Because meaning-making is often instigated or exacerbated by losses, disparities, or deficiencies (Jammaers & Williams, 2021 Jammaers et al., 2016 Meng & Ouyang, 2020), growing attention has been given to explaining how workers make meaning in response to repeated crises (Antoni et al., 2020), confrontations (Creed et al., 2022), and violations of their rights (Michelson, 2021). A broad range of organizational arrangements, from Snow and Anderson’s ( 1987) homeless living in Los Angeles to Shepherd et al.’s ( 2022) rag pickers in Mumbai and Hein & Ansari’s ( 2022) infantilized beneficiaries of sheltered workshops in Germany, underscore the prevalence of everyday meaning-making as a moral issue (Michelson et al., 2014). Mundane processes of meaning-making can also loom large, especially for workers who repeatedly face stigma (Ashforth et al., 2017), marginalization (Shepherd et al., 2022), or discrimination (Kreiner & Mihelcic, 2020). Management scholars have so far largely focused on workers’ efforts to make meaning when their sense of existential mattering had been shaken by crises (Christianson & Barton, 2021 Michaelson & Tosti-Kharas, 2020). 259) defines deliberate meaning-making as “a broad category of efforts to deal with a situation through meaning-related strategies.” In organizations, such efforts range from “coping” to “sensemaking” (Heintzelman & King, 2014) from “ascribing” and “maintaining” (Heine et al., 2006) to “doing,” “updating,” and “sharing” (Lepisto, 2021) meanings as part of performing one’s tasks, roles, and jobs. ![]() Meaning-making refers to how individuals construe, understand, and make sense of life and work events (Park & Folkman, 1997). Park ( 2010, p. Negative and stressful situations compel meaning-making. Our findings elaborate, and bridge, emerging theories of body work and recursive meaning-making to explain how disabled workers explicitly enroll their bodies to make meaning at work during periods of societal upheaval. This conjunctive process model stabilized meaning-making at work by acknowledging the duality of the disabled body, as both anomaly and asset. However, as the global pandemic unfolded, disabled workers begun crafting composite dramas that deliberately juxtaposed thriving and suffering. Our disjunctive process model shows that, at the beginning of the pandemic, disabled workers performed either dramas of suffering or on dramas of thriving. We inductively explain how body dramas of suffering or thriving initially instigate cycles of meaning deflation and inflation at work. To us this term most clearly highlights that it is society (and possibly organizations) that disable and oppress people with impairments, by preventing their access, integration and inclusion to all walks of life, making them ‘disabled’.” (Jammaers and Zanoni, Organization Studies 42:429–452, 2021 : 448)) models the growing centrality of the body in meaning-making. We do so to underscore the premise of the social model of disability, which explains that “people are disabled first and foremost by society, not by their individual, biological impairment. ![]() ![]() A 22-month longitudinal study of (self)employed disabled workers ( Following the preference of the lead author who identifies as disabled, the linguistic self-presentation by our participants, the precedent of (Hein and Ansari, Academy of Management Journal 65:749–783, 2022), and the clarification note included in Jammaers & Zanoni’s recent review of ableism (Jammaers and Zanoni, Organization Studies 42:429–452, 2021), we chose, and consistently use, the term “disabled employees” throughout the paper.
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