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This chapter examines the emergence of India as a site for surrogacy, which has led intended parents from all over the world to contract with Indian gestational surrogates to carry “their” babies for them. Through participant observation in a surrogacy workshop, interviews with American intended parents, and interviews with Indian surrogates, I show how ideologies of normative, nuclear families built around genetically similar children, drives American consumers' desires to seek fertility intervention, and, finally, surrogacy. In India, gender ideologies shape the contours of an inexpensive, compliant labor force of surrogate mothers.

Although research on reproductive technologies such as IVF and egg freezing has traditionally been rather separated from the work on contraceptives and abortion, analysing reproductive and nonreproductive technologies together, as this volume proposes, can provide the basis for a broader contemporary politics of reproductive control. This chapter analyses this politics of integrating reproductive and nonreproductive technologies by focusing specifically on IVF-based fertility (preservation) treatments and (medical) abortion. More specifically, it explores both technologies' interrelated research trajectories and the financial and platformised dimensions of their clinical implementation. With a dual focus on egg freezing and medical abortion, this project seeks to explore how processes of platformisation and financialisation shape the clinical and commercial infrastructures that govern twenty-first-century reproduction. The chapter's broadened analytic scope that incorporates both reproductive and nonreproductive technologies highlights how a contemporary biopolitics of reproductive control may be expressed through these technologies' interrelated regulatory practices, shared politicised reference points (e.g. the embryo), opposite investment practices and mutually reinforcing social effects.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the introduction of distributed leadership and team working in a therapy department in a healthcare organisation and to explore the factors that enabled the introduction to be successful.

This paper used a case study methodology. Qualitative and quantitative information was gathered from one physiotherapy department over a period of 24 months.

Distributed leadership and team working were central to a number of system changes that were initiated by the department, which led to improvements in patient waiting times for therapy. The paper identifies six factors that appear to have influenced the successful introduction of distributed learning and team working in this case.

This is a single case study. It would be interesting to explore whether these factors are found in other cases where distributed leadership is introduced in healthcare organisations.

The paper provides an example of successful introduction of distributed leadership, which has had a positive impact on services to patients. Other therapy teams may consider how the approach may be adopted or adapted to their own circumstances.

Although distributed leadership is thought to be important in healthcare, particularly when organisational change is needed, there are very few studies of the practicalities of how it can be introduced.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the difference between the sale price and list price of houses varies across the market cycle.

The paper utilises quarterly transaction‐based information on house prices from the Belfast Metropolitan Area. The information is structured on a time series basis from 2002 to 2008. The analysis is concerned with the mean differences between list price and sale price, the standard deviation of the differences, the skewness and kurtosis of the distributions.

The results show that under normal market conditions the mean deviation between list price and sale price is small circa 1 per cent. However, the departure between list price and sale price becomes substantial on both the up‐ and down‐cycles of the market. The analysis shows that the highest mean positive deviation of 12.1 per cent occurred in the first quarter of 2007 and two quarters before sale prices peaked, suggesting that buyer bidding behaviour was changing prior to the market peak. The extent of market change is highlighted by the mean negative deviation of 8.6 per cent for the fourth quarter of 2008. The results demonstrate that volatility increases over the cycle and distributions of price differences are lower and flatter.

This paper breaks new ground through the analysis of differences between list and sale price in a period of high volatility in the housing market. The analysis shows how list price lags sale price on the up‐cycle but leads on the down‐cycle.

Corporate activity in Ireland has experienced a significant growth as the economy has benefited from extensive inward investment. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of real estate in corporate decision making within Ireland. Corporate real estate issues are initially discussed as the contextual anchoring for a survey of corporate occupiers within both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Findings indicate a high level of professional and practical experience in relation to real estate but this has not been fully exploited by companies in developing a proactive corporate strategy. Real estate plays a largely traditional role within organisations although it appears that differences exist between indigenous and externally parented companies. Comparisons are drawn with other similar surveys at an international level.

The purpose of this paper is to consider a psychoanalytic explanation for the challenges facing social entrepreneurs in Scotland.

A qualitative approach was used, in an exploratory study involving semi‐structured interviews with, and observation of, a purposive sample of social entrepreneurs.

Respondents exhibited a sense of splitting between the archetype of hard driving business leader and that of social reformer. One respondent was able successfully to integrate the two roles through an intuitive understanding of psychodynamic processes.

This was an exploratory study with a small sample.

In a period of financial challenge for the UK economy, presenting new challenges for social enterprises, the findings add to researchers' understanding of apparently irrational responses to change.

There is limited research into the impact of archetypes on business behaviours and the paper aims to extend the literature.

Seeks to explore recent studies in corporate real estate and to provide a comparative analysis of industrial corporations in Ireland and those in the non‐industrial sector with respect to their corporate real estate management objectives.

The empirical investigation reports on a study undertaken in Ireland and compares results from companies in the industrial sector with companies in the non‐industrial sector. The methodology is based on a behavioural questionnaire targeted at the top 150 companies operating in Ireland and classified on the basis of number of employees.

The findings indicate that significant differences are apparent between companies in the industrial sector and companies not in the industrial sector in the use of real estate assets. In particular companies in the industrial/manufacturing sectors have weakly developed corporate real estate strategies.

The main limitations derive from a relatively small sample size, a function of targeting the survey at senior executives. There are implications for companies in the under‐utilisation of real estate assets and the effects of this on corporate balance‐sheets requires further investigation.

Highlights that companies in Ireland, notably those in the industrial sector, have some significant way to go in utilising their corporate real estate assets more effectively.

This chapter examines how lawmakers had to grapple with whether and how to regulate medically assisted reproduction after the 1988 Baby M court case in the United States propelled surrogate motherhood and related reproductive technologies onto the public policy stage. The chapter compares the public policy approaches of two countries, France and Germany, with the regulatory structures in the United States where the Baby M court case that garnered international attention took place. Specifically, the chapter provides an in-depth examination of the legal and historical contexts of each country's policy approaches in the form of existing national marriage, family, and adoption laws as well as policies regulating human reproduction. Lawmakers' task became even more pressing once citizens began using the court system and traveled abroad to either gain access to proscribed technologies or use them for a lesser fee elsewhere. As a result, Germany developed one of the most restrictive national laws in the world while France established certain legal proscriptions, which are still more far-reaching than the regulatory structures in the United States. Along the way, this developing policy area contributed to the creation of international frameworks governing medically assisted reproduction and the development of national bioethics advisory councils.