This communication is based on a PhD research conducted between 2017 and 2021 on sheltered employment in France and Sweden. Based on different research methods (interviews, observations, collection and analysis of official documentation), this research proposes a transversal analysis of the interdependence of the different levels of policies. In a context of increasing labour market demands, it sheds light on the way specialized devices supporting the inclusion contribute to disabled people's job placement onto the open labour and/or to an alternative professional activity. Analysing the concrete ways to implement the inclusive model of policies toward disabled persons furthest from the labour market, we nuance the opposition between the objective of inclusion onto the open labour market and specialized institutions. We show that these policy models are cumulative rather than substituting each other.

In this presentation, I would like to interrogate the opposition between institutions and inclusion and to defend the idea that sheltered workshops can only be understood in the light of the transformations of the social state. In order to explain the apparent paradox between the growing affirmation of the objective of inclusion and the persistence of a large sheltered employment sector in France and Sweden, we will show that the objective of inclusion has been reappropriated by the protected sector. In doing so, I would like to extend the analyses of changes in institutional care that qualify the idea of deinstitutionalization and are based on the notions of "désenclavement" (Dodier, 2003), "détotalisation" (Rostaing, 2006) or "déconfinement" (Callon et al., 2001).

I would like to focus on logics on which individuals are referred toward sheltered workshops or the open labor market. We will see that the institutional segmentation characterizing the French system leads to a quasi-automatic referral from children institutions to adult institutions. Thus, the majority of sheltered workshops' workers come from other medico-social institutions like special education establishments. Professionals involved in the referring procedures towards sheltered workshops try to ensure consistency in the careers of PwD. On the contrary, the strong centrality of the Public Employment Service in the Swedish system serves a very strong activation logic. All jobseekers are supported by the Public Employment Service. And the referral to sheltered workshops is a last resort: this support is only granted after other modalities have been exhausted. After then transition pathways to the open labor market are conditioned by a very strong sequencing of the services and by close accompaniment of the individuals. In addition, the transitional pathways often involve a choice for the workers between employment under ordinary law or rewarding work tasks.

Studying referral processus in the French and Swedish cases will lead us to qualify the distinction between "valid" and "invalid" (Castel, 1999), between "able" and "unable" to work, between "employable" and "unemployable". The comparison between these two systems will indeed highlight the social dimensions of the categories at stake. More generally, this presentation would like to show a niche object, namely sheltered workshops, can contribute to the reflections on the structuring effects operated by social protection systems and on the changes that these systems are undergoing (Barbier, 2017; Esping-Andersen, 1990; Hassenteufel & Palier, 2001; Jessop, 1994).