Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-sjtt6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-06T09:52:23.011Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Making Way: Legal Mobilization, Organizational Response, and Wheelchair Access

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Abstract

Questions of how and why organizations respond to legal rights are analyzed in several sociolegal research traditions, including studies of legal mobilization, regulation, and neo-institutionalist accounts of the diffusion of organizational structures. Using original qualitative and quantitative data, this article examines the responses of ten organizations to wheelchair access rights that are found in various provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and related state laws. We find that concepts from each of the research traditions are useful in understanding the sources of variance in response among the organizations in our sample. We focus on four key variables: legal mobilization, commitment, professionalization, and routinization. We contend that these variables offer a relatively parsimonious language for studying organizational responses to the law and for aggregating insights from competing approaches in the literature, both of which are essential to advancing our understanding of the conditions under which law changes society.

Type
Articles
Copyright
© 2012 Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We first wish to thank the participants in this study. Many thanks also to Samuel Bagenstos, Lauren Edelman, Chuck Epp, Bob Kagan, Mark Kessler, and Susan Silbey for their comments during various stages of this project, as well as the participants of various panels on the study of rights who have greatly stimulated our thinking, especially Michael McCann and Jeffrey Dudas. Further thanks are owed to the anonymous reviewers and editors at Law & Society Review, whose insightful feedback significantly improved the manuscript. Any remaining mistakes and shortcomings are entirely our own. Finally, we thank the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for its generous financial support through its innovative Scholars in Health Policy Research Program, which allowed us to embark on this challenging—but highly rewarding—project.

References

Acemoglu, Daron, & Angrist, Joshua D. (2001) “Consequences of Employment Protection? The Case of the Americans with Disabilities Act,” 109 J. of Political Economy 915–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Albiston, Catherine (2005) “Bargaining in the Shadow Social Institutions: Competing Discourses and Social Change in Workplace Mobilization of Civil Rights,” 39 Law & Society Rev. 1150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Albiston, Catherine (2010) Institutional Inequality and the Mobilization of the Family and Medical Leave Act: Rights on Leave. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bagenstos, Samuel R. (2009) Law and the Contradictions of the Disability Rights Movement. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bardach, Eugene, & Kagan, Robert A. (1982) Going by the Book: The Problem of Regulatory Unreasonableness. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Barnes, Jeb, & Burke, Thomas F. (2006) “The Diffusion of Rights: From Law on the Books to Organizational Rights Practices,” 40 Law & Society Rev. 493524.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blanck, P. (ed.) (2000) Employment, Disability, and the Americans with Disabilities Act: Issues in Law, Public Policy and Research . Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Boxenbaum, Eva, & Jonsson, Stefan (2008) “Isomorphism, Diffusion and Decoupling,” in Greenwood, Royston, et al., ed., Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. Los Angeles: Sage.Google Scholar
Braithwaite, John, & Ayres, Ian (1992) Responsive Regulation: Transcending the Deregulation Debate. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Burke, Thomas F. (1997) “On the Rights Track: The Americans with Disabilities Act” in Pietro, Nivola, ed., Comparative Disadvantages? Social Regulations and the Global Economy . Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 242318.Google Scholar
Burke, Thomas F., & Barnes, Jeb (2008) “Is There an Empirical Literature on Rights?48 Studies in Law, Politics and Society 6992.Google Scholar
Coglianese, Cary (2001) “Social Movements, Law and Society: The Institutionalization of the Environmental Movement,” 150 Univ. of Pennsylvania Law Rev. 85118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeLeire, Thomas (2000) “The Wage and Employment Effects of the Americans with Disabilities Act,” 35 The J. of Human Resources 693715.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DiMaggio, Paul J., & Powell, Walter W. (1983) “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” 48 American Sociological Rev. 147–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dobbin, Frank (2009) Inventing Equal Opportunity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dobbin, Frank, & Sutton, Frank R. (1998) “The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions,” 104 American J. of Sociology 441–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dobbin, Frank, Sutton, John R., Meyer, John W., & Scott, Richard (1998) “Equal Opportunity Law and the Construction of Internal Labor Markets,” 99 American J. of Sociology 396427.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edelman, Lauren (1990) “Legal Environments and Organizational Governance: The Expansion of Due Process in the American Workplace,” 95 American J. of Sociology 1401–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edelman, Lauren (1992) “Legal Ambiguity and Symbolic Structures: Organizational Mediation of Civil Rights Law,” 97 J. of American Sociology 1531–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edelman, Lauren, & Suchman, Mark C. (1997a) “The Legal Environments of Organizations,” 23 Annual Rev. of Sociology 479515.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edelman, Lauren, & Suchman, Mark C. (1997b) “Legal Ambiguity and Symbolic Structures: Organizational Mediation of Civil Rights Law,” 97 American J. of Sociology 1531–76.Google Scholar
Edelman, Lauren, Uggen, Christopher, & Erlanger, Howard S. (1999) “The Endogeneity of Legal Regulation: Grievance Procedures as Rational Myth,” 105 American J. of Sociology 406–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engel, David M., & Munger, Frank W. (2003) Rights of Inclusion: Law and Identity in the Life Stories of Americans with Disabilities. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epp, Charles R. (1998) The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epp, Charles R. (2009) Making Rights Real: Activists, Bureaucrats, and the Creation of the Legalistic State. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feeley, Malcolm M., & Rubin, Edward L. (1998) Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America's Prisons . New York: Cambridge.Google Scholar
Frymer, Paul (2003) “Acting When Elect Officials Won't: Federal Courts and Civil Rights Enforcement in U.S. Labor Relations, 1935–1985,” 97 American Political Science Rev. 483–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Funk, Robert (1986) “Disability Rights: From Caste to Class in the Context of Civil Rights,” in Gartner, Alan, & Joe, Tom, eds., Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Goldberg-Hiller, Jonathan (2002) The Limits of Union: Same Sex Marriage and the Politics of Civil Rights. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gould, Jon B. (2005) Speak No Evil: The Triumph of Hate Speech Regulation. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gunningham, Neil, Kagan, Robert A., & Thornton, Dorothy (2003) Shades of Green: Business, Regulation, and Environment. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Gunningham, Neil, & Sinclair, Robert (2009) “Organizational Trust and the Limits of Management,” 43 Law & Society Rev. 865–97.Google Scholar
Howard-Grenville, Jennifer, Nash, Jennifer, & Coglianese, Cary (2008) “Constructing the License to Operate: Internal Factors and Their Influence on Corporate Environmental Decisions,” 30 Law & Policy 73107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huising, Ruthanne, & Silbey, Susan (2011) “Governing the Gap: Forging Safe Science through Relational Regulation,” 5 Regulation and Governance 1442.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenness, Valerie, & Grattet, Ryken (2001) Making Hate a Crime: From Social Movement to Law Enforcement. New York: Russell Sage.Google Scholar
Jolls, Christine (2000) “Accommodation Mandates53 Stanford Law Rev. 223306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kagan, Robert A. (2001) Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kalev, Alexandra, & Dobbin, Frank (2006) “Enforcement of Civil Rights Law in Private Workplaces: The Effects of Compliance Reviews and Lawsuits over Time,” 31 Law and Social Inquiry 855903.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kalev, Alexandra, Kelly, Erin, & Dobbin, Frank (2006) “Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies,” 71 American Sociological Rev. 598617.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaye, Stephen H., Kang, Taewoon, & Laplante, Mitchell P. (2002) “Wheelchair Use in the United States,” Disability Statistics Abstract #23. San Francisco, Cal.: University of California Disability Statistics Center. Available at: http://dsc.ucsf.edu/publication.php?pub_id=1 (accessed 13 Feb 2012).Google Scholar
May, Peter J. (2004) “Compliance Motivations: Affirmative and Negative Bases,” 38 Law & Society Rev. 41–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
May, Peter J. (2005) “Compliance Motivations: Perspectives of Farmers, Homebuilders, and Marine Facilities,” 27 Law & Policy 317–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
May, Peter J., & Winter, Soeren (1999) “Regulatory Enforcement and Compliance: Examining Danish Agro-Environmental Policy,” 18 J. of Policy Analysis and Management 625–51.3.0.CO;2-U>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
May, Peter J., & Wood, Robert S. (2003) “At the Regulatory Frontlines: Inspectors’ Enforcement Styles and Regulatory Compliance,” 13 J. of Public Administration Research & Theory 117–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCann, Michael (1994) Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
McCann, Michael (1996) “Causal Versus Constitutive Explanations (or, On the Difficulty of Being So Positive …,” 21 Law and Social Inquiry 457–82.Google Scholar
Meyer, John W., & Rowan, Brian (1977) “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” 83(2) The American J. of Sociology 340–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muir, William K. (1973) Law and Attitude Change. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Peltason, Jack W. (1961) Fifty-Eight Lonely Men: Southern Federal Judges and School Desegregation. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.Google Scholar
Reed, Douglas S. (2001) On Equal Terms: The Constitutional Politics of Educational Opportunity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reiss, Albert Jr (1984) “Selecting Strategies of Social Control over Organizational Life,” in Hawkins, K., & Thomas, J., eds., Enforcing Regulation. Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff Publishing.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Gerald (1991) The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change? Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin (1990) “ ‘The Law Is All Over’: Power, Resistance, and the Legal Consciousness of the Welfare Poor,” 2 Yale J. of Law and the Humanities 343379.Google Scholar
Scheid, Theresa L., & Suchman, Mark C. (2001) “Ritual Conformity to the Americans with Disabilities Act: Coercive and Normative Isomorphism,” in Schutt, R., & Hartwell, S., eds., The Organizational Response to Social Problems, vol. 8. New York: JAI Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scheingold, Stuart A. (1974) The Politics of Rights: Lawyers, Public Policy, and Political Change. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Silbey, Susan S. (2009) “Taming Prometheus: Talk about Safety Culture,” 35 Annual Rev. of Sociology 341–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Helena (1996) Unleashing Rights: Law, Meaning, and the Animal Rights Movement. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stapleton, David C., & Burkhauser, Richard V., eds. (2003) The Decline in Employment of People with Disabilities: A Policy Puzzle . Kalamazoo, MI: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sutton, John R., Dobbin, Frank, Meyer, John W., & Scott, W. Richard (1994) “The Legalization of the Workplace,” 99 American J. of Sociology 944–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thornton, Dorothy, Kagan, Robert A., & Gunningham, Neil (2009) “When Social Norms and Pressures Are Not Enough: Environmental Performance in the Trucking Industry,” 43 Law & Society Rev. 405–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vose, Clement E. (1957) “The National Consumers’ League and the Brandeis Brief,” 1 Midwest J. of Political Science 267–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vose, Clement E. (1958) “Litigation as a Form of Pressure Group Activity,” 319 The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2031.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weick, Karl (1976) “Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems,” 21 Administrative Science Q. 119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weick, Karl (1990) “Technology as Equivoque: Sensemaking in New Technologies,” in Goodman, P., & Sproull, L., eds., Technology and Organizations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Google Scholar