Thesis
Positive autism : Drucker-based auto-ethnography inquiry of the employment retention of people with autism
Southern Cross University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
2020
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25918/thesis.48
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Abstract
Introduction: Despite decades of deficit-based autism behavioural interventions and treatment, just 16 per cent of adults with autism are in full-time paid employment, and this situation is not improving.
Singling out people with autism by focusing on their deficits alone does not make sense. Wanting to change a person’s autistic behaviours is like attempting to correct left-handedness or sexual preference. It is cruel, unnatural and doomed to fail. It does not foster inclusion but emphasises exclusion. Instead autism researchers should move beyond studying autism as a deficit and emphasise the abilities and strengths of people with it. Research by the Gallup organisation shows people who use their strengths every day are 8 per cent more productive and 15 per cent less likely to quit their jobs, six times more likely to be engaged at work, and are three times more likely to report an excellent quality of life. Performance reviews that emphasise personal strengths improve organisational performance.
This study builds on a Drucker-based-strengths-focused innovation-driven management model to address employment retention issues for people with autism.
Research Questions:
1. What are the workplace factors critical to employment retention of people with autism?
2. How can employment retention for people with autism be improved?
Methodology: My academic method is combined evocative/analytic auto-ethnographic – involving deep reflection on my personal experiences over a lifetime of living with autism and connecting this experience to wider cultural, political and social understanding of interview participants.
Results and discussion: Three critical success factors for enhancing employment retention outcomes have emerged. First, build a knowledge-worker productivity workplace infrastructure to enable strengths. Second, stop workplace autism triggers. Third, promote strengths-focused management practices. This idea builds on Drucker’s theory of knowledge-worker productivity.
Significance: Understanding and addressing the organisational and structural mechanisms underpinning barriers to participation would inform efforts to redress social and health inequity through social action and our theoretical conceptualisation of disability and what it means to experience autism.
Conclusion and recommendation: We can change the significant social and employment disadvantage experienced by people with autism by seeing their assets rather than their liabilities. By rethinking management attitudes and practices, workplaces can harness as strengths and advantages the attributes that usually disadvantage people with autism.
Details
- Title
- Positive autism : Drucker-based auto-ethnography inquiry of the employment retention of people with autism
- Creators
- Peter Sun San Wong
- Contributors
- Bill Edgar Boyd (Supervisor) - Southern Cross UniversityPhilip Arthur Neck (Supervisor) - Southern Cross University
- Awarding Institution
- Southern Cross University; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Theses
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
- Publisher
- Southern Cross University
- Number of pages
- xvi, 347
- Identifiers
- 991012871700402368
- Copyright
- © PSS Wong 2020
- Academic Unit
- School of Health and Human Sciences
- Resource Type
- Thesis