Nothing about us without us becoming us: Processes of institutional change and identity formation in disabled peoples' self-organization

This project is a comparative organizational ethnography conducted in sociology dealing with the formation of organizational identity and with processes of institutional change in two selected Disabled Peoples? Organizations in North-America and Europe th roughout the processes of their establishment. The project analyzes the genesis of Regional Development Offices of Disabled Peoples' International (DPI), which is an international non-governmental organization and grassroots, cross-disability network with member organizations in over 110 countries. The time period covered ranges from 1981, the year of the establishment of DPI as part of the preparations for the UN-Decade of Persons with Disabilities (1983-1992), to the present. The research is being condu cted at the intersections of Sociology of Organizations, Disability Studies and Social Movement Theory within the Social Sciences, aiming at bridging particular research accounts from those academic fields within the Nordic countries of Europe and the USA . The project is based on process data from different kinds of sources: semi-structured interviews with persons involved in the development of DPI units; archival data from the DPI Regional Development Offices; archived correspondence by administration to stakeholders during the genesis of the network; and non-participant observation. Method for data interpretation is in-depth content analysis. Using the neo-institutional 'world culture' approach from sociology and the issue of the intricate interaction o f global processes with local agency as theoretical starting points, the project aims - and herein lays the anticipated application potential of the project findings - at contributing a conceptualization of the theoretical paradoxon of this 'embedded agen cy'. Both with its ethnographic approach and its use of concepts from 'Scandinavian Institutionalism', it suggests a way to complement 'world culture' theory for the sake of adequately capturing this problematique.