What Social Connections Do to Autonomy: An Ethnography of Autistic Workers and Workplace Supports

• In Event: Disability in Society Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3. Social Participation and Connections

Abstract

Supported employment pairs autistic workers with job coaches and often treats “independence” as the benchmark of success. That benchmark rests on a caricature of the self-sufficient worker who needs nothing from others. The problem is that work is never self-sufficient. It is organized through social connections that assign tasks, coordinate effort, evaluate performance, and confirm that completed work is adequate. When autism is disclosed or a coach is present, this ordinary interdependence becomes visible and can be re-read as dependence. In those moments, ableism operates through routine configurations of attention, coordination, and accountability that determine whose action counts as competent.

This paper develops the concept of relational autonomy to reframe how we understand the social connections that make up workplace relations. Where agency asks what actors can do, autonomy asks whose action it is—when a worker’s conduct is recognized as the worker’s own competent accomplishment. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork across five employment sites (observations, interviews, fieldnotes, and audio-recorded interactional sequences), I identify three recurring modes of workplace relating: watching, pre-empting, and witnessing. Watching sustains monitoring without uptake, so sequences end without acknowledgment, correction, or credit. Pre-empting makes another person’s intervention the action that counts. Witnessing secures authorship by recognizing and crediting the worker’s action. Taken together, these modes shift the analytic question from how much support a worker receives to what social connections do to the authorship of action.

Author

• Brent Hoagland, Rutgers University-New Brunswick