ABSTRACT
The social model of disability has been called ‘the big idea’ of the disability movement (Hasler, 1993). To many, it appears to be the fundamental political principle that both first initiated and now sustains the disability rights challenge to mainstream society. Both in Britain but also increasingly on the global disability rights stage, the term ‘social model’ has become synonymous with progressive approaches to disability, while ‘medical model’ sums up everything which is backward-looking and reactionary. Neither in this chapter, nor in my wider disability research, do I reject
the idea that disability is powerfully shaped by social forces. In the first edition of this book I wrote of the ‘family of social contextual approaches’, of which the British social model is a leading example. The role of factors such as the environmental, social and economic policies, cultural representations, individual attitudes in disabling people with health conditions cannot be denied. In North America, Australia and other countries, activists and scholars talk of the social model, but generally as a looser social-contextual concept, often entwined with a minority group approach (Hahn, 1988, 1985; Davis, 1995). However, in this chapter I want to focus on the British version of the social model, sometimes also called the ‘strong social model’.
