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The Pharmaceutical Industry and Access to Health Products. Interrogating the Role of Multinational Companies in Tackling Global Development Challenges

  • Society increasingly calls on business, in particular multinational companies, to contribute to solving global challenges such as poverty, hunger, or the recent pandemic. Many companies and industries have responded positively to these expectations and use a broad set of efforts to work toward objectives such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. However, research has frequently pointed out that that there is limited evidence for multinational companies being effective to this end, as they have to overcome many internal and external hurdles in tackling such development challenges. Thus, uncertainty remains with regard to how multinational companies can become instrumental in addressing the persistent and global problems we associate with sustainable development. This cumulative dissertation explores this question by studying how the multinational pharmaceutical industry has acted upon the challenge of insufficient access to medicines, vaccines, and other health products in low- and middle-income countries. By analyzing how two companies have tried to integrate access objectives into their business, the first empirical paper brings to surface two types of integration efforts that differently enable companies to make progress on the access challenge. It also highlights the strategizing needed for each type of integration to overcome internal and external challenges. The remaining two papers look at the pharmaceutical industry’s contributions to the Kenyan response to non-communicable diseases as a case of the growing scale and scope of involvement of multinational companies on the local level. One paper shows that local development actors perceive this as a challenging and risky phenomenon and lays out why and how they engage with companies as development agents regardless. By studying the Kenyan case, the final piece looks more closely at how governance structures may help to ensure that industry-led public health initiatives contribute to development objectives. Together, these papers contribute to management research by showcasing different pathways through which companies can become instrumental in making progress on development challenges: an internal pathway of integrating social objectives into the business as well as an external pathway of steering corporate initiatives through local actors and governance structures. Finally, it also informs debates in global health research by adding often neglected firm- and country-level perspectives on the growing role of business in global health.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Doctoral Thesis
Language:English
Author(s):Tobias Bünder
Advisor:Johanna Mair, Wirtz Veronika J., Sébastien Mena
Hertie Collections (Serial Number):Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School (07/2022)
Publication year:2022
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
Granting Institution:Hertie School
Thesis date:2022/06/01
Number pages:132
DOI:https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4474
Release Date:2022/07/26
Notes:
List of pre-publications

Parts of Chapter 2, 3 and 7: Bünder, T., Rathert, N., Mair, J., Understanding firm- and field-level change toward sustainable development: insights from the pharmaceutical industry and access to medicines 1960‒2020. In: George, G., Haas, M.R., Joshi, H., McGahan, A.M. and Tracey, P. Handbook on the Business of Sustainability: The Organization, Implementation, and Practice of Sustainable Growth. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Chapter 6: Bünder, T., Karekezi, C., & Wirtz, V.J. (2021). Governing industry involvement in the non-communicable disease response in Kenya. Globalization and Health, 17. doi.org/10.1186/s12992-021-00776-3
Notes:
Shelf mark: 2022D007 + 2022D007+1
Hertie School Research:Publications PhD Researchers
Licence of document (German):Creative Commons - CC BY - 4.0 International
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