Business, disability and corporate social responsibility: the India experience

There are more than 650 million disabled people world-wide (UN, 2006), with nearly 10% of the world’s population living with disability and a deeper disability-poverty connect. People with disabilities thus emerge as the world’s largest minority. In India, where this study is located, people with disabilities account for 2.1% of the population, or nearly 21.9 million people (Indian Census, 2011). In recent times there has been attention to the ‘mainstreaming of disability’ agenda, which has allowed disability to emerge as a critical and complex issue with a potential to impact across business for the corporation (Employers’ Forum on Disability, 2010). Yet, in contrast to organizational diversity variables of race, class, gender and sexuality, the variable of disability remains neglected within the management and organizational domains (Stone-Romero, Stone, & Lukaszewski, 2006). Inquiry into business response and disability itself is a new area of social debate. With practice leading theory in business response to disability, there is a compelling case for academic research to examine business responses to disability. Furthermore, given the context of vast current inequalities of income and power (Sachs, 2008), disability is an important business strategic issue that demands comprehensive examination. The dystopian scenarios of undermined global governance, social unrest and ineffective safeguards for vulnerable communities that arose from recent uncertainties also require researchers to ascertain and analyse the evolving nature of firm-centric mindsets of corporate executives. This is a new paradigm and contribution that seeks to understand and present how, in lieu of dynamic environment and shifting workplace expectations, business has understood, interpreted and responded to disability. The study also assumes that meaningful assessment of the present business response to disability must situate itself in the historical past, which provides for both a perspective and a comparison and allows identification and examination of the shifts in business responses. The study’s investigates the principal research objective which is to understand and explain the business disability relationship in India. The two Research Questions that the thesis investigates are ‘How and why was business responding to disability in India (Historically)?’ and ‘How and why is business responding to disability in IT industry in India (Contemporary)?’ The study involves a multi-disciplinary review of three principal bodies of disability, business and social responsibility literature. The study, empirically employing historical and contemporary research methods, chronologically builds the historical and current understanding of business response to disability over three periods of ancient and colonial India, post-independent India and the late twentieth century to twenty-first century India. The historical analysis is aided by six archival cases and by the study of sub-fields of business and management history, public health services history, colonial history, medical history, specific illness and disease history and the development history of India. The contemporary examination entails study of business responses to disability in four modern-day Information and Technology (IT) companies and nine institutional bodies. The findings trace the shift from a predominantly ethical and discretionary approach to modern-day strategic and institutional forms of business response to disability. The findings suggest that businesses’ own strategic intent and business case approach, along with the role of cognitive, normative, regulative forces, define modern-day business engagement with disability, accompanied by the changing position of people with disabilities as legitimate organisational stakeholders. This is in contrast to the earlier approach of business, which found its expression in philanthropic engagement, fringe employment practices and compliance with a weak legislative environment, and business intent to support disability within the expanded state agenda. As against generic consideration of issues within the domain of the corporate social responsibility literature the study contributes to an under examined area of business response to the specific social issue of disability. The study also elicits historical understanding of business response to an issue (notably, disability in this case). The study contributes to the literature on strategic CSR, institutional theory and stakeholder theory, and makes a methodological contribution to the study of corporate social responsibility.