ABSTRACT
Until recently sociological discussion of disability occurred as a backwater of medical sociology, or as a minor constituent of the sociology of deviance. Even today, the topic is not mentioned in the vast majority of general textbooks, nor is it dealt with in mainstream courses on social structure. But with the growth since the mid-1980s of organisations of disabled people which see their ‘problems’ from a social and political perspective, a new agenda for the sociology of disablement has arisen. In this context, statistical representations of disability have been the subject of thoroughgoing and fundamental criticism.
