The majority of people who work in the pharmaceutical industry subscribe to high standards of integrity and do everything in their power to stay within the constraints of...

Odnośniki

Smutek to uczucie, jak gdyby się tonęło, jak gdyby grzebano cię w ziemi.
outsourcingu jest zacieśnienie się integracji dostawcy i klienta umowy outsourcingowej, jak również powstanie rozwiniętej sieci relacji klienta z...
Retire thou then unto a secret place, where no one may be able to see thee or to hinder thee, before the completion of the experiment, whether thou shouldest wish to work by day...
This is why it is unwise to talk of stress (as some people have done) in terms of degrees of loudness, since loudness is in part a product of the inherent sonority of sounds...
Integracyjny internat jest plac�wk� opieku�czo-wychowawczo-rewali-dacyj na umo�liwiaj�c� ch�opcom niepe�nosprawnym intelektualnie -w miar� mo�liwo�ci -...
103 James sees himself as the new visionary within the retail market and constantly overwhelms people with his loud monologues on his latest concept...
Here, the constructors allocate the memory and initialize it, the operator= copies it, and the destructor frees the memory...
In his systematic efforts to ruin girls and women he strives to break down the last barriers of discrimination between him and other peoples...
and be so angry that they’d take it out on anyone who happened to have been around at the time...
jedno: izolacj�, b�d� integracj�...
"Who?" "It's someone you know...

Smutek to uczucie, jak gdyby się tonęło, jak gdyby grzebano cię w ziemi.

In the course of this research, I met pharmaceutical executives who impressed me with the sincerity of their commitment to the public welfare much more than many of the industry's critics in politics, regulatory agencies, the public interest movement, and academia.
Valerie Braithwaite accompanied me to many pharmaceutical companies, forever constraining me from driving on the wrong side of the road. One day, as we drove back to New York, she said: But these people are so nice, John. Do you think they really are corrupt?' My initial response was: 'You've spent the day being shown around and taken to lunch by the company's public relations staff. They're paid to be nice. Some people in these companies get paid a lot of money because they're good at being ruthless bastards, and others get big money to entertain people like you because they're good at being nice.' But really that was an inadequate answer. Irrespective of what they're paid to be, most of them in fact are principled people.
There are three types of principled people in the pharmaceutical industry. First, there are those who directly participate in company activities which do public harm, but who sincerely believe the company propaganda which tells them that they are contributing to the improvement of community health. Second, there are people who perceive the company to be engaging in certain socially harmful practices and fight tooth and nail within the organisation to stop those practices. Third, there are people who have no direct contact with socially harmful corporate practices. The job they do within the organisation produces social benefits, and they do that job with integrity and dedication. Most of the principled people in pharmaceutical companies are in this last category. Consider, for example, the quality control manager who is exacting in ensuring that no drug leaves the plant which is impure or outside specifications. It might be that the drug itself causes more harm than good because of side-effects or abuse; but the quality control manager does the job of ensuring that at least it is not adulterated.
In hastening to point out that not all pharmaceutical executives are nice guys, I am reminded of one gentleman who had a sign, 'Go for the jugular', on the wall behind his desk. Another respondent, arguably one of the most powerful half-dozen men in the Australian pharmaceutical industry, excused his own ruthlessness with: in business you can come up against a dirty stinking bunch of crooks. Then you have to behave like a crook yourself, otherwise you get done like a dinner.'
Nevertheless, most corporate crimes in the pharmaceutical industry cannot be explained by the perverse personalities of their perpetrators. One must question the proclivity in an individualistic culture to locate the source of evil deeds in evil people. Instead we should 'pay attention to the factors that lead ordinary men to do extraordinary things' (Opton, 1971: 51). Rather than think of corporate actors as individual personalities, they should be viewed as actors who assume certain roles. The requirements of these roles are defined by the organisation, not by the actor's personality. Understanding how 'ordinary men are led to do extraordinary things' can begin with role-playing experiments.
Armstrong (1977) asked almost two thousand management students from ten countries to play the roles of board members of a transnational pharmaceutical company. The decision facing the board was a real-life situation which had confronted the Upjohn company:1 should it remove from the market a drug which had been found to endanger human life? Seventy-nine per cent of the management student boards of directors not only refused to withdraw the dangerous drug, but also undertook legal or political manoeuvres to forestall efforts of the government to ban it.2 This was the same action as the Upjohn board itself took, an action which 97 percent of a sample of 71 respondents classified as 'socially irresponsible' (Armstrong, 1977: 197). Using delaying tactics to keep a dangerous but profitable drug on the market is something that ordinary people appear willing to do when asked to play the role of industry decision-makers. Hence, when people die as a result of the kinds of socially irresponsible manoeuvres of the Upjohn board in this case, to suggest that it happened because the Upjohn board is made up of evil men does little to advance explanation of the phenomenon.
The unquestionable artificiality of laboratory role-playing experiments may nevertheless share some of the very artificiality which is the stuff from which immoral corporate decisions are made:
[T]he usual restraints on antisocial behavior operate through a self-image: 'I can't see myself doing that.' In an institutional setting, however, that isn't being done by me but through me as an actor, a role player in an unreal 'game' that everyone is 'playing' (Stone, 1975: 235).
People in groups behave in ways that would be inconceivable for any of them as individuals. Groupthink (Janis, 1971) and what Arendt (1965) referred to as 'rule by nobody' are important in corporate decision-making which results in human suffering. Bandura (1973: 213) explained the basic psychology of 'rule by nobody'.