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Despite the legacies of many talented artists with disabilities, art programs for people with disabilities are consistently framed as important because of their “therapeutic” value. Such framing is a well-established way for organizations to garner support from publics drawn to images of disabled people as tragic victims and such programs as heroic in offering help. Some non-profit art programs, however, resist this narrative.

Data come from the organizational web-site of a community-based non-profit disability centered arts education organization that takes active steps to challenge traditional tragedy narratives. Data show how the organizational narrative does this by affirming the value of disabled artists and by casting as villains the stigma, discrimination, and misinformation surrounding people with disabilities.

While this organization constructs a narrative that portrays society and art spaces as victims in that they miss out on the contributions to art that people with disabilities can produce, the organization nonetheless must also offer to community stakeholders and potential donors reasons for its existence.

This examination highlights the ways in which this organization navigates the competing demands of fund raising and disability advocacy by constructing organizational narratives that affirm people with disabilities while still articulating the value of the organization to the wider community. This suggests the complex work narratives do and the tensions that can arise when narratives serve multiple purposes for multiple audiences.

Purpose: To examine empirical patterns of participation of allied groups in disability protests from 1970 to 2016 in the United States.

Methods/approach: Uses event history to analyze 1,268 cases of disability protests quantitatively. Internal and external allied groups and types of individual protestors are analyzed over the entire period and by decade.

Findings: Multiple impairment, single issue organizations were a more common type of “internal” ally than were either single impairment, multiple issue organizations or multiple impairment, multiple issue (truly cross-disability) organizations. External ally groups with a wide range of concerns were less common than internal ally groups but were most represented during the 1990s. Veterans groups were the most common type of external ally, while parents were the most common type of individual allies.

Implications/values: Two topics need more attention: How ally participation in disability protests compares to that in protests in other social movements, and what types of changes over time emerge. Explanations relating to movement trajectories and other social movement characteristics are presented, and the need for a more nuanced conceptualization of protest allies is discussed.

Purpose: Artists with disabilities use their bodies and minds to create art. Yet, the prevailing cultural narrative that art is “therapeutic” for people with disabilities shifts attention from their creative accomplishments to their disabilities. Some ally organizations attempt to challenge the narrative that art is merely therapy for people with disabilities. However, drawing on narratives of “helping” people with disabilities attracts funding. This chapter examines how organizations navigate empowering allies while still maintaining funding.

Methods/Approach: This chapter uses narrative analysis of material accessed through a nonprofit arts-based disability ally organization's website to address two research questions: 1. How do ally organizations both draw on and resist cultural narratives of disability in order to garner public support?; and 2. How do personal narratives of disabled artists associated with ally organizations support and/or resist organizational and cultural narratives about the connection between disability and art?

Findings: The organization uses narratives to address important and sometimes conflicting goals. Personal narratives from artists with disabilities that are available through the website tell a range of stories about art and disability. The organization draws on these heterogeneous stories to position itself as an ally. By including such personal narratives on its website, the organization challenges the cultural narrative that the art produced by disabled artists is merely therapeutic.

Implication/Value: Much of the work on allyship focuses on how individuals can be allies. Examining ways in which organizations frame themselves as allies can help us to more fully understand allyship on multiple levels of social life.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the unique and the complementary aspects of disability inclusion and diversity strategies and to offer insight for organizations to integrate disability within diversity frameworks.

The research team conducted semi-structured interviews with diversity and inclusion “champions” from large businesses to learn about policies, practices and processes for fostering disability inclusion. The businesses have all received national recognition for supporting employees with disabilities.

Interviewees described strategies to build, sustain and grow disability inclusion by framing disability similarly to other diversity categories. The champions suggested practices to improve disability inclusion initiatives within their organizations.

There is limited information on what organizations are doing to support disability inclusion in the workplace. This study builds on the existing literature and responds to calls for case information from business personnel to gather data about common and effective practices.

Despite increased attention towards workplace disability in global and local development agenda, mainstream inclusion of persons with disability continues to be a challenge for most organizations. This paper aims to explore how organizations can be facilitated for adapting to the need and responsibility for change, towards evolving into disability inclusive workplaces.

This paper uses an inter-domain approach by linking organization change and development models to Indian indigenous disability management literature.

This review indicates that in comparison with the other dimensions of diversity, disability brings unique challenges that need a differentiated management approach. Further, it finds a strong base for organizations to approach disability management as a strategic and transformative change initiative, aligning with some of the proven change and organization development (OD) interventions.

This paper draws implications for disability management and highlights the need for a practice perspective towards disability management and OD.

This paper provides an integrated view of critical factors influencing workplace disability management and OD.

This study frames the international disability movement – NGOs, foreign donors, and transnational networks focused on promoting the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities – as an organizational environment. As the movement expands into the Global South, it actively pressures local grassroots associations to adopt a new organizational model in order to become membership-based advocacy organizations. Many groups, however, are embedded in local civic environments that expect them to act as self-help and social support organizations. As such, grassroots associations are caught between two organizational environments, each promoting different models and practices.

This analysis draws upon 18 months of participant observation and 69 interviews gathered from a local coalition of seven grassroots disability associations in Nicaragua. This ethnographic approach is combined with sociological institutionalism, an analysis that emphasizes the way organizations conform to organizational models that spread across a field.

The local associations responded in a variety of ways to the advocacy model promoted by the international movement. Organizations either conformed, resisted, or developed hybrid organizational models on the basis of internal characteristics that determined how they straddled the two organizational environments.

This paper highlights the way international models may be ineffective in local environments that have civic traditions and lower levels of governmental capacity than found in the West. Some disability associations, however, will creatively combine local and international models to create new initiatives that make a positive impact in the lives of persons with disabilities at the grassroots.

In this chapter, we explore the role of disability-based employee resource groups (ERG) in implementing large organizations' disability inclusion strategies and how pandemic responses shaped the workplace treatment and inclusion of disabled employees.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with disability-based ERG members and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) professionals in large corporate settings. Then, we analyzed how pandemic-induced changes in the workplace impacted disability inclusion efforts and experiences of disabled employees.

Results from our study revealed that workplace disability inclusion responsibilities shifted to disability-based ERGs during the onset of the pandemic. Participants detailed how organizational disability inclusion practices and policies expanded through increased awareness among some employee bases and were de-prioritized to the point of erasure in other situations. Within the context of the pandemic, members of disability-based ERGs played an integral part in both enhancing visibility of disability and responding to instances of ableism in their respective organizations.

Findings provide context as to how shifting organizational contexts, such as pandemic related workplace policies, becomes disabling, and in turn illustrate the fluid nature of disability. By framing disability as an evolving (fluid) identity category and prioritizing the awareness of disabled perspectives, organizations can better support disabled employees in their future, overarching DEI strategies and approaches to workplace inclusion post-pandemic.

The purpose is to firstly, provide an example of how voices of people with various disabilities (motor, visual, hearing, and neuropsychiatric impairments) can be listened to and involved in the initial phases of a co-design process (Discover, Define). Secondly, to present the outcome of the joint explorations as design opportunities pointing out directions for future development of crisis communication technologies supporting people with disabilities in building crisis preparedness. The study was conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The study assumes a design research approach including a literature review, focus group interviews, a national online survey and collaborative (co-)design workshops involving crisis communicators and representatives of disability organisations in Sweden. The research- and design process was organised in line with the Double Diamond design process model consisting of the four phases: Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver, whereof the two first phases are addressed in this paper.

The analysis of the survey data resulted in a series of challenges, which were presented to and evaluated by crisis communicators and representatives from the disability organisations at the workshops. Seven crisis communication challenges were identified, for example, the lack of understanding and knowledge of needs, conditions and what it means to build crisis preparedness for people with disabilities, the lack of and/or inability to develop digital competencies and the lack of social crisis preparedness. The challenges were translated into design opportunities to be used in the next step of the co-design process (Develop, Deliver).

This research paper offers both a conceptual approach and empirical perspectives of design opportunities in crisis communication. To translate identified challenges into design opportunities starting with a “How Might We”, creates conditions for both researchers, designers and people with disabilities to jointly turn something complex, such as a crisis communication challenge, into something concrete to act upon. That is, their joint explorations do not stop by “knowing”, but also enable them to in the next step take action by developing potential solutions for crisis communication technologies for facing these challenges.

Despite several concerted efforts and directives, Indian organizations have a long road to travel with respect to the inclusion of persons with disabilities in the workforce. Disability taking different forms often impacts organizational decisions on employment and inclusion of persons with disabilities. Acknowledging the role of employers in improving their employment prospects, the purpose of this paper is to examine key factors that direct the decisions regarding targeted recruitment of persons with various types of disabilities.

The exploratory study is based on thematic analysis of senior executives' accounts to examine the factors that direct their decisions pertaining to employment of persons with varied types of disabilities.

Findings highlight organizational determinants that enable/disable employment of persons with varied types of disabilities. The organizational determinants reported are: knowledge about type of disability; work characteristics; accommodations based on type of disability; accessibility of physical infrastructure and external pressures; whereas, persons with orthopedic, vision, hearing and intellectual disabilities are represented in the employee base.

The present study contributes to employer perspectives on workplace disability inclusion toward understanding the nuances of organizational dynamics and human perceptions. Future studies could explore perspectives of other key stakeholders and the conditions under which organizational determinants are perceived as enabling or disabling.

The present study highlights how disability type influences leaders' views on recruitment of persons with disabilities, in an under-researched study context of Indian organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate research on human resource systems with work on disability management practices to outline how multinationals across India and Germany are engaged in efforts to increase workplace inclusion of persons with a disability.

Semi-structured interviews with respondents from multinational corporations in India and Germany were conducted, transcribed, and analyzed.

Employers followed three guiding principles (i.e. beliefs): importance of harnessing diversity, encouraging multi-stakeholder engagement internally, and engaging with the external ecosystem to build internal human resource capabilities. Respondents further noted two interdependent and mutually constitutive programs that covered the life cycle of the employee: job flexibility provisions and integration programs. Country-specific differences existed in terms of perceived external stakeholder support and availability of talent.

The results complement prior research with respect to the importance of organizational factors for the inclusion of persons with a disability and also extend prior research by shedding light on the role of the national context in such inclusion endeavors.

Findings indicate that disability-inclusion principles may be universal, but their operationalization is region specific. Global organizations must be aware of these differences to design effective inclusion programs.

The study helps in designing and evaluating appropriate inclusion initiatives for persons with disabilities, an important yet underutilized group of potential employees in both India and Germany.

This is the first study to investigate country-specific commonalities and differences in fostering workplace inclusion of persons with disabilities in India and Germany.