Diversity Management and Disability: Indications from a Research on Ligurian Enterprises

The paper aims to examine disability into the more general question about diversity management and to verify if work inclusion of disabled persons may be considered a practice of diversity management, pursued as a strategic goal, or not.
In order to target this goal, the paper first introduces diversity management and disability, then it presents the research activities and its most important conclusions. Disability is considered one of the sources of diversity, but its specificities (first of all, its internal variety) are so relevant – in front of the other more analyzed sources - that it needs specific supports to transform a constriction (indicated by the law n. 68/1999 whose object is the right to work for disabled persons) into a real opportunity to develop inclusive strategies.
The research we present in this paper analyzes the practises of diversity management in a sample of Ligurian enterprises and puts in evidence what concrete operational procedures are used to favourite a good inclusion: in this perspective, we observe that the new law (and the specific services introduced by it) plays an important role to transform a requirement into an opportunity.