Abstract
Drawing on in-depth qualitative data from autistic frontline workers, this study explores how agency is exercised under conditions of structural, emotional, and organisational constraint. While dominant workplace inclusion discourses position autistic employees either as passive recipients of accommodation or as empowered agents navigating difference, we show that agency in customer-facing roles is neither absent nor fully enabled. Using qualitative survey results of 110 autistic frontline employees, we identify four interrelated dimensions shaping workplace experience: financial benefits and costs, emotional labour, job design and person–job fit, and organisational support and job embeddedness. Across these dimensions, frontline employees engage in continuous calculations—whether to mask, endure, adapt, or plan exit—revealing a pattern of bounded choice, where options are formally available but practically constrained. We theorise this dynamic as agency cost: the uneven psychological, emotional, and identity-related costs borne by autistic workers to remain employed and perceived as competent.