Page 276 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

10. WORKPLACE DISCRIMINATION
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that directly examines patronization as a cause or form of workplace dis­
crimination against persons with disabilities.
Examining disability discrimination as resulting from paternalism
brings up several important issues. The first is getting at the underlying
cause of the paternalism. This obviously has implications for how to erad­
icate discrimination. Earlier we mentioned several motives for paternal­
ization. One group concerns good, if misplaced, intentions. In this case,
nondisabled people want to be nice or are following "norm to be kind"
scripts. If this is the motive underlying paternalization, then education
whereby coworkers are made aware of paternalization and the negative
consequences it may have should go far in helping people to overcome
this tendency. Furthermore, education that focuses on the reality and ex­
periences of persons with disabilities can be used to enlighten others about
how paternalistic behavior may be perceived by the target.
On the other hand, there are other positive motives underlying paternal­
istic behaviors, having to do with intergroup relations (Fox & Giles, 1996a,
1996b). Paternalism can be used as a way in which to communicate the
lower status of the target. Instead of paternalism resulting from a desire
to help, it results from a desire to degrade. This view is consistent with
Lerner's "just world hypothesis." In this case, it would be expected that
education alone would not be enough to ameliorate paternalistic behavior,
and that the problem needs to be approached as an intergroup problem.
Another issue arising from considering disability discrimination from
a paternalism framework is that we need to develop a conceptual frame­
work that allows us to predict and understand when paternalism will occur.
Throughout this paper, we have mentioned several factors that tend to be
related to inflated evaluations, such as the disability is physical (rather than
mental or sensory) and the situation is of little consequence to the actor.
However, these observations are post hoc; no integrated conceptual frame­
work exists. Most conceptual treatments of disability discrimination (see
Stone & Colella, 1996) focus on predicting and explaining outright negative
reactions. One outcome of this is that we tend to dismiss inflated evalua­
tions and overly positive responses to persons with disabilities, rather than
studying the phenomena in its own right. We only reviewed published
articles. We wonder how common this phenomenon is in "file drawer"
research that hypothesized negative disability effects, but found positive
effects instead.
A final issue is that we need to examine the impact of paternalization
on the target. Most research on this topic appears in the communication or
rehabilitation literature and focuses primarily on qualitative assessments.
Empirical work in this area is necessary if we are to understand disability
discrimination. Heilman's (Heilman, Block, & Lucas, 1992) work on targets'