Organizing the Blind ― The Case of Once in Spain

This book is a case study which narrates the history of the National Organization of the Spanish Blind (ONCE), established in 1937 during the Civil War. Contrary to other affluent countries where most blind people live on welfare benefits, the Spanish blind enjoy full employment. Furthermore, the average income of the Spanish blind is higher than that of the sighted. Why is this so? Why the blind, and not the deaf mute, or any other group of disabled people? This book shows that ONCE answers those questions.

The book explains its origins, the shifting strategies that the organization has pursued to adapt to an ever-changing environment, its original goals and the way they have mutated and been interpreted, its conflicting relationship with an authoritarian regime, its struggle to find its place in a democratic regime, and its relations with other groups of disabled people. An historical narrative, the book lies at the intersection between disability and organization studies, history and sociology.

It will be of interest to all scholars of disability studies, the sociology of work, the history of medicine and contemporary Spanish history.

Roberto Garvia is Professor of Sociology at the University Carlos III of Madrid. His research has focused on the sociology of organizations, comparative historical sociology, economic sociology, and sociolinguistics. He has been Prince of Asturias Visiting Professor at Georgetown University (2008-2010), where he taught post graduate seminars on the sociology of organizations, sociolinguistics, and historical memory. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard (as a Fulbright post-doc), Yale, the Max-Planck Institute at Cologne, and Mozarteum UniversitA?t (Salzburg). He has published in the American Journal of Sociology, European Sociological Review Work, Employment and Society, Journal of European Public Policy, Language Problems and Language Planning, and the European Journal of Language Policy among other journals. In 2007 he was awarded the Roger Gould Prize for the best article published in the American Journal of Sociology that year. His most recent book Esperanto and Its Rivals (Penn University Press), is forthcoming March 2015.