The Market Value of Compliance: Functioning Labels as Economic Assignments
The Political Economy of Functioning: Autism, Capitalist Sorting, and the Myth of Productivity.
A deep dive into how “functioning labels” serve capitalism’s Calibration Machine — from eugenic roots to modern compliance economies. Narrative sovereignty is our refusal. We were never broken. The machine was designed to break us.
We Were Never Broken. The Machine Was Designed to Break Us
I speak now as seanchaidh. Not the court historian of kings and their conquests, but the keeper of memory for those hunted and displaced. For the ones whose histories were carried not in books but in bodies — in the weight of salt air, in the rhythm of stone and peat, in hands that stitched what was needed from what the land offered. The Calibration Machine did not begin with autism. Its first teeth bit deep into the Highlands, long before any diagnostic manual was written. It began with the Gael, who once stitched shoes from stag hide. The taking of the stag was not extraction, but a relationship — its antlers honoured, its sinew drawn into thread, its hide softened into supple leather. A pair of shoes could be crafted in an afternoon, because time then was not yet broken into wages.
But men arrived bearing maps and laws, slicing the land into parcels and the people into labour. The old world was not inefficient, but it was incompatible — uncalibrated to the emerging industrial order. Subsistence became reframed as idleness. Craft as backwardness. The land was enclosed; its people displaced. What once was made freely through skilled relationship with land and season could now only be purchased through wage labour, controlled by markets and merchants far away. The woman who once made her own shoes in a day would now work for many days to earn enough coin to purchase a pair in a shop on the High Street. Not for lack of skill, but because her skill was no longer permitted to circulate outside the mechanisms of extraction.
To resist this arrangement was to be called wild, savage, defective. Those who complied were called industrious, modern, civilised. The Calibration Machine requires not merely bodies but adjustable bodies, pliant bodies — bodies that can be measured, disciplined, corrected. It refines its tools. It invents categories. It assigns labels. And so we arrive at the present, where functioning labels serve not as neutral descriptions of support needs, but as assignments of compliance. The question the machine poses remains unchanged: Will you tolerate this arrangement? If so, you are ‘high-functioning’. If not, you are ‘low-functioning’. You are wild. You are unfit. You must be broken.
It was never we who were broken. It was always the machine.
Adaptive Functioning as Capitalist Metric
The Calibration Machine requires measurement. It cannot tolerate ambiguity; it must convert lives into data, into units that can be compared, sorted, and assigned. And so it reaches for tests — instruments to translate the fluidity of human being into fixed scores. Chief among these is the assessment of adaptive functioning. On paper, such tests claim only to measure how well a person navigates the tasks of daily life. In truth, they serve as proxies for something else entirely: the capacity to participate in wage labour.
Adaptive functioning assessments were never neutral tools. As Geiger and colleagues (2018) note, such evaluations have become deeply embedded in the eligibility structures of social security and disability benefit systems. Ostensibly, they measure skills: hygiene, cooking, budgeting, communication. But beneath these surface items lies a deeper metric — not whether one can cook a meal, but whether one can do so at the speed, under the conditions, and within the hierarchical disciplines required by employment. The question is not whether a person can dress themselves, but whether they can dress quickly, reliably, and without disruption in order to appear on time for work, prepared to serve another’s schedule.
In this way, adaptive functioning becomes the language through which the state and market collaborate to determine one’s calibratability. Harrison (2013) exposes how cost-benefit analyses within disability policy reduce care and support to questions of productivity and economic return. Those who cannot meet the tempo of market expectations — or who might meet them but only with unpredictable variance — are designated as burdens. Subramanian and Mital (2009) critique the assumption that existing work standards are universal or objective, arguing instead that these standards are historically contingent artefacts of industrial discipline.
The Calibration Machine’s genius lies in its ability to mask these economic judgments behind a facade of clinical objectivity. The adaptive functioning score becomes a number, a chart, an eligibility threshold. The assessor becomes a technician, detached from the moral weight of the process. And yet, at every turn, what is being measured is one’s capacity to conform — to arrive on time, to follow instructions, to subordinate self-regulation to external demand.
This system does not ask: What does this person need to thrive? It asks only: Can this person be calibrated for efficient extraction? Those who can are rewarded with access to employment and services; those who cannot are left to languish in the margins, their existence pathologised as “low functioning.”
Thus the Calibration Machine advances, not with overt cruelty but with the cold efficiency of bureaucratic logic, ever refining its metrics of compliance.
Vocational Rehabilitation as Surveillance Pipeline
The Calibration Machine does not wait passively for bodies to present themselves; it actively recruits them into its circuits. Nowhere is this more evident than in the apparatus of vocational rehabilitation. Ostensibly designed to support disabled individuals into meaningful employment, vocational rehabilitation functions in practice as a pipeline — a sorting mechanism that disciplines bodies into compliance with the economic order.
In the United States, the reach of this system extends beyond job placement. Remarkably, a Vocational Rehabilitation Specialist may serve as one of the few professionals authorised to provide an official autism diagnosis — a gatekeeper not only to services, but to identity itself. For many adults, particularly those who have navigated life undiagnosed, vocational rehabilitation offers the most expedient path to formal recognition of their neurodivergence. But this diagnosis is not issued as an act of cultural or psychological understanding. It is issued to determine eligibility for labour force adjustment. The diagnostic act is inextricable from the question: Can this person be made work-ready?
Roux et al. (2023) reveal how deeply these cross-system linkages have become embedded. Vocational services intersect with public education, Medicaid, and state benefit systems, forming a seamless network of surveillance and adjustment. The boundaries between schooling, welfare, and employment blur; the individual becomes a case file circulating within a bureaucratic ecosystem whose primary mandate is to prepare them for economic productivity.
Stratton et al. (2022) show that for autistic employees, “vocational functioning” is often assessed not on the basis of their actual skills or contributions, but on their capacity to navigate unspoken social hierarchies, tolerate sensory strain, and regulate affect in ways deemed appropriate for hierarchical work environments. Emotional self-regulation, not task competence, becomes the benchmark. The question is never whether the work can adapt to the worker, but always whether the worker can adapt to the work.
This convergence is further illuminated by Chun et al. (2024), who capture the dialectical tension between the hopes and expectations placed upon autistic youth and their families. Parents are promised inclusion; practitioners are tasked with delivering employability. Yet at each stage, the definition of successful transition is framed in strictly economic terms — insertion into the workforce, maintenance of full-time employment, reduction of “dependency” on public benefits. Sung et al. (2024) similarly document how employment readiness training emphasises behavioural conformity, emotional control, and social presentation — all carefully calibrated to meet employer expectations, often with little regard for sustainable wellbeing.
Vocational rehabilitation thus becomes not a neutral service but a tool of calibration — adjusting, conditioning, and sorting neurodivergent individuals according to their proximity to normative labour market demands. The language of support masks the logic of extraction. To be supported is to be shaped. To be shaped is to be made marketable.
The Calibration Machine does not care for one’s gifts or potential for alternative contribution. It seeks only to standardise — to smooth the irregularities of embodiment until the body can be slotted into a predetermined economic niche. The pipeline operates with mechanised precision, converting the wildness of neurodivergence into units of controlled productivity.
The Eugenic Underpinnings Persist
Long before the word eugenics was coined, the Calibration Machine was already sorting bodies. It has always sought to distinguish the fit from the unfit — not by any universal standard, but according to its own shifting demands of profit and power. The earliest capitalist enclosures did not merely displace the Gael and the peasant; they recoded their bodies as deficient. Those who could not be made productive within the new wage economies were framed as burdens, deviants, or threats to social order.
When the term eugenics finally entered public discourse in the late nineteenth century, it simply named and formalised what was already long underway. As Rembis (2018) observes, eugenics was never solely a scientific movement; it was a social project designed to safeguard economic and political hierarchies. Disability, poverty, and neurodivergence were pathologised not because they represented any objective harm, but because they disrupted the smooth operation of the industrial state.
Wilson (2017) traces how these eugenic principles quietly endure even as the explicit rhetoric has softened. Where once the language spoke of purity, heredity, and degeneration, the modern discourse invokes productivity, independence, and self-sufficiency. But the underlying selection pressures remain: those who can conform to the requirements of neoliberal labour markets are deemed worthy of support and inclusion; those who cannot are quietly excluded, institutionalised, or left to navigate systems designed to exhaust them.
McConnell and Phelan (2022) expose how this continuity plays out in reproductive and sexual health policy for people with intellectual disabilities — a stark reminder that control over bodies is not limited to employment, but extends into the most intimate domains of autonomy. The Calibration Machine is totalising. It regulates not only who may work, but who may partner, parent, or reproduce. Compliance is rewarded; deviation is punished.
The modern discourse of adaptive functioning thus serves as the soft face of an ancient discipline. Rather than overt declarations of genetic fitness, today’s assessments translate the same judgments into clinical scores and service eligibility thresholds. Productivity becomes both moral virtue and economic metric. Cost-containment — the silent obsession of modern disability policy — operates as a proxy for worth.
This is not simply the remnant of a darker past. It is the ongoing refinement of the same machinery, recalibrated to operate within neoliberal sensibilities. The language is more technical, the processes more bureaucratised, but the Calibration Machine remains unchanged in its fundamental purpose: to regulate the flow of bodies into the service of capital, and to discard those deemed inefficient or unmanageable.
The Commodification of Neurodivergent Labour
The Calibration Machine is nothing if not adaptive. As social pressures mount against the overt exclusion of neurodivergent people, the machine recalibrates its rhetoric. The language of deficit gives way to the language of opportunity. In recent years, corporations have discovered the autism advantage — a seductive narrative that frames autistic ways of being not as impairments to be managed, but as untapped resources to be harvested.
Bury et al. (2020) trace the rise of this discourse. Autistic individuals are now marketed as possessing exceptional attention to detail, superior pattern recognition, hyperfocus, and loyalty to routine — all qualities which, conveniently, align with certain narrow industrial roles. What is framed as “strength-based hiring” often amounts to a selective commodification of specific autistic ways of being, extracted for profit whilst the fuller person remains unacknowledged.
Yet beneath this surface lies the same economic logic that has always driven the Calibration Machine. Hollin (2016) demonstrates how the scientific and corporate construction of autism aligns with broader state interests in managing and optimising populations for workforce efficiency. Autistic labour becomes valuable precisely because it can be channelled into roles that demand intense, repetitive, often isolating focus — tasks others may find intolerable, but which are reframed as “perfect fits” for those whose difference can be exploited.
The inclusivity rhetoric becomes a profitable marketing tool — a means of public relations burnishing that costs little whilst yielding significant reputational capital. But behind these smiling campaigns lies a quieter financial incentive structure. In many countries, including the United States, corporations receive significant government subsidies, tax credits, and diversity incentives for hiring disabled workers. As Kosherbayeva et al. (2024) document, these incentives are rarely reflected in the worker’s wages or working conditions. The autistic employee receives no share of the public subsidy their body has unlocked; the bonus is pocketed entirely by the corporation. The Calibration Machine extracts not only labour, but state capital — a double harvest.
Kizer (2024) situates this grift within the broader architecture of neoliberal nonprofit infrastructure. Organisations such as Autism$peaks position themselves as intermediaries, brokering partnerships between corporate interests and disability communities, often advancing programmes that serve corporate hiring needs whilst marginalising autistic voices that advocate for structural change. Inclusion, in this frame, becomes another site of extraction — not a genuine reimagining of work, but a refinement of profit mechanisms.
Thus the Calibration Machine advances under a banner of progressive language, its economic logic intact. The autistic person becomes not a subject with agency but a resource to be managed, optimised, and marketed. What is sold as empowerment is often enclosure by another name.
Resistance, Refusal, and Narrative Sovereignty
Yet always, even as the Calibration Machine refines its instruments, there are those who refuse to be measured.
The wildness the machine sought to break never truly vanished. It went underground. It nested in community, in song, in the quiet knowing exchanged between those who live outside the smooth corridors of standardisation. Autistic people — especially those whose lives have long been subject to diagnostic parsing — are among the most skilled at naming the violence hidden inside the language of compliance.
Keates et al. (2024) document how autistic individuals overwhelmingly reject functioning labels, recognising them not as tools of support but as instruments of distortion. These labels do not describe need; they describe tolerability — how easily a body can be slotted into the existing machinery without requiring inconvenient adjustments. What is deemed ‘low functioning’ is often simply refusal to mask, to contort, to sacrifice health for others’ comfort.
Kapp (2023) warns of the dangers embedded in emerging severity scales, particularly those that claim to offer finer gradations of ‘support needs’. These scales risk freezing people into fixed hierarchies of worthiness, where access to services is granted not on the basis of humane care but on one’s distance from normative productivity. The Calibration Machine does not ask who is suffering or what would nourish. It asks only: how expensive is this body to maintain?
Mogensen and Mason (2015) show how autistic youth internalise these labels as scripts of identity, often struggling to reconcile institutional assessments with their lived realities. To be told one is “high functioning” whilst still drowning in unrecognised needs is a particular kind of epistemic violence — erasure dressed as compliment. To be branded “low functioning” is to be pre-declared unsalvageable. In both cases, one’s narrative sovereignty — the right to author one’s own story — is denied.
Milton (2018) advances an alternative frame rooted in the concept of autistic development as relational personhood — an approach that resists the neoliberal demand for atomised, self-regulating independence. Autistic lives are not problems to be solved but relational systems to be understood. Growth emerges not through calibration to external demands, but through collective negotiation of meaning, safety, and shared existence.
The act of refusal is not simply a rejection of labels; it is a reclamation of time, of embodiment, of history. The autistic refusal to be calibrated echoes the older refusals of those who resisted enclosure, who fled the counting houses, who sang to the stones. It is a refusal to let one’s being be reduced to units of compliance. It is an insistence on narrative sovereignty — to speak, to name, to define, not in the language of the machine, but in the living languages carried within neurodivergent kinship.
Conclusion: Dismantling the Compliance Economy
The Calibration Machine has always known its greatest threat. It is not resistance in the streets, nor even open rebellion. Its most profound danger comes from those who carry memory — from those who tell stories that do not align with its metrics. This is why, in every system of enclosure, the seanchaidh is targeted first.
The seanchaidh threatens the Machine because she remembers other arrangements. She remembers lives not bound to productivity, time not divided into wages, care not rationed according to profit. She speaks of subsistence that required no masters, of wildness that required no discipline. In erasing her — or taming her into harmless folklore — the Machine severs people from the memory of alternative economies, making the Calibration System appear natural, inevitable, even benevolent.
And once the memory-keepers were silenced, the gatekeeping mechanisms could rise unchallenged: the assessments, the eligibility criteria, the diagnostic categories. Functioning labels became not just measurements of need, but permissions to exist within the market’s logic. The wildness of being was domesticated into managed diversity — tolerable so long as it could be calibrated into labour or safely contained at the margins.
But wildness does not die so easily.
The growing refusal of autistic people to accept functioning labels is not merely a protest against diagnostic language. It is a revival of memory — a reconnection to older forms of knowing that were never compatible with capitalist discipline. When we reclaim narrative sovereignty, we do more than resist individual labels. We challenge the entire economy of compliance that rests upon them.
To dismantle the Calibration Machine is to refuse its foundational premises: that care must be earned, that worth is measured by productivity, that deviation from the norm requires correction. We must build economies of care that do not demand calibration, but instead honour interdependence, reciprocity, and mutual flourishing. This means universal supports not tethered to diagnostic thresholds; it means housing and healthcare without work requirements; it means educational systems that cultivate human thriving rather than manufacture compliant labour.
The Calibration Machine is efficient, but it is brittle. It depends upon our continued consent to its measurements, its narratives, its definitions of worth. The more we refuse its terms, the more it fractures.
We were never broken.
We have always been wild.
And we remember.
End Note: On Method, Transparency, and the Shape of the Archive
As with all of my deep dives, this piece rests upon a wide base of research. Every study cited here is referenced directly within the text, with links provided for readers who wish to explore the scholarship themselves. But as always, the visible citations reflect only the most directly integrated threads. Dozens of additional papers were read, surveyed, and weighed to give this essay its shape — papers which informed the argument even if they are not individually cited.
Were this a formal academic paper, I would include a complete reference list at the end, capturing every source considered. However, the constraints of this medium — and my desire to keep the article accessible and readable — do not lend themselves easily to that level of exhaustive citation.
In the interest of full transparency, I have prepared a supplementary page where readers can examine the full research process that shaped this piece. There you will find:
The exact queries I submitted to the AI research assistant;
The full list of papers surfaced in response to those queries;
The overlapping studies which appeared across multiple searches — redundancies that, in fact, reflect how certain key works straddle multiple dimensions of this topic.
I offer this not simply for disclosure, but as an invitation. Scholarship is always a dialogue — and I believe readers deserve to see both the story and the scaffolding behind it.