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This chapter contributes to the discourse of difference by problematizing the sameness/difference trope through the lens of the exceptional. It explores the nature of being exceptional with an expectation that its nature is contingent and variable. At the heart of understanding what constitutes exceptional is its implicit comparison with the average. While exceptional is defined to include both individuals who achieve in extraordinary ways and individuals with a physical or mental impairment, the two definitions are consonant in that both describe individuals who deviate from expected norms. Relying on the insights from pragmatism, this chapter considers community habits exceptional individuals must confront in forming their choices. In this way, it further adheres to the lessons from pragmatism for norm change. The strategies individuals use to alter the effects of being perceived as exceptional contribute to the overall discourse in equality and equal protection and potentially constitute the individual action that formulates change. It examines some approaches to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) derived from civil rights and from economic perspectives and the relevant matrix of choices available to the exceptional to understand the potential for productive change. With this foreground, it examines the choice of exceptional individuals to cover or convey matters of their identity. This chapter pays particular attention to these choices in seeking accommodations under the ADA. Ultimately, this study strives to participate in the conversation seeking to maximize human potential.

The impetus was to assess pluses and minuses of a national mandate with specific paratransit guidelines per “the” 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) model. Two European countries were chosen to explore other ways to serve persons with disabilities, not driven by ADA.

This research compared mandates in each area (via a tri-lingual survey) both as related to ADA’s most common practices and the European model of “Persons with Reduced Mobility” (PMRs). After data collection, analysis compared and contrasted ADA and PMR schemes.

Even in California, differences were found among survey sites; for instance, the organization type and mix of services varied greatly, despite a national framework. In Europe, there were more similar approaches among regions where, without a national framework, there was flexible, regional decision-making. In Europe, the national focus is on more regular transit accessibility, maximizing transit use rather than special services.

Five recommendations resulted and apply most directly to California and equally for agencies with or without ADA. The strengths of the PMR approach are transferable to California and the trend among a few California partners to go beyond ADA, while only a local option, reinforces the strength of the PMR solution.

How to improve service and financial performance and enlarge the private sector role are put forward. Existing methods, whether Federal or California-driven, need revisiting to achieve true benefits of coordination.

Beginning with the assumption that antidumping laws are used to address adverse shocks in import-competing industries, this chapter provides an explanation for the infrequent utilization of the Dispute Settlement Understanding under the Antidumping Agreement. It does so with a very simple model that represents the shock by a one-dimensional random variable. This is found on an interpretation of the ADA as a de facto escape clause. ADA signatories are homogeneous, which enables the representation of the expected frequency of shocks over each member's import-competing sectors by the binomial distribution with identical parameters. The explanation for the infrequency of utilization of the DSU invokes a repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma with two levels of cooperation in an infinite horizon game. The high level is free trade in all sectors. The low level is the application of ADA duties in sectors incurring the shock in a manner that is consistent with the ADA. The high level of cooperation in all sectors in every period is not sustainable for any degree of patience. A convex combination of the high and low levels of cooperation is sustainable for some degrees of patience under the folk theorem. However, this combination of cooperation is attainable only with the support of the DSU. The extent of importance of the DSU depends on the completeness of information with which signatories are endowed. With complete information, dispute resolution does not occur in equilibrium. However, its presence supports cooperation through its mandate to sanction retaliation. If filing were prohibitively costly, disputes would never arise, and cooperation would be expected to evaporate. In the instance of incomplete information with costless filing, disputes would occur in equilibrium whenever an AD action was taken. In the most realistic circumstance, that of incomplete information and nonprohibitive filing costs, disputes would arise only when the number of AD actions exceeded their (common) expectation. This provides a conceptual explanation for the observations of Tarullo (2002) and Bown (2005) that ADA disputes are infrequent.

The purpose of this study is to analyze public perceptions of disability and gain insight into the types of health conditions nondisabled people believe should be protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Understanding how the public interprets the ADA could offer perspective on which disabilities are viewed as legitimate and which are not. Data were gathered from a convenience sample of members from local community groups and college classrooms in a metropolitan university setting. Our analyses evaluate the clustering of health condition types due to similar traits and identify which attributes of the health conditions generate this clustering. Results from a series of quantitative and qualitative analyses (e.g., hierarchical cluster analysis, frequency analysis, discourse analysis, etc.) indicate nondisabled respondents perceive physical and cognitive health conditions that are visible, static, and externally acquired as legitimate disabilities that should be protected by the ADA.

This paper examines evidence of “ritual conformity” with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), with a focus upon the employment of individuals with mental disabilities or illnesses. We view the ADA as an important “rational myth” in the institutional environment of American business which enunciates a new set of legal and normative standards for employment of individuals many believe to be unemployable. In conforming to the mandates of the ADA, businesses may display coercive isomorphism; hiring those with mental disabilities because they fear the coercive effects of the law. Evidence of coercive isomorphism is consistent with a more materialist/instrumental view of the relationship between legal mandates and organizations. However, drawing from the law and society tradition, we articulate a culturalist/constructionist alternative which posits that because the law is often ambiguous, contested and symbolic, organizational decision makers are responsive to normative appeals and cognitive framings. Ritual conformity may then take the form of normative isomorphism. Important to either form of institutional isomorphism for compliance) are the beliefs employers hold about the employability of those with mental disabilities. Consequently, we argue that the practical meaning of the ADA depends on the ways in which it is interpreted and enacted by the organizations that it supposedly governs. To capture this enactment process in mid-stream, we report early empirical evidence on the organizational response of a random sample of businesses to the ADA requirements governing the hiring of persons with mental disabilities. Extensive telephone interviews were completed with 117 employers (representing a 61.6% response rate) in one urban SMSA with a low unemployment rate. The majority of the employers surveyed had received information about the ADA, and most had a reasonably good understanding of the law. Over a third of the employers (37.3%) had indeed hired an individual with a mental disability since the ADA went into effect in 1992, and a third (33.3%) made special recruiting efforts to hire individuals with a mental disability. Receiving information about the ADA was significantly related to such proactive policies; larger companies were also more likely to exhibit compliance to the ADA by hiring, or having specific policies for the recruitment of individuals with mental disabilities. In examining the sources of such ritual conformity to the ADA, we found evidence of both coercive and normative isomorphism, and that ritual conformity was also associated with beliefs about the abilities of those with mental illnesses. Employers who were not in compliance with the ADA were more likely to be uncomfortable with potential employees with a previous mental hospitalization or employees taking anti-psychotic medication. Furthermore, we found important differences between those organizations which expressed coercive rationales for compliance and those which expressed normative rationales; specifically employers expressing normative isomorphism were more likely to have hired individuals with mental disabilities prior to the ADA and to exhibit ritual conformity to the ADA. Businesses expressing coercive rationales for compliance were more likely to hold stigmatizing attitudes and less likely to exhibit ritual conformity to the ADA. Our data suggest a potential synthesis between material and cultural models of law whereby early compliers with a new law are more likely to exhibit normative rationales and to respond more directly to the normative messages of the law, or else implement policies they would have otherwise adopted on their own. Over time, normatively driven proaction will foster mimetic isomorphism, and resistant firms (or those holding ideological constructions which run counter to the normative mandates of the law) will move toward a profit-maximizing mixture of compliance and evasion; complying largely because of the coercive threat of the law.

This chapter explores the relationship between disability identity, civil rights, and the law. Twenty-five years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the question remains why disability rights legislation does not go far enough toward addressing access, stigma, and discrimination issues. People with disabilities have found empowerment from disability rights laws, but these laws are also restrictive because they define people in relation to medical aspects of their disabilities and narrowly define society’s obligation for inclusion. The successes and failures of disability rights laws are an important contribution to the study of conceptions of difference.

The ADA provides its own definition of disability. The term is defined as: a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities of such individual; a record of such an impairment; or being regarded as having such an impairment. The phrase physical or mental impairment means: (i) Any physiological disorder or condition, cosmetic disfiguration, or anatomical loss affecting one or more of the following body systems: neurological; musculoskeletal; special sense organs; respiratory, including speech organs; cardiovascular; reproductive; digestive; genitourinary; hemic and lymphatic; skin; and endocrine; and (ii) Any mental or psychological disorder such as mental retardation, organic brain syndrome, emotional or metal illness, and specific learning disabilities.…The phrase major life activities means functions such as caring for one’s self, performing manual tasks, walking, seeing, hearing, speaking, breathing, learning, and working (EEOC & U.S. Department of Justice, 1991, pp. 16–18 as cited in Hishinuma & Fremstad, 1997).Apparently, persons identified with specific learning disabilities are covered under the ADA (Hishinuma & Fremstad, 1997). Grant and Grant (2002) affirmed that learning disabilities have been viewed as a perplexing category of exceptionality. Learning disabilities are marked in persons by a discrepancy between intellectual ability and actual school achievement. There are many definitions for the term learning disability. In fact, lack of commonality for defining the term has been cited as the reason for a vast difference in agreement of prevalence (Kirk et al., 2003). As Stanovich (1989) stated, “the decision to base the definitions of a reading disability on a discrepancy with measured IQ is…nothing short of astounding. Certainly, one would be hard pressed to find a concept more controversial than intelligence in all psychology” (p. 487). Even though there is a lack of common definition for learning disability, it is agreed upon that students with learning disabilities comprise the largest proportion of students receiving special education services (Kirk et al., 2003). The Federal Register (1999) has established criteria and non-criteria for identification of students with a specific learning disability. The criteria include: (a) presence of academic difficulties; (b) perceptual disabilities; (c) brain injury; (d) minimal brain dysfunction; (e) dyslexia; and (f) developmental aphasia. The non-criteria include: (a) academic problems due to visual, hearing, or motor disability; (b) mental retardation; (c) emotional disturbance; and (d) environmental, cultural, or economic disadvantage (Murdick et al., 2002).

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibit schools from discriminating against otherwise qualified individuals with disabilities because of their impairments. The major difference between the two statutes is that the former applies only to recipients of federal funds, whereas the latter extends protections to those in the private sector. Otherwise qualified individuals with disabilities are those who have physical or mental impairments, which substantially limit one or more of their major life activities, a record of such impairments, or are regarded as having such impairments but who are capable of meeting all of a program's requirements in spite of their disabilities. In this chapter, the authors review the statutes' various requirements as they apply to both students and employees in the school setting. Specifically, using numerous court cases as examples, the chapter outlines the reasonable accommodations schools must provide to extend the benefits of their programs to individuals with disabilities in terms of providing services or employment. Furthermore, the chapter discusses the limitations on the types of accommodations schools must provide when doing so would place an excessive financial or administrative burden on the school board.

Understanding how leaders make foreign policy and national security decisions is of paramount importance for both the policy community and academia. It is our assertion that decisions in these domains can be explained best by tracing the cognitive process leaders go through in formulating and arriving at their decisions, using the applied decision analysis (ADA) method.

Consequently, this chapter introduces readers to Applied Decision Analysis (also see Mintz, 2005; Mintz & DeRouen, 2010), which is utilized throughout the chapters comprising this volume. We describe the methodological and theoretical implications of the research findings presented in this edited volume. Specifically, the range of leaders analyzed in this volume using ADA (namely, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Khaled Mashal, Mao Zedong, and Saddam Hussein) substantiates this method’s capacity to provide robust analysis of decisions made by leaders from diverse nations and cultures. We conclude this introduction by providing a brief summary of the chapters that are included in this volume.

This volume is the second of two volumes analyzing decision-making, policy, and strategy of 12 prominent political leaders from the East and West through the lens of ADA. The chapters comprising both volumes seek to uncover how political leaders make decisions: their decision calculus and the motives and factors affecting their crafting of foreign as well as national security policies. The concluding chapter outlines the empirical and analytic contributions of ADA and poliheuristic theory to analysis that should be undertaken in national security and foreign policy affairs. Specifically, the chapter underscores ADA’s policy relevance and ramifications vis-à-vis intelligence analysis, international security analysis, as well as cross-cultural decision-making studies of rivals and allies.

This chapter examines how personal testimonies at four town hall listening sessions on the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA) proposed regulations reflect and affect the institutional narrative of “who counts” as disabled, and “what counts” as a reasonable accommodation in the United States.

I use the full transcripts of four town hall meetings to analyze the stories told.

Despite changes to public policy intended to broaden the meaning and scope of “disability,” narrative analysis demonstrates how difficult it is to change the fixed and narrow institutionalized beliefs about who counts as “really disabled” and therefore in “real need” of accommodations.

This study suggests a theoretical framework for conceptualizing disability; highlights the importance of narratives in public policy; and suggests the need for more complex understandings of what constitutes reasonable accommodation of disability in the workplace. The study illustrates the value of a narrative approach to understanding disability policy and policymaking more generally.