Contingent Coherence and Relational Inclusion: Women, Work, and Invisible Illness

Armand Bam^*Joy Lulema

• University of Stellenbosch Business School, Stellenbosch, South Africa

This article explores how professionally employed women living with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), a chronic, fluctuating, and largely invisible illness, navigate the relational and emotional demands of credibility, disclosure, and performance in the workplace. Using narrative-interpretive interviews with eight women in cognitively and emotionally demanding roles, the study draws on feminist disability theory to examine how inclusion is co-produced through interpersonal discretion, emotional restraint, and invisible labour, rather than guaranteed through formal policy. The analysis identifies four recurring tensions between disclosure and protection, credibility and capacity, aspiration and sustainability, and policy and practice which converge in the concept of Contingent Coherence. This term captures the continuous, relational effort to maintain professional viability in systems that overlook episodic fluctuation. Drawing on the findings we also propose a Relational Framework of Inclusion, underpinned by three enabling conditions, trust, responsiveness, and ethical proximity, as essential to fostering supportive environments for employees with invisible illnesses. By foregrounding the lived negotiations of workplace inclusion, this article contributes to critical HRM, feminist disability studies, and organisational behaviour literature. It argues that inclusion must be understood not as a fixed institutional achievement, but as a fragile, relational practice sustained through emotional labour, managerial discretion, and mutual intelligibility.