Beyond Policy: Organisational Culture and the Employment of People with Disability in Bangladesh's Ready-Made Garment Industry

Employment is fundamental to human dignity, identity, and social participation, contributing to economic stability alongside psychosocial benefits including self-worth, belonging, and resistance to marginalisation. However, people with disability consistently struggle to access meaningful employment. This is particularly acute in low- and middle-income countries, where over 80 percent of the world's 1 billion people with disability reside, and where weak policy enforcement and limited workplace accommodation compound structural exclusion. Existing public policy, political science and organisational scholarship on disability employment has predominantly examined institutional design, external levers, legislative quotas, employer incentives, and formal accommodation schemes while treating organisational culture as a secondary or implicit variable rather than a central determinant of policy effectiveness. This study proposes that while disability inclusion policies provide an important foundation, one area that has remained underexplored is the role that organisational culture plays in supporting or limiting the employment of people with disability. Organisational culture influences organisational norms and workplace routines, which shape how policies are implemented. This research explores how organisational culture affects the employment of people with disability, and how policies might foster cultures that support this employment. This paper presents through a qualitative case study of Bangladesh's Ready-Made Garments industry the country's largest employment sector, employing approximately 4 million workers, where disability-inclusive hiring remains limited despite legislative commitment under the Persons with Disabilities Rights and Protection Act 2013. Drawing on 55 semi-structured interviews with policymakers, disability experts, HR professionals, managers, and workers, data were thematically coded using Johnson and Scholes' Cultural Web Theory, adopting this theory as the primary theoretical lens for conceptualising organisational culture. The theory views organisational culture as a system of interconnected cultural elements including routines, stories, symbols, power structures, organisational structures, and control systems that shape everyday organisational behaviour. By foregrounding these cultural elements, the study explores how organisational culture influences the enactment of disability inclusion policies and ultimately shapes the employment experiences of people with disability. The empirical findings demonstrate that organisational culture plays a central role in shaping the employment experiences of people with disability. Most organisations centre productivity and efficiency as core cultural norms, which reinforces the preset assumption of an "ideal worker” and categorises disability as a condition that fails to meet employment expectations. These cultural assumptions have impact on recruitment decisions, workplace accommodations, and opportunities for career progression. These findings confirm that the enactment of inclusion varies across organisations, depending on whether inclusive values exist only in policy documents or are genuinely lived out in day-to-day practice. Organisational culture shapes how disability inclusion is understood, enacted, and experienced in everyday work. These findings have important policy and practice implications for improving the employment of people with disability. They provide insights that may inform disability employment policies in Bangladesh and other countries with similar socioeconomic contexts, while also offering practical lessons for organisations in contexts such as Australia. The findings suggest that formal policies alone are insufficient to achieve meaningful inclusion. Rather, their success depends on how they are interpreted and enacted within organisational cultures.