An important issue in the study of inclusion concerns changes that occur in organizations over time: the trajectories of inclusion in organizations. Although most research on inclusion has examined how and why organizations become (or fail to become) more inclusive over time, the opposite trajectory—organizations becoming less inclusive— remains an important but underexamined possibility. In this study, we explore the role that patterns of relationality in organizations play in shaping such trajectories. We examine three organizations chosen because they represented positive exemplars of disability inclusion: in each case the organizations, over a 10-year period, diminished in terms of their efforts at disability inclusion. We identify three types of (downward) trajectories of inclusion: diluting, expelling, and relocating inclusion. Our findings suggest these trajectories are tied to organization-level changes (e.g., a change in mission or governance) that led to shifts in patterns of relationality among organizational actors (in terms of density, hierarchy, and standardization of relationships). These broader changes provided a backdrop in which the disability regimes developed: the disability regimes all suffered from weakened structures of diversity responsibility and networking but had their own shift in the cultural meanings attributed to marginalized employees, in this case people with disabilities. Despite the fragility of inclusion in relational contexts that became more transactional in nature, the lived experiences of trajectories of inclusion demonstrate how local social orders marked by caring leadership and small-scale practical changes like hybrid and activity-based working can soften the blow of a downward trajectory of inclusion.
