of social labour (i.e. not labour expended to satisfy onlythe labourer’s own needs) incorporated in it. A commodity has value, he argues, because itis the crystallisation of such social labour.

Marx draws a sharp distinction between rewards for labour and the quantity of labourrequired to produce a commodity. He goes on to argue that

[i]t might seem that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity oflabour bestowed upon its production, the lazier a man, or the clumsier a man, themore valuable his commodity, because the greater the time of labour required forfinishing the commodity. This, however, would be a sad mistake. In saying that thevalue of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour . . . in it, we meanthe quantity of labour necessary for its production in a given state of society, undercertain social average conditions of production, with a given social average intensity,and average skills of the labour employed. (Marx, 1968, p. 204)

Here, Marx clearly identifies that commodity values – their prices in a market – aredetermined by reference to some normalised worker capacity. As Davis comments

Marx is unimaginable without a tendency to contemplate average humans and thinkabout their abstract relation to work, wages and so on. In this sense, Marx is very


much in step with the movement of normalising the body and the individual (1997,p. 51)

The harnessing of biopower (Foucault, 1979) through the disciplining of labour is essen-tial to capitalism. Industrial economies have quite distinct, economically rationalised, usefor people’s bodies as paid labourers. The centrality of cost accounting to Taylor’s principlesof scientific management provides clear evidence of this. As such, those with impairmentswhose labour might have lower surplus value may be deemed unsuitable for certain workas they diminish profitability. There are obvious parallels here with the definition of othergroups as unsuitable for full labour market participation, and their consequent social exclu-sion: the characterisation of women as a ‘reserve army of labour’ called upon in timesof national need such as war, or the exclusion of people of colour from certain sorts of(generally better paid) work has been an aspect of the operation of labour markets in theindustrialised world for some time.

3.2. From feudal work to labour markets

Britain’s transformation from a feudal to an industrial society engendered a correspond-ing shift in the economic status of the individual. Ordinary people gradually ceased to besubject to relationships based on feudal allegiances and became instead paid labourers oper-ating in a market with their social standing defined by their economic identities. New wayshad to be found to make people work in order to extract the surplus value of their labour and,for the ‘impotent’ and ‘aged’ who were unable to support themselves because their labourwas of insufficient market value, solutions had to be found to providing for their support.

In response, between 1552 and 1601 the Elizabethan Poor Laws were put in place. TheLaws’ primary purpose was to ensure that the economic burden imposed by those who wereunproductive was minimised. The Laws divided the poverty-stricken into three categories.First, there were the ‘able-bodied’ poor who could not find employment and who were tohave work provided for them. Second, were the rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars whowere to be whipped or otherwise punished for their disinclination to work. Third were the‘impotent’ poor (the old, sick or handicapped), who could not earn their living in the emer-gent labour markets. They were set to some form of work provided by the parish, but notnecessarily work that was economically productive. In recognition of a public responsibilityto look after the impotent poor, the Poor Laws required local parishes to collect money forthem from parishioners. Thus only people with impairments that prevented them from work-ing productively were now characterised as deserving of charitable support (Feiling, 1950).

The Elizabethan Poor Laws became outdated by the end of the eighteenth century asindustrialisation and urbanisation increased. Systems of local relief discouraged labourmobility, were increasingly expensive and created inflexible labour markets (Perkin, 1969;Thompson, 1968; Walker, 2004). The new 1834 Poor Law was aimed at ensuring by duressthe economic and moral independence of the able-bodied labourer (Thompson, 1968). Localrelief gave way to a national commission to deal with the poor, on much more onerousgrounds. Walker (2004) notes in a detailed analysis of the accounting systems created bythe Poor Laws, that they were an essential part of the social fabric of a changing society.In particular, he argues, the Poor Laws and, in particular, the accounting systems they


engendered, became an effective way of managing paupers, who were effectively dividedbetween the able-bodied and the infirm.

The simplistic classificatory nature and financial imperatives of the Poor Laws empha-sised the state and nature of the individual’s own body: one was either able-bodied orimpotent and therefore fit for economic activity or not. The primacy of the link betweendisability and the capacity of a normalised body to do productive work was thus establishedat an early stage of capitalist development. The Poor Laws also legitimised and eventuallyencouraged the stigmatisation of the poor – those deemed worthy of charity were sometimesissued with special badges to denote their status and this was thought efficacious in reducingthe number of applicants for relief (Walker, 2004).

This hegemonic emphasis on labour market participation has persisted. Although thegrowth of the Welfare State after 1945 offered a less harsh climate for workers, its principalaim was still to act as a temporary safety net for those who had fallen out of paid employment(until they could return) and minimal relief for those who could not work (Cmnd 6404, 1942).The fact that, even now, contributory social security benefits (earned through previous paidwork) are paid at a higher rate compared with non-contributory benefits (for those with norecent work history) is illustrative of the longevity of the Poor Law principles.

The Welfare State was relatively short lived. Successive Conservative administrationsfrom 1979 to 1997 sought consistently to halt and indeed reverse any trend away fromthe primacy of paid labour as a means of support for all individuals. These years saw theassertion of what has come to be known as ‘Economic Citizenship’ (Lister, 1998): a conceptof citizenship predicated solely on an individual’s responsibility to support themselvesthrough paid work and a corresponding right to retain the lion’s share of such earningswith minimal tax burdens. Such an approach stands in stark contrast to the Welfare Statetradition, most notably in its emphasis on individual rather than collective responsibility.

New Labour administrations since 1997 have seen a strengthening of this neo-liberalturn. New Labour’s self-proclaimed altruistic approach has sought to ensure and facilitatethe entry of everyone to the labour market and to forge greater strategic alliances betweenthe state and the private sector in this regard. Dean (1999) argues that there is an emphasisin modern neo-liberal states such as the UK on the harnessing of biopower – the populationitself – for economic ends. Such ‘Third Way’ policies (Giddens, 1998) bolster the paradigmunder which social position/participation depends upon membership of and position in thelabour market.

Much therefore currently hangs upon the ability of an individual to undertake paid workin the UK. Not only is such participation the most important method of providing a decentstandard of living, but it also brings with it Economic Citizenship – or to adopt the NewLabour neologism (as we do in this paper) – ‘social inclusion’. It is important to recognisethat paid labour market participation is for most people a source of real social capital.Moreover (and perhaps consequently), the undertaking of paid or financially profitable workis undeniably of crucial psychosocial importance to the vast majority of the population.

3.3. Work and bodies

Bringing these two strands together, the power of the ability to participate in paid labour todetermine people’s physical and intellectual identities is unsurprising given the economic,


psychosocial and social capital importance of such work in Britain’s industrial society.Historically, it is clear that, following the advent of capitalism, the imperative to work createda classificatory regime of dis/abled bodies. Bodies were normalised according to productivecapacity as measured by accounting. The medical discourse on disability supported andsustained capitalism by enabling it to legitimately reject bodies deemed inadequate byvirtue of their perceived diminished productive capacity. The medical model effectivelyprevented disabled people from contesting their lower status by rendering it non-contestable.Thus the operation of power (Lukes, 2005) was effectively obscured by the discursiveregime.

At the same time, government has long felt that the ‘burden’ of employing disabledpeople should be to some extent shared by employers. In 1944 it imposed an obligationon employers to ensure that at least 3% of workforces of more than 20 people should be‘registered’ disabled (Disabled Persons (Employment) Act 1944). Of this, Campbell andOliver said

The main pieces of legislation relevant to disabled people included the DisabledPersons (Employment) Act 1944, which was supposed to ensure reasonable access topaid employment for disabled people and which failed lamentably, largely becausesuccessive governments refused to enforce it.” (Campbell and Oliver, 1996, pp. 28–29)

Later, companies were obliged to disclose in their annual report and accounts the per-centage of disabled people employed. However, such regulations were also poorly compliedwith and policed – some £302 in fines was collected under the legislation in over 50 yearsof its operation. The weakness of these legislative measures indicates the strength of theoperation of capital, with its normalising practices, here.

4. (Non)compliant bodies—new challenges

UK legislation concerning disability was, until the 1970s, grounded in the medical modeland supportive of the needs of capital for what were perceived as fully productive bodies. Butemerging social movements began to challenge the legislative regime. In 1970 the Labourgovernment passed the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act (CSDA). Representingsomething of a new approach to disability, this law attempted to address issues such asdisabled access. In 1974 the government appointed Alf Morris, the author of the CSDA, asBritain’s first minister for the disabled. In 1979 a committee he established to assess theimpact of the CSDA on access reported that it had achieved little. That year the Commit-tee on Restrictions against Disabled People (CORAD) was established and subsequentlyrecommended that broad anti-discrimination legislation should be enacted.

During the 1980s, when Britain suffered a long and entrenched economic recession,disability classification achieved renewed importance in labour market terms. As unem-ployment reached peak levels, those living on state benefits were increasingly categorisedas ‘disabled’ by sympathetic medical professionals in order to secure access to the improvedbenefits available to disabled people. The government of the day responded by changing themedical definitions of disability, setting higher levels of impairment and making the regimeof acceptance more onerous.


By the time the recession has eased, radical disability campaigners had seized the issueand began afresh a high profile campaign to end workplace and other disability discrimi-nation. From this point onwards, the parliamentary story is marked by successive attemptsto get anti-discrimination legislation enacted in the teeth of bitter government opposition.In 1982 Jack Ashley, a Deaf MP, moved the Disablement (Prohibition of Unjustifiable Dis-crimination) Bill. This aimed to give powers to the Equal Opportunities Commission toinvestigate cases of discrimination against disabled people and to try to resolve them byconciliation. The bill failed, but was reintroduced in the next parliamentary session, onlyto fail again. In all, between 1982 and 1995 there were 13 unsuccessful attempts to getlegislation to combat discrimination against disabled people through parliament (Barnesand Oliver, 1995).

Successive governments opposed these legislative attempts on the grounds that no dis-crimination existed. However, the increasingly vocal radicalism of the disability lobbiesby the mid-1990s made this a hard argument to sustain. So, when further legislation wasproposed seeking an end to disability discrimination in the mid-1990s, the neo-liberal Con-servative government for the first time openly invoked formal accounting techniques to‘prove’ that it was simply too expensive and would impose too great a burden on employersand service providers. Similar lines of accounting argument were deployed, at much thesame time, in an attempt to counter the extension of employment rights to (predominantlyfemale) part time workers. The rest of this section charts this particular story of the use ofaccounting cost calculations in the battle for a disability discrimination act in the UK. Whatthis illustrates is how, by the mid-1990s and under a new public management regime, therole of accounting in the construction of regimes of control became transparent. Given theeventual adverse outcome for government, it also indicates how accounting as a regime ofcontrol can be at least partially successfully countered by political arguments based aroundthe assertion of rights.

4.1. Disability and compliance cost assessment

The Conservative Governments of 1979–1997 made the deregulation of much of theBritish economy a key policy goal – although the extent to which this was achieved iscontestable. In seeking this, as in other areas, they resorted frequently to the toolbox of newpublic management.

A desire for rational government has engendered the development of and reliance onwhat are perceived to be rational policy tools. In what can be seen as a shifting frontierbetween regulatory approaches grounded in traditional forms of public administrationand more evaluative and quantitative techniques, the British Government has activelypromoted the application of elaborate calculative regulatory procedures. These seekto inform regulation making through quantitative data, guide the actions and thinkingof civil servants, and provide a clear public demonstration that the state is acting in arational manner. (Boden and Froud, 1996)

An emphasis on accountability and management, and the rise of technocrats in govern-ment, was accompanied by a growing expectation of what could be measured. One of the‘rational’ tools employed in the quest for deregulation was compliance cost assessment


(CCA). This was an accounting technique used to calculate the likely costs to business ofintroducing new regulations and legislation. In its first manifestation, CCA concerned onlycosts and only business costs (Froud et al., 1998).

From the 1993/1994 parliamentary session onwards, CCAs had to be produced for allproposed statutory instruments, private members bills with a reasonable chance of enactmentand all primary legislation. A summary of the CCA had to be included in the explanatory andfinancial memorandum attached to each bill or statutory instrument presented to parliament(Froud et al., 1998).

Disclosure was an integral part of the deregulatory strategy of government at this time:the CCA process specifically placed business compliance cost data in the public domainin the belief that potentially over-zealous regulators would be held accountable for theiractions (Froud et al., 1998). Thus, having ensured the production of compliance cost datausing accounting technology, the process aimed to utilise it to control regulators thoughaccountability requirements.

The MP Roger Berry introduced the Civil Rights (Disabled People) Bill to parliament as aprivate member’s bill in 1994. The proposed legislation would have outlawed discriminationin the workplace and in the provision of goods and services. On the day before the mainparliamentary consideration of the bill the government deposited its CCA on the proposedlegislation in the library of the House of Commons. This CCA purported to demonstratethat the bill would result in total non-recurring compliance costs of £17 billion and a further£1 billion in annual compliance costs.

The CCA directly addressed the issue of pay for disabled people. It said that:

[t]here is some evidence that the average earnings of disabled employees are lowerthan those of non-disabled workers; however, it is not clear whether this is solely dueto the different occupational distribution of disabled workers, and receiving lower payfor lower productivity, or also due to genuine discrimination. (Part 1, paragraph 6)

This statement fails to engage with the possibility that the different occupational distri-bution of disabled workers may be the result of discriminatory practices. Further, there isa presumption, unproven and unevidenced, of lower productivity. And finally, there is animplicit acceptance that disabled people should receive lower pay if their productivity, in awork environment determined by others and that may not be conducive to them, is lowerthan non-disabled workers. The document went on to imply that because 21% of disabledpeople earn less than their non-disabled work counterparts and 15% of them think that theyare less productive, that disabled people are therefore less productive (paragraph 7). TheCCA then goes on, producing unevidenced figures, to say that:

[g]iven these figures, it is assumed that around 20% of disabled employees in theprivate sector would have to be paid more under this legislation. (paragraph 8)

The CCA asserts that ‘it is . . . unclear whether the Bill would permit lower pay for lowerproductivity’. If it did not, it was reasoned, it was fair to assume that employers would incurcosts of £500 a year to cover the ‘lower productivity’ of disabled people, who under the billwould have to receive equal pay with non-disabled colleagues. This, the CCA calculated,would cost the private sector £63 million a year.


Other workplace costs addressed in the CCA included the increased costs of recruitment,adapting the workplace, the costs of retaining staff who become disabled, the costs of findingout after an offer of employment that the person ‘cannot do the job’ because of disability andthe cost of legal proceedings in cases taken by employees under the legislation. The totalcalculated recurring annual cost in relation to employment alone was £75 million for privatesector employers. For the public sector the costs were estimated, using similar arguments,at £20.4 million per year.

A number of issues arise here. First, there is an overt concern with the presumed lowerproductivity of disabled workers. Yet there had been no rigorous work done on this issueand, in any case, lower productivity may result from an unsuitably constructed job orworkplace. There is no challenge offered to the presumption that the productivity of the‘normal’ body should be the norm. Yet even normal bodies may differ markedly in theirproductive capacities – some people are just lazier or stronger than others are. Second, thesefigures were produced with a great deal of publicity but are, at heart, pure ‘guesstimates’.Third, there is scant mention of any compensating benefits that may accrue to employersfrom employing disabled people.

Despite the fact that the CCA authors had not found it possible ‘in all cases . . . toconsult widely’, the Government chose to use the document in a highly targeted way: itwas circulated widely to the press yet only produced to parliament the day before the majordebate, thereby constraining any considered critique of it.

The minister for the disabled, Nicolas Scott, arranged for the bill to be filibustered thenext day. There was much debate in parliament about the excessive costs of the bill, asdemonstrated by the CCA. Or, as Barnes and Oliver (1995) put it:

The Civil Rights (Disabled Persons) Bill was finally laid to rest on Friday 15 July. Ina Parliamentary debate on this issue, Nicolas Scott reiterated the Government viewthat [the bill] failed to take account of the interests of the business fraternity, and thatthe cost of implementation would prove far too expensive. (p. 112)

The Financial Times newspaper report on this episode gives a flavour of the intensepublic controversy that the debate and the costings engendered

The prime minister yesterday spelt out to the House of Commons the hard eco-nomics which lie behind the political furore over the Civil Rights (Disabled Persons)Bill.

Mr Major [the Prime Minister] cited the official estimate of £17bn in non-recurringcosts (plus £1bn a year in subsequent costs) and the potential bill from litigation asreasons for the government’s opposition to the private member’s bill.

But are these cost figures realistic? The Confederation of British Industry and theInstitute of Directors, which have been lobbying effectively against the bill, believethat they are. Disability lobbyists say they are not.

The Institute [of Directors] argues that the bill is loosely drafted and does notproperly address the issue of who pays. It says that that the cost of compliance couldclose thousands of small businesses across the country . . .

The government has been encouraging business lobbyists to make public theirarguments and its own cost estimates. But the figure is more than double the true cost,


according to Ms Victoria Scott, the disability lobbyist and daughter of Mr NicholasScott, the minister responsible for the disabled.

Dr Berry, the Labour MP who introduced the bill, says the figure is ‘absurd’ andtakes no account of the cost savings from employing more disabled people.

Dr Berry, who has made no estimates of his own, says several government depart-ments have produced summaries of costs which include a large number of ‘guessti-mates’ as well as being based on the recommendations being introduced within fiveyears.

Dr Berry said: ‘The bill as amended says that the timescale would be subject tothe decisions of the secretary of state. So the government could control the costs.(Financial Times, 20 May, 1994)

Whilst the Government was thus successful in deploying cost (as calculated in the CCA)in its defeat of the bill, this proved to be something of an own-goal. The first casualty wasthe minister himself, who was humiliated by public exposure of the tactics employed todefeat the bill and stung by the criticisms of his daughter, Victoria Scott, who said of theepisode ‘I think it is time we had a minister for disabled people who represented the needsof disabled people’ (Financial Times 21 May 1994).

Scott was promptly replaced in a Cabinet reshuffle and the new minister for the disabled,William Hague, introduced government proposals on disabled rights in what was plainly anattempt to recover lost public relations ground. A new green paper on disabled rights (Cm2729) made no mention of costs. This was followed by the publication of the Government’sDisability Discrimination Bill. This set out measures similar to that in the Berry bill, but withthree important differences. First, there was an emphasis throughout on ‘reasonableness’– that is, discrimination would be permitted if the cost of ending it could satisfactorilybe deemed unreasonable. Second, employers of fewer than twenty people were exempt,because it was felt that to include them would impose unduly onerous financial burdens onsmall firms. Third, it permitted the requirements to be phased in over a longer period. Thisbill was eventually enacted as the Disability Discrimination Act.

The CCA for this new bill was markedly different from that on the Berry bill. Whilstit covers similar ground, public sector costs were excluded (they had been included in theearlier CCA). The section on the extra costs that might arise from equal pay was significantlydownplayed. The CCA noted that blatant pay discrimination would end with the new bill,but also noted that some existing pay differentials may be due to ‘differences in productivity,hours worked, and occupational distribution of disabled people and so on’. It concludedthat there was no evidence to suggest what the cost to employers might be, but significantlyinfers that this cost would be limited to cases of blatant discrimination. The CCA declinesto provide a figure. Similarly, with regard to the costs of employees taking legal action, theCCA places a strong caveat on the figure given, indicating that it is difficult to distinguishthe costs of compliance from those of non-compliance, the latter being excluded from theCCA algorithm. The CCA took into account the exclusion of small firms, but made noadjustments for the longer period of phasing in, nor could it assess what constituted a‘reasonable’ cost. The CCA concludes that the Bill was unlikely to have ‘an adverse effecton our international competitiveness, since the costs are small in terms of labour costs perhead’.


Table 1Comparison of two compliance cost assessment results

Berry bill (public andprivate sector)

Government bill (privatesector only, public not costed)

Recruitment Not given 0.5millionAdapting the workplace 3.43 million 0.6 millionTribunal proceedings 12.75 million 6.7 millionRetention of disabled employees Not given Not givenMedical questions 0.24 million Not consideredPay 79.3 million Not givenTotal compliance cost 95.72 million 7.8 million

Table 1 shows a comparison of the two CCAs with regard to calculated employmentcompliance costs. It should be emphasised that the employment provisions of the two billswere largely similar. In addition, the civil servants who produced the two CCAs wereworking to standard guidelines for the production of such documents.

In line with CCA practice and guidelines, the two documents made only scant mentionof the benefits of employing disabled people. Yet the disability campaign group Rights Nowestimated that the costs of underemployment of the disabled to be between 32.75 billionper year to £5 billion a year (Hansard, 24 January 1995, col. 166).

This episode illustrates a number of themes. First, it demonstrates the continuing hege-mony of a medical model of disability grounded in notions of the economic productivity oflabour.

Second, it is clear that, for those operating under a medical model paradigm that con-siderations of cost should be central in deciding how far legislation should go. Thusthis remained a question of how far the ‘burden’ of additional costs could fairly beimposed.

Third, for the disability campaigners acting from a social model perspective, the issuewas one of rights rather than costs. That is, an entitlement to receive human rights shouldnot be attenuated by considerations of costs. At the same time, these groups did alsoengage in costing arguments, especially in critiques of the government’s own figures.These arguments are resonant of those that have also arisen in the USA in relation todisability discrimination legislation there (Pfeiffer, 1994). The Economist, in an argu-ment that emphasises the capitalist underpinnings of disability discrimination, put it thisway

How much should be spent? Ministers rejected the Private Member’s Bill because theyestimated it would cost £17 billion to implement . . . Campaigners accused ministers ofoverstating the costs. And they argued that costs should not matter where fundamentalrights are at stake. The Government, however, has a duty to restrain public spendingand the financial burden on firms. Rights for the disabled must be balanced againstthe goal of a competitive economy. When is it justifiable to discriminate againstdisabled people? Outlawing discrimination against blacks or women does not costfirms anything. (Economist, 13 August, 1994)


5. Summary, consequences and futures

The discursive power of accounting with regard to individuals has been noted bya number of authors (for example, Preston, 1992; Walker, 2004). Likewise, the roleof accounting in the construction of classificatory regimes both generally (for instance,Grojer, 2001) and also with respect to bodies (Jeacle, 2003) is well-established. This paperhas extended such analyses of the role of accounting to the ways in which accountingis implicated in the construction of the disabled body with particular reference to theworkplace.

Capitalism shifted the idea of work from a feudal allegiance to an economic relation-ship in which, for the capitalist, the maximisation of the surplus value of labour was ofparamount concern. Accounting is, of course, deeply implicated in the measurement ofsuch surplus value. This social transformation engendered, for reasons of social control andthe disciplining of labour, the necessity to classify bodies in accordance with their capacityfor productive work. Under such regimes, unimpaired bodies are normalised and impairedbodies are categorised as disabled.

We argue that this classification of bodies based on notions of productivity led to thedevelopment and hegemony of the medical model of disability – that is, a concern with‘capacity’ and the ‘othering’ of those with impairments. The medical model had the effectof disenfranchising disabled people, silencing them because of the objective basis of dis-crimination against them.

Thus a discursive regime of which accounting was a principal technology played a trace-able role in the development of the classification of the body. Of course, this classificatorywork was no more an overt attempt at direct control than the standard sizing protocolsstudied by Jeacle (2003), but the effect is just as clear.

The power of definition is significant and has generally rested with employers and thegovernment. The new economic relationships that came with capitalism created a needfor new regimes of control, and here accounting played a central and further role. Fromthe Poor Laws onwards, UK governments have constructed legislative regimes that havesupported and sustained this capitalist reading of the body and the role of accounting inthe making of such laws is scarcely concealed. Thus, early Poor Laws quickly establisheddistinctions between the able-bodied and the impotent by reference to their capacity towork ‘normally’. Similarly, at the other end of the time scale, the government’s reactionto the Berry bill analysed in this paper makes no secret of the primacy of employers’cost considerations and even makes explicit use of accounting mechanisms in governmentpolitical argumentation.

Thus, capitalist imperatives with regard to the extraction of the surplus value of labour,the medical model of disability and the legislative efforts of government came together inan assemblage of discourses that has led to the effective government of the body and thecreation of particular disabled identities.

But, of course, no power is absolute. The rise of new social movements in the UK in thelatter half of the 20th century brought new conceptualisations of disability, which throughthe medium of social models, came to be differently understood. These movements pro-vided fresh challenges to this status quo. The fact that these challenges first arose frompeople who classified themselves as disabled indicates the strength of the hegemonic dis-


cursive regime in effectively marginalising and disempowering disabled people – they hadto develop a new epistemological framework before they could commence a struggle forrights.

The Conservative government’s response to such challenges was unsurprising: a baldassertion of the rectitude of accounting (and by implication profitability and economiccompetitiveness) arguments. For the first time those in power resorted to very explicitstatements of the basis of their actions. In this critical incident, as the extended quote fromthe Economist above indicates, the differing discursive frameworks came into direct andopen conflict.

Here, the regime of control started to become unravelled for two reasons. First, theaccounting exercise undertaken through the CCA was very far from robust. This left thecampaigners pushing at an open door in terms of critique. The apparent attempt to camou-flage the weakness of the CCA by loose wording and last minute publication did little butinspire anger and contempt. Second, the government’s position also lacked any subtlety withregard to the position of people with regard to the national economy: individual rights ofa socially excluded but radicalised group came a poor second to considerations of nationaleconomic competitiveness.

In seeking to recover from this disastrous debacle, the government did not concede theprinciple that accounting cost arguments should hold sway. Rather, it revised its accountingargument to improve its robustness and calculated that the compliance costs were negligible.As such, as an act of altruism, it was able to conclude that the rights of disabled people wereprobably affordable and enact its own legislation. Thus the same principles of the accountingmeasurement of the productivity of labour still hold sway in UK legislation with regard toworkers: for instance, the current legislation still refers to the ‘reasonableness’ of costs. Thisis not to downplay the significance of the legislative changes in the working lives of ordinarypeople, which have been significant. The new legislation may well reflect more sophisticatedunderstandings of bodily impairment and modern technological and the changing nature ofwork away from high levels of very physical activity.

There are two issues here that deserve further consideration and research. First, littlework of a robust nature has ever been undertaken with regard to the costs of employingdisabled people. Nor does any of the existing work consider the full gamut of costs (i.e.those of the individual and the government as well as of the employers). In a related vein,consideration of the compensating benefits of employing disabled people has similarlyremained unexplored.

Second, the fundamental issue of how human rights are to be balanced against theperceived or actual costs (perhaps adjusted for benefits) of inclusion remains. The persuasivepower of accounting cost arguments achieve particular power in such contexts. Perhaps weneed to ask ourselves the question whether we would tolerate such abuses of, say, childrenas workers, were similar arguments about business costs to be deployed?

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