Going beyond vocational rehabilitation as a training of skills: return-to-work as an identity issue

Abstract

In western welfare states, labour participation is increasingly considered a vital aspect of taking part in society. Vocational rehabilitation programmes are intended to support people in the process of returning to work. These programmes pay much attention to the skills that clients need to develop in order to return to work. We argue, however, that vocational rehabilitation is more than the acquirement of skills, and that further attention should be paid to clients’ ‘identity work’ processes. Based on 45 life-stories, we present an analysis of the identity work expressed by people with a work disability in the Netherlands. We describe ‘separative’, ‘integrative’, and ‘pending’ processes of identity work. The presented typology can help vocational rehabilitation professionals become more sensitive to clients’ processes, and supports more inclusive vocational rehabilitation.

Keywords:

• vocational rehabilitation
• work disability
• life-stories
• identity work

Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to the people who shared their life-stories with us. This research was supported by a grant from the UWV and a Kootstra Talent Fellowship from Maastricht University. The authors want to thank Ewan Dow and Rebecca Cooke for editing the English.

Notes

1. The Netherlands maintains social insurance compensation for people with a work disability. To be eligible for compensation, the cause of the work disability is not necessarily work related (the focus is on finality instead of causality). The level of the disability benefit is based upon the person’s earning capacity and is not directly related to the specific disability. This means that if a person’s earning capacity has been (re)assessed, that person could be registered as less work-disabled although his or her state of health has not necessarily improved.

2. For the sake of anonymity, real names are not used.