Mobile phones, non-human agents at the service of assisted reproduction: monitoring and gendered dual allegiance

For sub-Saharan women enrolled in a protocol for assisted reproductive technology (ART), the use of mobile phones entails dual allegiance: toward the services of reproductive medicine and toward their transnational family. Indispensable for medically monitoring women’s reproductive bodies, the mobile phone enters the process for producing female gametes and contributes to the gender asymmetry typical of biomedicalized procreation. It is also used to maintain contacts with transnational family members who, from a distance, obtrude in the woman’s reproductive life. The use of mobile phones extends biomedical power over the woman’s body into her everyday life and the normative power of her transnational family into reproduction. Paradoxically, the mobile telephone allows collateral relatives to support the woman seeking reproduction assistance while also “hypermedicalizing” the woman’s daily life. Also paradoxically, this everyday companion is conductive to individual autonomy while also being used for new forms of surveillance and control. The data come from fieldwork conducted in the greater Paris area between 2011 and 2013 within a network of ART professionals and their patients.

The Foundational Years

Pope’s first year presented a mixture of challenges that required much of her. Her dual allegiance—to her native Hawaiian pupils and her missionary benefactors—was a tension that would persist throughout her career. In January 1895, Lili‘uokalani was charged with treason and imprisoned in ‘Iolani Palace. With their queen in custody, Pope had to keep a more watchful eye on the psychological states of all of her pupils, ever loyal to the monarchy. The entire community was quarantined due to the cholera outbreak affecting school operations. Her first graduates hit the job market and Pope asserts herself with Charles Bishop and the school trustees.

DUAL ALLEGIANCE, KNOWLEDGE SHARING, AND KNOWLEDGE PROTECTION: AN EMPIRICAL EXAMINATION

Earlier research has put forward the theoretical proposition that R&D employees exhibit different patterns of allegiance — they tend to either develop a unilateral allegiance (to their own firm or to the inter-firm collaboration), a dual low allegiance or a dual high allegiance. It has also been proposed that each particular allegiance type influences these employees' knowledge sharing behaviour. The present paper empirically tests these claims. Analysing original data collected through 50 interviews that took place in 2011 and 2012 in the R&D units of two global firms in Finland, the United States, and China, we confirm that these allegiance patterns exist and there is a relationship between allegiance and knowledge sharing behaviour. We also extend the previous theoretical framework on which the study is based and analyse not only knowledge sharing, but also knowledge protection behaviour.