Disability & Business: A Book Review

I recently completed a book entitled " Disability and Business: Best Practices and Strategies for Inclusion" by City University of New York professor Charles Riley. The book itself is a wonderfully written, detailed introduction to the basic ideas of the value that people with disabilities bring to the business landscape. From the beginning Riley states that no longer should big business view the disability commmunity as just providing handouts, rather, the disability community will become a critical component in the future of good business practices. Moving beyond the traditional "hand out" model (which so often the social service organizations still cannot get past) he begins to explore areas like human resources, marketing and universal design. While ALL of these elements are critical to the overall business strategy the one draw back that I found was that the book provides a very basic overview of these themes and never really delves into case studies. Riley interviewed hundreds of people for the book - people in mangement, executive positions and so on. While the information provided was solid I often felt that there were knowledge gaps that were to broad for my taste. But in all fairness, as someone in the field who craves detailed information I know that my biases maybe unwarented.

The book itself I believe is a wonderful start to the growing ouvre of Disability Studies literature and provides readers with a greater understanding that these issues are vital - but more importantly business executives, management and scholars must begin to think about creating a paradigm shift when thinking about the relationship between business and disability.