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A technological community framework can be used to explain and manage new medical technologies. It describes emergence, commercialization, and standardization of an innovation or technology within the context of its whole network (or community) of stakeholders. This framework is used to illustrate the emergence, commercialization, and standardization of a relatively new medical technology – umbilical cord blood (UCB) banking. Umbilical cord blood may prove to be a source of stem cells for bone marrow transplant that is safer, more accessible, and less expensive than current sources of stem cells. The technological community framework can signal potential problems as the technology emerges, and help healthcare delivery systems and providers to effectively assess and manage the technology. The framework can also be applied to other medical technologies and innovations.

This paper aims to examine emotional labour in the work of frontline staff (FLS) of the Canadian Blood Services' Cord Blood Bank (CBB), contributes to understandings of emotional labour by allied healthcare workers and suggests implications for healthcare managers.

Qualitative interviews with 15 FLS were conducted and analyzed as part of a process evaluation of donor recruitment and cord blood collection in Canada.

Emotional labour with donors and hospital staff emerged as a vital component of FLS' donor recruitment and cord blood collection work. Emotional labour was performed with donors to contribute to a positive birthing experience, facilitate communication and provide support. Emotional labour was performed with hospital staff to gain acceptance and build relationships, enlist support and navigate hierarchies of authority.

The results indicate that FLS perform emotional labour with women to provide donor care and with hospital staff to facilitate organizational conditions. The findings are based on FLS' accounts of their work and would be enhanced by research that examines the perspectives of donors and hospital staff.

Attention should be paid to organizational conditions that induce the performance of emotional labour and may add to FLS workload. Formal reciprocal arrangements between FLS and hospital staff may reduce the responsibility on FLS and enable them to focus on recruitment and collections.

This paper addresses a gap in the healthcare management literature by identifying the emotional labour of allied healthcare workers. It also contributes to the cord blood banking literature by providing empirically grounded analysis of frontline collection staff.

Recently, researchers have explored the medical applications of umbilical cord blood (UCB) to treat certain types of cancer and other disorders. UCB is a hematopoietic tissue that contains a motherlode of cells, and creates the blood cells that carry oxygen, fight infections, and form clots at the sites of injuries. The use of UCB involves fewer ethical and legal problems than other stem cell technology. UCB banking not only involves the creation of a UCB storage bank, but is also a serial process that includes collecting UCB, extracting stem cells from UCB, storing these stem cells in liquid nitrogen at –385°F, and defrosting them if required by their owner. UCB banking service is thus a form of biological insurance, where the reward is an increased chance of good health rather than monetary compensation. Many people have begun to consider the need for public and private UCB banks to preserve cord blood donations. The main purpose of this research is to develop the UCB consumers’ behavior based on the consumer buying behavior model. It clarifies the opinions of Taiwan people about UCB banking, identifies the main factors motivating people to store UCB, and provides the marketing strategies for the UCB banking service.

Marketing.

This case is suitable for MBA/MS courses for students of services marketing; courses such as sustainable development of business and integrated marketing communications.

Cordlife Limited entered the Indian market for cord blood banking in 2006 and by 2011 held third place in market share. However, the management of Cordlife had identified a major problem as a lack of awareness of the potential of cord blood banking among the Indian middle class, and the lack of a proper infrastructure for transportation of biological packages. Cordlife undertook several marketing initiatives to spread awareness. Marketing such a sophisticated service like cord blood banking called for heavy investments. The case provides an opportunity to closely examine various marketing activities in detail and understand how problems associated with intangible services can be managed. In addition to marketing of services the case highlights the existence of several gaps in designing a delivery in a service. The scope of the case can also be extended to the concept of service pricing and also integrated services marketing communications.

The case is designed for class discussions and in understanding the following concepts: the service gaps model; service pricing; and integrated service marketing communications.

Teaching notes are available. Consult your librarian for access.

The present paper is an attempt to explore the emerging stem cell innovation system in India. It is contended that the social capital in terms of linkages of various sorts can no longer be ignored to strengthen the innovation system and that the coevolution of technology and institutions is yet to emerge. It seems that given the nature of complex technologies involved, there is a greater need felt for R&D and training collaboration and hence linkages of various types are taking place. For shaping futures for a balanced growth of this sector, the institutions in India will have to be geared towards greater coordination, promotion of greater knowledge flows at national as well international levels. This paper also analyses the strengths and barriers in the development of rapidly growing stem cell research in India along with future challenges.

Theories of prosumption offer social marketers an opportunity to improve market segmentation strategies and health campaigns by improving understanding of audiences. The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework to understand how women produce and consume ideologies of pregnancy.

A total of 19 pregnant women ages 24‐38 years completed qualitative, in‐depth interviews. Data analysis included a grounded theory approach and constant‐comparative method using open and axial coding to reduce the data and identify themes across the data.

This study addressed prosumption in three meaning‐making sites: the physiological basis of pregnancy; perceptions of medicine and the biomedical model during pregnancy; and perceptions of media surrounding pregnancy.

This study applied prosumption theory in a new social context: pregnant women. Findings articulate the importance of gender and the necessity of incorporating women's lived experiences into theories of prosumption.

Social marketers benefit from improved understandings of pregnant women's body identity, perceptions, and opportunities for empowerment and agency in reproductive health. The proposed “purist pregnant woman” myth impacts effective strategies in social marketing and health communication campaigns. Findings suggest that pregnant women may serve as a receptive audience for a range of health issues.

This study extends our understanding of prosumers, suggesting that prosumption of pregnancy reduces alienation, humanizes and demedicalizes health care and the birthing process.

This study offers theoretical and practical implications for social marketing and health communication campaigns to improve pregnancy health outcomes through an improved understanding of prosumers.

This chapter is an ethnographic exploration of birthing and body politics in the United States and Uganda with the placenta as the catalyst for understanding reproductive regulation and gendered bodily epistemologies. Based on fieldwork spanning 2009–2017 with rural, traditional midwives in Southern Uganda, merged with recent, anecdotal observations from Los Angeles County and greater California and the United States generally, this work considers cultural terrains of placentas as well as corresponding worldviews and perspectives, ranging from life-generating organ imbued with vast spiritual and physiological significance, to preventative mental health food, to bio-waste that is incinerated or filled with toxic chemicals. The bio-ontologies of placentas are explored herein in terms of toxic contingencies and with regard to the relationship between health and industry.

Toxic entanglements and embodied politics of risk and exposure explored herein point to dehumanizing and ill-fitting regulations that stifle health autonomy and medical sovereignty. Such disempowering governance is compounded by gender and myriad cultural factors. With implications for national and international policies, this work examines my findings that illustrate ways in which flesh, technologies and knowledge intersect in bio-praxes that monitor and manage, rather than support, the reproductive body. This work suggests departure from colonial instability and dispossession by re-scripting medicine in such a way that achieves health justice through bodily knowledge, or enfleshed understandings. Decolonizing the flesh demands ungripping health encounters from praxes of control, in favour of choice and preference. This entails reclaiming physiologies as well as reimagining how medical systems inform core ethos.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an inclusive research model to overcome the single perspective issues of the previous research which were looking at either on knowledge management (KM) activity, information technology (IT) applications or information infrastructure capability (IIC) independently.

This paper reviewed and categorised five knowledge management (KM) frameworks: first, KM foundation studies; second, resource-based view studies; third, IIC studies; fourth, competitive advantage (CA) studies; fifth, organisational information processing theory studies to propose research model. Case studies based on face-to-face interviews were conducted to empirically analyse the proposed research model.

An inclusive research model was suggested to redress the key limitation of past studies in this research field.

Since Asian countries are at present heading for the creation of a knowledge economy, the present study is important to assist government and researchers to develop the most suitable information infrastructure for effective KM in the organisation. The research model proposed by the present study can also become a key reference to the governments and researchers in other developing countries towards the creation of knowledge economy.

The model proposed by the present study will help organisations to examine the performance of their current information infrastructure towards developing new business processes, techniques and decisions for effective KM in the organisations.

The present study is one of the pioneer studies that integrating important IICs such as the integrating capability, data management capability, security capability, utility capability and collaborating capability in the research framework to assist knowledge-based companies to enhance current KM practices and attain long-term CA.

The blood service sector faces issues with obtaining and retaining loyal donors at one end of its supply chain, a marketing issue, and being efficient and effective in blood and related product delivery to customers at the other end of its supply chain, a supply chain management issue. The purpose of this paper is to present an investigation of these issues and propose the adoption of techniques and technologies from the food processing and retailing sector to address them.

An exploratory case study with the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service is used to investigate research questions stemming from extant literature.

This study finds that a national blood service can achieve better stock management and resource optimisation and better communication with “input” and “output” stakeholders by implementing information flows and integration throughout the supply and marketing chain. It also finds that a national blood service can convince non‐donors to donate and increase donor relationships and loyalty by ensuring internal marketing takes place with its employees who can then inform external stakeholders through their first‐contact relationships.

This study is exploratory, thus empirical research is limited.

This paper validates primary issues in recruiting and retaining blood donors and making blood supply chains more efficient and effective, and proposes the adoption of techniques and technology from other process sectors to overcome these issues. Thus, European national blood services should benefit from implementing suggestions in this research.

This paper adopts a multi‐disciplinary approach across the marketing and supply chain management disciplines to explore issues usually associated with medical and pure sciences.