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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.

This chapter examines the increase in global demand for quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) and considers the impact of such demand on the Peruvian and Bolivian farmers who produce it. Specifically, it analyzes the social media marketing of U.S. based I Heart Keenwah (IHK) and considers the role of “storied food” with respect to corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in a Web 2.0 context. This chapter reports the results of textual, rhetorical, and cultural analyses of the digital marketing materials IHK deploys, and considers IHK’s use of Web 2.0 tools to mobilize discourses of socially responsible marketing, and implications of industrial quinoa production on Andean biodiversity and indigenous culture. This chapter principally concludes that the social media and digital marketing materials that IHK deploys obfuscate the social, economic, and ecological complexities surrounding the quinoa industries in Peru and Bolivia. This chapter provides evidence of new tendencies in capitalist commodification, and demonstrates how the traditional and indigenous protectors of the quinoa plant species are being denied their agricultural and cultural heritages. Further more, it demonstrates how the language of corporate social responsibility is abused in the service of less sustainable, branded, and extractive imaginaries and corporate profit. Given the significant rise in international quinoa demand, IHK’s explosive economic success, and IHK’s reliance on Andean quinoa, this case study provides unique insights into global food capitalism in the age of social media.

This chapter provides “viewpoints” on the education of learners with extensive and pervasive support needs. That is, students who require the most support to learn, often categorized as having intellectual disability, multiple disabilities, autism spectrum disorder, or related disabilities. The lenses through which we provide these viewpoints are historical and future-oriented; we begin with historic perspectives on the education of students with extensive and pervasive support needs, and then provide 21st century viewpoints for these learners. We interpret the notion of viewpoints in two ways: first, consistent with a viewpoint as indicating an examination of objects (in this case, practices and interventions) from a distance so as to be able to compare and judge; and, second, viewpoint as indicating our perspective on said interventions and practice.

Across the globe, the increasing exploration of women entrepreneurship as an emerging phenomenon has resulted in growing lines of examination that extend across the motivations, challenges, contributions, and strategies for navigating the entrepreneurial space. Despite such advancements in the field, the effects of gender and motherhood on entrepreneurship remain highly under-theorized and under-contextualized, with little appreciation of the spatial and situational realities that they confront. Such is the case for the Caribbean where women and mothers are increasingly entering into entrepreneurship, but where their realities are yet to be understood. In this chapter, we therefore make a case for the use of contextual theorizations that focus on the structural, historical, and cultural aspects of entrepreneurship, and the implications of these for the thinking and action of women entrepreneurs and mumpreneurs in the region. Implications for entrepreneurial research, policy, and practices in the Caribbean are also discussed.

The purpose of this chapter is to make visible the similarities and differences among narrative, self-study of teacher education practices, and autoethnographic methodologies to generate clarity about when each methodology might be most appropriate. Using Margery Wolf’s (1992) A Thrice Told Tale as a heuristic to support our exploration, we look at a selected slice of data as if standing within each methodology. As we do that we consider ways that we might engage each methodology to push forward our thinking about powerful research. Our goal is to critically examine the processes that researchers use for the study and to explore the ways using particular methodologies in appropriate ways that can strengthen our thinking about professional knowledge.

Within the last two decades, entrepreneurship education has become institutionalized in Germany. It is offered as a stand-alone program or as part of a business degree, combining academic knowledge, practical skills, and personal development to enhance the entrepreneurial success of university graduates. While entrepreneurship education has experienced similar growth worldwide, its emergence in Germany is closely tied to the country’s political and economic developments. The significance of entrepreneurship education for a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem and contemporary economic policy has been instrumental in advancing its academic recognition. This chapter provides a historical analysis of the academization of entrepreneurship in Germany. It explores the recursive and often idiosyncratic processes involving state and financial institutions, companies, and universities that have created, respecified, and mutually reinforced a subdiscipline and field of study. Academic entrepreneurship knowledge successively not only became relevant for starting a business but also for employment within the entrepreneurial infrastructure and beyond. This chapter follows a chronological order, highlighting three key stages in the academization of entrepreneurship education. First, the academic, financial, and political roots (I) of entrepreneurship up until the 1970s. Second, it explores the transformation (II) of entrepreneurship into a viable policy alternative and the challenges faced in establishing complementary research and education in higher education institutions during the 1980s. Finally, it sketches the institutionalization (III) of entrepreneurship as a central driver of government economic policy, allowing for the late bloom of entrepreneurship education and research at universities around the turn of the millennium.

Paul Samuelson was attracted to the irregular economic development pattern of some South American countries because of the links between economic performance and political factors. He discussed the influence of “populist democracy” on Argentina’s relative economic stagnation, which, he argued in the 1970s and early 1980s, served as a dangerous paradigm for the American economy under stagflation. Stagflation phenomena marked the end of Samuelson’s “neoclassical synthesis.” Moreover, he applied his concept of “capitalist fascism” to deal with military dictatorships in Brazil and (especially) in Chile. The Brazilian translation of his Economics in 1973 brought about a correspondence with Brazilian economists about the “fascist” features of the regime. The main variable behind the South American economic and politically unstable processes discussed by Samuelson was economic inequality, which became also a conspicuous feature of the American economy since the adoption of market-based policies in the 1980s and after.

The new economic-policy regime in Sweden in the 1990s included deregulation, central-bank independence, inflation targets and fiscal rules but also active labour market policy and voluntary incomes policy. This chapter describes the content, determinants and performance of the new economic policy in Sweden in a comparative, mainly Nordic, perspective. The new economic-policy regime is explained by the deep recession and budget crisis in the early 1990s, new economic ideas and the power of economic experts. In the 1998–2007 period, Sweden displayed relatively low inflation and high productivity growth, but unemployment was high, especially by national standards. The restrictive monetary policy was responsible for the low inflation, and the dynamic (ICT) sector was decisive for the productivity miracle. Furthermore, productivity increases in the ICT sector largely explains why the Central Bank undershot its inflation target in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The new economic-policy regime in Sweden performed well during the global financial crisis. However, as in other OECD countries, the moderate increase in unemployment was largely attributed to labour hoarding. And the rapid recovery of the Baltic countries made it possible for Sweden to avoid a bank crisis.