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Over the past decade ‘social egg freezing’ has emerged as a technology of hope that purports to empower women by enabling them to continue their careers or find the right partner without the fear of jeopardising their fertility. This technology has been promoted and celebrated by fertility companies, bioethicists, clinicians, and multi-national corporations such as Apple and Facebook. While critical questions have been raised, they tend to focus on ethical and legal issues, such as informed consent and patient autonomy. This paper uses Foucault’s notion ofdispositifas analytic lens to examine the entanglement of the commercial arrangements of fertility companies, the discursive use of hope in promoting these services, and effects on professional medical care. Drawing on socio-political analyses of hope, this paper examines the potential financial conflicts of interest facing clinicians and the way discourses of hope might mask problematic financial relations and lack of evidence of effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors describe the incremental approach to the marketisation of the English National Health Service (NHS) since the introduction of an 'internal market' in 1990 until the 2010 White Paper, 'Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS', and the subsequent Health and Social Care Bill published in January 2011. The introduction of a competitive market for a universal, tax-financed health system requires fundamental changes in regulation in order that market bureaucracy can be substituted for direct management. The components of reform are insufficiently captured by the framework of hierarchies and networks in new public management theories of decentralisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the articles within the issue of the journal on topics including privatisation as a form of neo-liberal accumulation by dispossession, impact of the commoditisation of nursing care and pressures toward privatization, is presented.