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This paper suggests that a corporate-environmental food regime is emerging as part of a larger restructuring of capitalism. Like past food regimes, it reflects specific social and political compromises, which I interpret through the social movement concept of interpretive frames. The diasporic-colonial food regime of 1870–1914 grew up in response to working class movements in Europe, and created a historically unprecedent class of commercial family farmers. When world markets collapsed, those farmers entered into new alliances, including one that led to the mercantile-industrial food regime of 1947–1973. Lineaments of a new food regime based on quality audited supply chains seems to be emerging in the space opened by impasse in international negotiations over food standards. Led by food retailers, agrofood corporations are selectively appropriating demands of environmental, food safety, animal welfare, fair trade, and other social movements that arose in the interstices of the second food regime. If it consolidates, the new food regime promises to shift the historical balance between public and private regulation, and to widen the gap between privileged and poor consumers as it deepens commodification and marginalizes existing peasants. Social movements are already regrouping and consolidation of the regime remains uncertain.

We identify the key social and political forces that brought about the Self Managed Attendant Service Direct Funding Pilot (SMAS-DFP). Attendant Services are services for people with physical disabilities (PWD) to assist with daily activities. Direct Funding means that individuals obtain funds through direct funding mechanisms and/or through third parties. Self-direction refers to consumers who know their attendant service needs and can instruct workers to meet these needs. Self-management refers to (PWD) who are employers under the law and are legally responsible for hiring, training, scheduling and paying their attendants. Our analysis of the success of the SMAS-DFP is based on pre-conditions and facilitating elements. The pre-conditions were the: (1) existence of social movements; (2) precedents to direct funding programs; (3) prior experience with the governance of attendant services; and (4) government health reform. Five elements facilitated the SMASD-FP: (1) a clear vision by the community; (2) a core group of leaders; (3) supporters of the SMAS-DFP came from inside and outside of the community; and (4) supporters provided key resources to be used and to deal with barriers. PWD successfully led the pilot (1994–1997) and continue to administer the expanded government program (began 1998).

Purpose – This chapter briefly outlines the history of childbirth in the United States and describes the influence of the natural birth movement and consumer demand in shaping the contemporary advertising of mainstream maternity services.

Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative content analysis of 59 hospital websites was undertaken in order to understand how hospitals depict childbirth in their online advertising.

Findings – Our findings illustrate how contemporary medical institutions idealize childbirth through their depictions of its physical and social dimensions. Although hospital advertising has adopted some of the rhetoric of the natural birth movement in describing the social and symbolic dimensions of the childbirth experience, this rhetoric is shown to stand in tension to the highly rationalized and bureaucratic institutional nature of hospitals. These tensions are most apparent in advertised descriptions of the physical environment of maternity centers and in the attempt to depict hospitalized birth as an opportunity for the individual empowerment of women.

Research limitations/implications – This research is limited to an analysis of how providers advertise their services and does not provide data on whether practices actually reflect the rhetoric of the ideal birth. Future research should consider the fit between rhetoric and reality in hospital maternity practices in order to better understand the social structural constraints of delivering these services in a hospital maternity center.

Originality/value – This chapter highlights the importance of consumer demand for how maternity services are portrayed and identifies key tensions between an idealized image of birth and the rational, bureaucratic demands of modern medical institutions.

The goal in this research is to offer a new interpretation of activism by focusing not on the various ideologies but on the order of worth that coordinates activism.

Ethnographic approaches of participant observation and nondirective interviewing were the methods used in this study.

Drawing on the order models (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991), the authors introduce the existence of an “activist order.” This order is composed of rules that coordinate activists’ practices. Activists draw on this “activist order” to justify their practices but also to criticize other orders such as the market order.

This “activist order” serves as the structure underpinning both activists’ institutional frameworks (such as CSA and LETS) and their actions (e.g., antiadvertising campaigns). This paper also has implications for our understanding of the relationship between the Marketplace and consumer movements. The authors demonstrate that people navigate between different order of worth, from the market order to the “activist order” and vice versa.

Purpose – This study identifies the multiple contributions of the Salvadoran women's movement in sustaining mass mobilization under the threat of public health care privatization.

Methodology/approach – A case study methodological approach shows how the emergence of an autonomous women's movement in El Salvador in the late 1980s and early 1990s “spilled over” (Meyer & Whittier, 1994) to assist in the maintenance of the health care campaigns in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Findings – We observed three arenas in which the women's movement played pivotal roles in the anti-health care privatization struggle: (1) women-based organizations; (2) leadership positions within larger coalitions brokering the participation of diverse social sectors; and (3) key advocacy roles inside the state. These three contributions of the women's movement increased the overall level of mobilization and success against health care privatization.

Research limitations – The study centered on one major group of health care consumers. The role of other civic organizations should be examined in future research.

Originality/value of chapter – The study demonstrates that in the era of globalization, women's movements form a critical part of the social movement sector facilitating the construction of large coalitions protecting consumers from neoliberal restructuring in areas such as public health care.

Purpose – This chapter on global civil society provides a definition of global civil society, and also provides a historical and theoretical overview of social movements. This chapter also presents a taxonomy of non-state actors and demonstrates at the theoretical level that actions and initiatives by non-state actors since the 1990s’ globalisation. In this chapter, the concept of civil society is presented as a form of globalisation from below, and its role in the participatory governance of societal processes implies forms of soft regulation and moral authority which transcend the role of states as enforcers.Design/methodology/approach – This chapter is based on an extensive literature review.Findings – Actions and initiatives by non-state actors in the current age of globalisation have been increasing. This increase has become more evident with the more stringent traceability of processes associated with the development of information and communication technologies (ICT), and private forms of organisation networking at the local and transnational level. This has re-defined geographical boundaries, creating proximity between individuals which goes beyond physical constraints, and it has extended definitions of communities to multiple levels of identification and convergence, but also divergence.The concept of civil society and its role in the participatory governance of societal processes implies forms of soft regulation and moral authority which transcend the role of states as enforcers. The idea of civil society opens a space for non-traditional actors to actively participate and engage in the political processes of change in society, for the betterment of marginalised groups, the environment or social justice in general. The diversity of roles that single individuals have in society allows them to participate from different angles.Although the concept of civil society has limitations due to its breadth, manifestations of a global civil society can be understood as forms of globalisation that occur outside traditional institutional settings.Originality/value of chapter – This chapter provides a general overview on civil society, and its relevance for analysing contexts of international business, and MNES's relations with community and non-governmental groups. Within this chapter, it is also conceptually describe how multinationals as non-state actors have increasingly playing a role in providing welfare.

Is the aim of the university to prepare citizens to contribute to civic and social life as well as to travel flexibly and successfully through a rapidly changing work world? Or is the purpose of higher education more narrowly to advance students’ individual economic interests as they understand them? Should we think of students as citizens or consumers? Many analysts argue that, in recent years, the notion that higher education should serve to advance students’ individual economic position has increasingly taken prominence over broader notions of the purpose of American higher education. In this paper, we examine whether and to what extent a shift from considering students-as-citizens to students-as-consumers has occurred in US higher education. We provide a longitudinal analysis of two separate and theoretically distinct discourse communities (Berg, 2003): higher education trustees and leaders of and advocates for liberal arts education. Our data suggest a highly unsettled field in which commercial discourse as measured by the student-as-consumer code has surely entered the US higher education lexicon, but this code is not uncontested and the more traditional citizenship code remains significant and viable.

Health care systems all over the world are undergoing rapid and profound transformations. These changes are the result of a broad array of economic and social trends including neo-liberal economic policies that are contributing to the trend toward privatization, the commodification of health services and products, institutional restructuring (e.g., managed care) to contain costs in the context of technological advances, globalization and demographic changes such as population aging in post-industrial societies. Questions about the accessibility and quality of health care delivery in the face of persistent health disparities, growing numbers of medical errors, and new and uncertain risks posed by emerging infectious diseases, some of them drug-resistant, have also contributed to rethinking about health policy.