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Purpose – Pharmaceutical expenditures have an important role in Europe. The attempts to control expenditure have used a wide range of policy measures. We reviewed the main measures adopted by the European Union countries, especially in countries where governments are the largest third-party payers.

Methodology – To complement a literature review on the topic, data was gathered from national reviews of health systems and direct inquiries to several government bodies.

Findings – Almost all countries regulate prices of pharmaceutical products. Popular policy measures include international referencing to set prices (using as benchmark countries that have set lower prices), internal reference pricing systems to promote price competition in domestic markets, and positive lists for reimbursement to promote consumption of generics (including in some cases substitution by pharmacists of drugs prescribed by physicians). Despite the wide range of policy measures, it is not possible to identify a “silver bullet” to control pharmaceutical expenditures. We also identified two main policy challenges: policy coordination among countries within the European Union to maintain incentives for R&D at the global level, and the development of new relationships with the pharmaceutical industry; namely, the so-called risk-sharing agreements between the pharmaceutical industry and governments/regulators (or large third-party payers).

To present the view that harm arising from aggressive marketing and sales of health-related products and services (including dangerous and defective ones) in order to maximize profits should be a cause of concern for public health academics and practitioners.

The discussion is conducted using biomedical ethics principles and supported using various real-world examples.

Harm arising from aggressive marketing and sales of health-related products and services (including dangerous and defective ones) in order to maximize profits should be a cause of concern for public health academics and practitioners. In the area of products, the most obvious would be tobacco products. In the case of pharmaceutical drugs, it would include overuse or inappropriate use because of aggressive marketing. It would also include harm caused by the continued promotion and sale of a drug in the face of evidence that it has significant negative side effects. Brody and Light’s “Inverse Benefit Law,” that is, the benefit-to-harm ratio of drugs tends to vary inversely with how aggressively drugs are marketed is discussed. Harm is also evident in health-related services, for example, misuse of ultrasonography for sex-selective abortion. This chapter will discuss how the risk of harm is increased because of questionable marketing strategies used by drug companies.

One limitation is that no attempt to quantify the harm done (e.g., through economic evaluation techniques) is carried out.

This chapter presents the view that much more attention should be paid to this aspect of medicalization as a public health threat.

The purpose of this chapter is to develop a framework that can be used to study the impact of multinational enterprises (MNEs) on sustainable development and poverty alleviation in developing countries. In the 3-year project awarded by the EC-FP7 program, six universities from Europe and three partners from developing countries participated: Brazil, Ghana, and India. For this purpose, a thorough literature review is done and a framework is presented. To confirm the conceptual framework, we performed several case studies with three MNEs in two countries, Ghana and India. Data collection was done through qualitative in-depth interviews with managers in the headquarters of MNEs, the subsidiaries, and the “linked” local firms and host governments. Results confirm our conceptual model that the autonomy of the subsidiary, strategies of MNEs, and local government policies play a major role in achieving positive externalities from MNE operations in developing countries. The key contribution of this study is the development of a relevant conceptual framework that can be used in the overall project. Our study confirms that an interaction between the MNE subsidiary and the local government is essential for the linkages and spillovers to occur that may benefit local economic development and poverty reduction in developing countries.

If any organization wants to be globally recognized leadership plays an important role. This chapter deals with the leadership failure in creating good salesperson behavior in India’s pharmaceutical industry. There are four types of salesperson’s behavior: selling orientation, customer orientation, adaptive selling, and unethical selling. Selling oriented and unethical selling behaviors negatively impact customer trust and customer value, while customer orientation and adaptive are more positive. This chapter explores how senior managers can create good organization culture and organization climate by creating positive sales behavior. This chapter will be an eye opener to many first-line managers for helping their salespersons to practice customer orientation and adaptive selling behavior.

Through an analysis of the HIV-Tainted-Blood Affair in Japan, this paper explores why pharmaceutical companies act in a socially irresponsible manner. The paper suggests encouraging members of these corporations to become more conscious of their responsibility to society by developing themselves as professionals. The analysis shows that drug disasters are not caused only by a particular “special villain,” but by the structural conflict between medical professional ethics and the profit making motivation of pharmaceutical companies. In other words, the behaviors of pharmaceutical companies fall into the interstices of professional ethics.

To investigate the impact of knowledge-intensive FDI in the Chinese pharmaceutical industry, this study analyzes the activity of foreign MNEs operating in this context by exploring their innovative background, the organizational arrangements they use for local knowledge creation and the performance of their local innovative processes. Based on the analysis of the universe of USPTO pharmaceutical patents applied for between 1975 and 2010 and granted to foreign assignees utilizing the work of Chinese inventors, our results show that, while the presence of foreign MNEs in the Chinese pharmaceutical industry entails a strong potential for positive externalities that could enhance the performance of the local innovation system, such externalities do not completely materialize yet, likely because of local actors’ limited absorptive capacity.

Dual marketing, i.e. selling the same product to both consumers and business customers, calls for a rearrangement of companies’ organizational chart. New figures, appointed with new roles, need to be integrated within the organization. In addition, dual marketers are required new skills by the market, having to learn to blend push and pull marketing techniques. This chapter discusses how the market's imperatives make the dual marketer an on-the-edge figure within the business landscape, able to constantly reinvent herself to keep pace with innovations.

This chapter takes a critical look at the sociological notion of ‘medicalisation’ in relation to recent trends and developments in neuroscience, neurotechnology and society, taking memory, medicine and the brain as our prime focus and the disease category of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) as our empirical case study. Five relational nexuses in particular are identified as relevant to these developments and debates, namely the bio-psych nexus, the pharma-psych nexus, the selves-subjectivity nexus, the wellness-enhancement nexus, and the neuroculture-neurofuture nexus. We show that developments in memory medicine and the shifting boundaries of cognitive health, as embodied and expressed in the case of MCI, shed further valuable light on these issues and the interconnectivity of these relational nexuses. As an emergent disease and susceptibility category, MCI illuminates not only the fuzzy boundaries between normal and abnormal cognitive functioning, but also the working of neuroscientific, neurocultural and pharmacological interests, which, in this case, are already claiming MCI as the next locus of enhancing the mind and optimising aging. Thinking both within and beyond medicalisation challenges us to find new ways to critically understand the ideas about life and health as they travel, translate or migrate from (neuro)scientific and clinical spheres to cultural life and patient experience.

Organizational studies of time tend to be done by academic researchers rather than practitioners. This chapter builds on academic research to provide a practitioner perspective by reviewing time situated in theory and constructing two phenotypes: timescapes of business and social time. These timescapes are defined by six dimensions, each with a social and business time parameter. Organizational business and social timescapes have different functions and applications. Timescapes, with their concomitant dimensions and sets of parameters, are used differently by senior managers, middle managers, and entry-level managers. Three multi-level approaches (self, dyadic, and social relationships), composition theory, and compilation theory confirm these three managerial timescape usages. After a review of the theoretical bases of the timescape constructs and a brief discussion of the grounded, anthropological, research methodology used in the study, this chapter applies timescape theory and models to an extended time case study of the Procter & Gamble Company that frames the company's timescape understanding and use from a practitioner's view.