The Challenges of Coeliac Disease at Work: A Research Agenda towards Organisational Inclusion

Over the past decade, organisations have attempted to create more inclusive and open workspaces. Despite this, the understanding of what inclusive workspaces should accommodate and what they should look like are numerous and often contradictory. Terms such as ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversity’ rhetorically seem to become buzzwords in organisational discourse, with an increased employee experience of exclusion. This paper aims to understand how and why organisational practices, behaviours and norms promoted as inclusive reinforce barriers and inexplicit discrimination. In interpreting the experiences of employees living with Coeliac Disease as presented in United Kingdom (UK) employment tribunals, UK Parliamentary debates and in medical journals, we illustrate how ‘inclusive’ organisational practices pose challenges to the employees living with Coeliac Disease. The paper adopts a theoretical perspective as developed by the Essex School of Discourse Analysis to demonstrate that organisational practices mobilise logics of exclusion and inclusion. We contribute to current academic debates in critical management by challenging the discursivity of organisational inclusivity and promote further research into medical conditions at work.