**1. Introduction**

There has been a considerable amount of research into construction innovation going back more than four decades [1–3]. However, the vast majority of this research has focused on economic and technological innovations, whereas the concept of social innovation has received virtually no attention. In contrast, social innovation is a rapidly emerging field of research outside construction, encompassing business and management, sociology, economics, and other social science disciplines [4,5]. As an emerging area of innovation research, the concept of social innovation has many definitions. However, the Office of Economic Cooperation and Development [6] defines social innovation as the design and implementation of new solutions that imply conceptual, process, product, or organisational

**Citation:** Bailey, S.; Carnemolla, P.; Loosemore, M.; Darcy, S.; Sankaran, S. A Critical Scoping Review of Disability Employment Research in the Construction Industry: Driving Social Innovation through More Inclusive Pathways to Employment Opportunity. *Buildings* **2022**, *12*, 2196. https://doi.org/10.3390/ buildings12122196

Academic Editor: Osama Abudayyeh

Received: 20 November 2022 Accepted: 8 December 2022 Published: 12 December 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

change, which ultimately aim to improve the welfare and wellbeing of individuals and communities. Although social innovations can be technological, many seek to address unresolved social needs with novel organisational solutions.

The neglect of social innovation in the field of construction is somewhat surprising given the growing focus on corporate social responsibility in the industry and the recent proliferation of social procurement requirements in many countries, which specifically weight social innovation in construction tender decisions [7,8]. In simple terms, social procurement involves construction clients requiring their construction supply chains to innovate in creating social value in the communities in which they build [9]. Social value can take many forms but social procurement policies tend to focus on creating employment and training opportunities for disadvantaged equity-seeking groups such as people with a disability, Indigenous people, refugees and migrants, ex-offenders and disengaged youth [10,11].

The construction sector is the world's largest employer but has struggled to increase the diversity of its workforce [12–14]. The long tradition of research in this area highlights that the industry has a strongly normalised view of an ideal construction industry employee (typically male and able-bodied) [15–17]. Barriers to more diverse employment are reinforced by narrow and exclusionary networks from which people are recruited into the construction industry, and negative stereotypes of those who lie outside the sector's institutionalized norms [8]. While diversity research in the field of construction management has focused on a wide range of excluded groups such as women [15], Indigenous Australians [18], culturally and linguistically diverse people [19] and refugees [20], research on the employment of people with disability has received relatively little attention. The term disability refers to a long-term physical, mental, intellectual, neurological or sensory impairment which can hinder [a person's] full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others. Disability can be caused by genetic disorders, illnesses, workplace accidents, ageing, injuries or a combination of these factors and the way that people experience disability varies significantly depending on environmental factors such as community and employer attitudes, services and support available to them and personal factors such as an individual's determination and resilience in overcoming barriers.

The relative lack of research into the employment of people with disability in construction, compared to other equity-seeking groups is surprising given that the construction industry in many countries is facing calls to diversify its workforce to address severe skills shortages [21,22]. Furthermore, there is significant potential to increase the number of people with disability in the industry's workforce. For example, in the UK people with disability make up only 6% of the construction workforce [22] and in Australia it is around 8% [23] and these jobs are typically focused in low income, insecure and administrative type jobs which provide little opportunity for career progression compared to people without a disability. While there have been a small number of studies highlighting barriers to employment for people with disability in construction ranging from physical barriers and inaccessible workplace settings to negative attitudes and assumptions about higher costs, lower productivity and safety risks [10,12,24–27], there have been virtually no studies of pathways to more inclusive employment opportunities for people with disability in the construction industry. This contrasts starkly with the extensive body of research into disability employment outside construction which continues to identify entrenched personal and societal attitudes towards people with disability [28], a lack of knowledge of accommodations to enable people with disability to secure and maintain a career [29] and a lack of understanding of the diversity of disabilities [30]. Research also shows that those injured or disabled in the workplace face significant direct and indirect discrimination in maintaining their positions [31,32].

Given the above, there is a need for more research to understand and improve the opportunities for the employment of people with disability in construction. To address this gap in research, the aim of this paper is to present a scoping review of extant academic evidence relating to the inclusion of people with disability in the construction industry workforce. Specifically, this research addresses the question of what knowledge gaps exist in construction disability employment research, compared to Gewurtz et al.'s [29] review of mainstream disability employment research. The overall objective is to identify future research directions to advance this important yet under-researched area, enabling the construction industry to better harness the untapped potential benefits of a more diverse workforce [11,33].

As Munn et al. [34] notes, scoping reviews are especially useful when research is in an exploratory, disorganised and nascent state, as it is in the field of construction disability employment research. In contrast to systematic literature reviews, scoping reviews do not aim to explore a specific research question or testable hypothesis, but aim to provide an overview or map of the evidence in a particular field. To ensure that the results of this scoping review are valid and robust, this review employs the widely used Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) methodology [35]. Scoping reviews using PRISMA-Scr have been successfully applied across many built environment disciplines [36,37]. However, scoping reviews are less common in the field of construction management.

#### **2. Method**

Following the PRISMA-Scr method in Figure 1, the systematic literature review employed applied bibliometric analysis of relevant peer-reviewed research relating to the employment of people with disability in the construction industry. The searches were conducted in July 2021 and inclusion criteria related papers with key words: "disability" or "disabled" combined with "employment" or "recruitment" and "construction industry" or "construction sector". We excluded papers with keywords relating to 'safety' and 'injury' because while disability can arise from injury and safety risks in construction, such papers tend to focus on safety risks and laws and regulations rather than the forms of disability arising from them. We extracted data on: year of publication; journal/location of report; study design; study participants; main findings; sample size; key results.

While it is acknowledged that any bibliometric analysis is subject to the limitations of scientific research evaluation based on citations and potential biases towards certain types of publications in databases [38], this research focused explicitly on peer-reviewed journal articles published in the Scopus data base, ISI Web of Science (WoS), PubMed and Association of Researchers in Construction Management database. Peer-reviewed articles ensure a high degree of data integrity and are widely considered to encompass validated knowledge which has a more significant and reliable impact on a field's development than non-peer reviewed research [39]. In the review, duplicate citations were removed and we excluded protocol papers and commentaries with no reported results. The search was limited to literature written in English and was not restricted by date of publication. Eligible study designs included qualitative and quantitative methodologies as well as policy discussion. Whilst we did not include systematic literature reviews in the search criteria all systematic reviews resulting from our searches were analysed for relevant, empirical studies which were then assessed separately against our inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Based on the above criteria, 113 articles were initially identified. After removing duplicates and screening abstracts, we identified 91 articles that discussed disability in the construction sector but only 24 met the inclusion criteria and were included in this review. These articles were then coded using Gewurtz et al.'s [29] analytical framework which is based on a scoping review of mainstream disability employment literature outside construction which categorizes research into key seven themes, which are defined in Table 1. Gewurtz et al.'s [29] framework was chosen because it provides the most recent scoping review of the wider disability employment literature (not construction-specific) and thereby a useful point of comparison between our sector-specific findings and their findings in the wider field of disability employment research. While we acknowledge that the profile of mainstream disability research will have evolved since Gewurtz et al.'s [29] scoping review, the classification they produced remains the most up-to-date and valid.

**Figure 1.** PRISMA Flow Chart. (\* disability).

The coding process was conducted by a team of researchers from within and outside the construction industry to provide different perspectives on the data. This insider/outsider approach is widely used in psychology and social sciences research to provide different perspectives on data [40]. Comparing and cross-checking codes, categories, and themes between the researchers helped to minimized any potential disciplinary bias in the results. Instances of disagreement were resolved through discussion, a process which continued until 100% inter-rater agreement was achieved, providing a high level of 'fit' between the selection criteria and the articles and confidence in the validity of the coding process.


#### **Table 1.** Gewurtz et al.'s [1] seven themes.

#### **3. Results**

This section discusses the results in relation to our analytical framework which is based on a direct comparison to Gewurtz et al.'s [29] disability employment themes as discussed above and identified in the broader non-construction disability employment literature.

A comparison of studies in each of Gewurtz et al.'s [29] seven themes is illustrated in Figure 2 as a visualization device which has been applied in other scoping reviews such as [36].

In Figure 2, the height of each column illustrates the percentage of included studies that report on each theme in Table 1 rather than the number of studies, noting that an individual study can be reported across multiple themes. Interestingly, Figure 2 shows that the construction disability employment literature reflects different interests and priorities compared to mainstream disability employment literature reviewed by Gewurtz et al. [29]. In particular, the construction literature pays relatively more attention to the 'requirements versus practice', 'stigma' and 'accommodation' themes than mainstream disability employment literature. This may reflect the relatively high levels of psychological, cultural, procedural and environmental barriers that have been found to limit the employment of people with disability in the construction industry, and perceptions that people with a disability represent a risk rather than an asset who cannot be easily accommodated in the construction workplace [21,26,28]. In contrast, relatively less attention is paid to the 'disclosure', 'relationship building' and 'hiring practices' themes reflecting the immature state of corporate social responsibility reporting, human resource management and collaborative relationships with social economy organizations in the construction industry [8,12,41]. This lack of maturity of the sector, in terms of social models of disability, is

also reflected in [26]'s study investigating enabling and disabling factors in the British and Dutch construction sectors.

The construction literature within each of these themes is discussed in more detail below to elaborate and explain these key differences.

**Figure 2.** Research on employment of people with disability in construction mapped against Gewurtz et al.'s [29] themes.

#### *3.1. Theme 1: Requirements Versus Practice*

The literature included in this theme focusses largely on the laws, policies and rules that dictate anti-discrimination requirements within the hiring process and recognize the right of people with disability to access paid work compared to the actual hiring practices observed. Construction employment research contributes additional literature which identifies industry-specific barriers that limit the opportunity for people with disability to work in that sector in practice. For example, the traditionally homogenous (male and able-bodied) workforce of self-employed contractors, inflexible employment conditions and the practice of contractors to recruit tradesmen from their established, narrow social networks are barriers to the employment of people with disability in the construction industry in Britain, Holland and Australia [10,25,42]. The construction literature reports poor employment outcomes in practice. For example, Ref. [43]'s study reported low rates of participation in the UK construction workforce on the basis of gender, ethnicity and disability. Notably, although [43] made suggestions for increasing the representation of women and ethnic minorities, there were no suggestions for improving the employment participation rate for people with disability. Ref. [44]'s study focussed on professional transport employees and employee experiences of both invisible and visible disability types in a non-construction but comparable male-dominated industry. The employer's perspective on barriers to hiring people with disability was explored in [45]'s early Israeli research.

Only a small number of articles (all based on US and Canadian studies) demonstrate an effort to educate construction employers on their obligation not to discriminate in employment. For example, Ref. [46] described how the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to real-life employment situations in the construction industry and explained the impact of the ADA on the hiring process. Ref. [47] developed a Construction Disabiity Management Maturity Model. Ref. [48] also delved into the implications of the ADA for the construction sector, more specifically focusing on the liabilities of engineers, as non-discriminatory employers as well as the designed outcomes of their work. Subsequent research by [49] examined cross-sector employer practices in relation to the ADA. Another study investigated the underemployment of people with disability in the construction industry in South Africa, and the role of that country's Employment Equity Act [50]. These research projects collectively demonstrate the importance of legislation in driving diverse employment practices in a compliance-based industry where competitive pressures and industry norms have not yet materialized to drive the employment of non-traditional workers [11]. Clarke and Gribling's [12]'s research reflects a new theme of social procurement research which is responding to the contractual imposition of disability employment requirements on construction supply chains. For example, Guimarães [51] explored the emergence of diverse employment requirements in the Swedish construction industry, as part of social procurement and as a tool to mitigate issues of exclusion on the job market. In Australia Loosemore et al [11] highlighted the value of cross-sector collaboration in implementing social procurement processes to find meaningful and sustainable work for people with disability (among others). This focus on collaboration across organisations (internally and externally) was reflected in Clarke and Gribling's [12] study of different strategies for reducing barriers to employment for people with disability, among other groups on the Heathrow Terminal 5 construction project in London. A group of studies of construction companies in Brazil focused on the higher rate of employment of people with physical disability under the employer quota obligations in that country [52,53]. Those studies investigated the types of accommodation for people with different types of disability working in different construction site roles in the context of the legal requirement to make reasonable accommodations in Brazil.
