Disciplined Into Hiding: Milk Banking and the “Obscured Organization”

Abstract

Amid recent attention to nonprofit and voluntary organizing, empirical studies have largely focused on social capital functions, decision-making, and volunteer relationships, in contrast to missions or practices that are contested, controversial, or concealed. This study examines how nonprofit milk banks and online milksharing networks experience concealment in unique, unintentional ways. Using ethnographic fieldwork and discursive interviews, we analyze how Discourses of Filth, Suspicion, and (In)adequacy discipline members’ corporeality and participation in the milk banking/sharing industry such that concealment is enacted and enforced. The findings provide evidence for obscured organizations as a useful complement to hidden organizations by highlighting how organizations involved in body product exchange encounter unique symbolic, structural, and technical communication problems that bear community consequence. The results have implications not only for studying contemporary organizations, but also for theorizing hidden organizing and stigmatized membership.

‘They Know What It’s Like’: Exploring Facebook Groups for Digital Coping

“…Some themes became more salient than others as the authors further examined the data together for emerging themes from patients and their caregivers. Analysis stopped when emergent themes attended to RQ1 and RQ2, provided significant insights into the Digital Coping Model (Rains, 2018), and when new data were not different from what the authors previously identified (Jones & Tracy, 2022).…”

Determining Knowledge and Opinions of Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Nurses on Wet-Nursing and Human Milk Banks: A Cross-Sectional Study in Türkiye

“…Human milk is particularly crucial for preterm infants, as it has been shown to reduce the risk of life-threatening complications such as late-onset sepsis (LOS) and necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) in NICU settings (Mara et al, 2022; Perrin et al, 2022). When breastfeeding is not feasible, wet-nursing and human milk banks (HMBs) serve as important sources of human milk for infants who cannot be breastfed due to reasons related to the mother or the infant (Ergin & Uzun, 2018; Jones & Tracy, 2022).…”