‘The dying of the light’: the impact of the spending cuts,and cuts to employment law protections,on disability adjustments in British local authorities

Adjustments to working arrangements and the working environment have enabled organisations to recruit and retain valuable staff and helped disabled individuals to work and progress in their careers. The qualitative study reported in this paper indicates that generally good adjustments-related practice across 33 British local authorities was beginning to deteriorate under the impact of government spending cuts; and was at further risk from the dismantling of legal protections. The findings have implications for local authorities, but also for national policy-makers and those wishing to influence them.     

Disabled people as counterfeit citizens: the politics of resentment past and present

In this article I argue that disabled people in the United Kingdom have been tipped into an abyss of counterfeit citizenship. They have been smeared as ‘false mendicants’ – an old trick well documented in the historical archives of ableism. Neoliberalism has used this repertoire of invalidation – its noxious taint of cunning and fraud – as the ‘moral justification’ for welfare reform and for the pillory and notoriety into which the entire disabled community has been placed. Austerity – through the neoliberal politics of resentment – has made disabled people its scapegoat. I argue that a historical precedent for the contemporary demonisation of disabled people as counterfeit citizens can be found in the early modern period in the mythology of the ‘sturdy beggar’.     

Wounded/monstrous/abject: a critique of the disabled body in the sociological imaginary

Contemporary sociology has made sense of bodily difference by mobilising a number of tropes. ‘Wounded’ (or vulnerable), ‘monstrous’ and ‘abject’ stand out by virtue of their ubiquity though they do not exhaust the repertoire. These categories highlight the conceptual tensions between the sociology of the body and Disability Studies. In this paper, I will examine the value of these tropes to Disability Studies and suggest that while they can help to clarify the processes that bring about the misrecognition of disabled people, understanding the nature and scope of the lives of disabled people in modernity requires a more embodied language rather than one that has been generated from a sociological imaginary that is strongly influenced by a non‐disabled subject position in which repulsion for the other – which one must become – is never fully resolved. Disability has had little impact on sociological theories of the body and when sociology ventures into disability it has tended to conflate it with an ontology of human frailty or gloss it with tropes that may be instructive about the generic or gendered modernist structure of exclusion but it tells us little about the specific forms of invalidation experienced by disabled people.     

On the shaping of South African society

The Shaping of South African Society edited by Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee. Cape Town: Longman Penguin Southern Africa. R15,00.     

WHO (ELSE) BENEFITS FROM ELECTRICITY DEREGULATION? COAL PRICES,NATURAL GAS,AND PRICE DISCRIMINATION

Deregulation of major industries over the past 40 years has produced large efficiency gains. However, distributional effects have been more difficult to assess. In the electricity sector, deregulation has vastly increased information available to market participants through the formation of wholesale markets. We test whether upstream suppliers, specifically railroads that transport coal from mines to power plants, use this information to capture economic rents that would otherwise accrue to electricity generators. We find railroads charge higher markups when rents are larger. This effect is larger for deregulated plants, highlighting an important distributional impact of deregulation. (JEL L11, L51, Q48)