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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does law change society? To gain new leverage on this long-standing question, this article draws on two lines of research that often ignore each other: political science research on the mobilization of law, and sociological research on the diffusion of organizational practices. Our insights stem from six case studies of diverse organizations' responses to the accommodation provisions in the Americans with Disabilities Act and related state laws. We found that different modes of exposure to the law combined with organizational attributes to produce distinct “rights practices”—styles of standard operating procedures and informal routines that reflect the understanding of legal requirements within an organization. The diversity of the organizational responses challenges simple dichotomies between compliance/noncompliance, change through deterrence/change through norms, and mobilization/nonmobilization, and it underscores the importance of combining political science and sociological perspectives on law and social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]