Re-employing Military Veterans with Service-Connected Disabilities: A Case Study

Abstract

This qualitative study focuses on addressing the phenomenon of re-employing military veterans with service-connected disabilities using the Case Study Strategy. To do so, this study explored a particular organizational context, called “Hero Apparel”3, which started as a rehabilitation center to employ disabled military veterans who were disabled due to the Sri Lankan civil war. Hero Apparel as a commercial enterprise is mainly focused on providing vocational training to veterans in the garment industry. Service-connected disabilities are impairments associated among military veterans that occur due to active engagement in military services. Veterans lose their sense of independence and self-reliance because of these impairments. To mitigate these social issues associated with disabled veterans, providing opportunities to be engaged in productive work in a defined organizational environment is a very effective way since the veterans get a chance to integrate successfully into their lives again despite being disabled. Therefore, Hero Apparel can be considered as an entrepreneurial innovation that emerged to assist disabled veterans to regain their productive rank within society back again by allowing disabled military veterans to be re-employed as workers in the garment industry and build appropriate vocational skills. This context intrigued this study to explore the relevancy of this re-employability phenomenon with the organizational mechanism of social enterprises. By doing so, this study was able to find that Hero Apparel is operated under the concept of social enterprise mechanism and has an inspiring context compared to mainstream workplaces as Hero Apparel does its business operations while being both commercially and socially oriented. This study also revealed that the provision of meaningful employment opportunities for disabled people can empower them since such work is capable of ensuring their independence and self-reliance. In the Sri Lankan context, social enterprises are relatively a new term. Therefore, as a study oriented toward the mechanism of social enterprises, this paper contributes to increasing the awareness of social enterprises within Sri Lanka by presenting the contextual factors of an organization, which operates under the concept of social enterprise.