I examine the career advancement facilitators of organizational stakeholders who may be identified as simultaneously “core” and “fringe” in this article, via the insights of 21 leaders with disabilities. To navigate barriers and advance their careers, these leaders benefited from three categories of facilitators, including career self-management strategies, social networks, and organizational and societal factors. Facilitators are synthesized with a metaphor, the three-legged stool, which depicts three foundational pillars that underlie the leaders’ success. Focusing on an understudied element of the social networks pillar, I examine how leaders’ external networks (family, friends, acquaintances, and role models) facilitated their career advancement. Findings point to the role of strong and weak ties in developing leaders’ career self-management strategies as well as their access to core stakeholder positions. Last, contributions, implications, and limitations of this article are discussed.

Guest editorialThe benefits of inclusion: disability and work in the 21st century Changing perspectives on disability and workThe United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) was adopted in 2006 with 82 nation signatories (United Nations, 2019). The purpose of the convention was to elaborate upon and codify the rights of persons with disabilities while setting a path for implementation of legislation, policies, programs and practices that ensure those rights are activated and maintained (United Nations, 2006). To date, over 160 nations have signed the convention (United Nations, 2019), indicating global interest in implementing legislation, regulations, policies and programs on the rights of persons with disabilities.Increased international attention on the rights of persons with disabilities is associated with a shift away from the medical model of disability, which characterizes disability as a deficit of the individual (e.g. Areheart, 2008). Historically, this model has been the focus of disability benefits programs (e.g. Withers, 2016). More inclusive approaches to disability are now being recognized, such as the social model of disability, which identifies disability as a societal rather than individual phenomenon (Oliver, 1983(Oliver, , 2013, and the human rights model of disability, which draws from the social model to highlight the centrality of upholding the rights and dignity of all persons in society (Office of Disability Issues, 2003).The social model of disability was first developed in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. However, the social understanding of disability has been advanced by activists and disability studies scholars in several countries. This understanding proposes that disability is a form of oppression caused by social barriers that exclude persons with impairments from participation in society. Attention is drawn to the role of environment and society in creating barriers. This approach very much underpins the human rights approach to disability. Over the period that followed, the World Health Organization (WHO) and others integrated the social understanding and medical understanding into a biopsychosocial framework, known as the disablement process, which is described in the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) (WHO, 2001) and in earlier work by the WHO (1980). In this framework, a health condition or impairment is a necessary but not sufficient condition for disablement. The social and built environments are seen as key factors that can be enabling or disabling. Earlier work by Nagi (1965Nagi ( , 1991 also took this approach. With this approach, disability is conceptualized as arising out of the complex interaction between a health condition or impairment, barriers in the physical and social environment, and personal factors (Kazou, 2017).The human rights model of disability looks to societal norms, practices and structures to understand the barriers that persons with disabilities experience. This approach focuses...

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