Summary:
Drawing on 25 biographical interviews with people living with multiple sclerosis—the qualitative strand of a larger survey on the occupational consequences of the illness—this article analyses the heterogeneous relationship to French disability schemes. Between a right and its use lies a labour of self-categorisation and moral calculation. We make three arguments. First, non-take-up is not reducible to an information deficit: it is the joint product of identity work, moral calculation and the presence or absence of an intercessor, which helps explain why the experimental record finds personal assistance outperforming information provision. Second, the deservingness criteria the literature measures in third parties operate here inside claimants, as a principle of self-selection out of rights, especially where impairment is invisible and its onset gradual. Third, through their threshold and household-means effects, the schemes produce the administrative status of disability as much as they compensate for its costs. Beneath the heterogeneity of trajectories lies one tension, between an entitlement defined by diagnosis and threshold and a claim that must pass through an identity; three ideal-typical logics answer it, patterned by class and by gender.
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