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The Corporate Social Responsibility of the Pharmaceutical Industry: Idealism without Illusion and Realism without Resignation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Klaus M. Leisinger
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Abstract:

In recent years society has come to expect more from the “socially-responsible” company and the global HIV/AIDS pandemic in particular has resulted in some critics saying that the “Big Pharma” companies have not been living up to their social responsibilities. Corporate social responsibility can be understood as the socio-economic product of the organizational division of labor in complex modern society. Global poverty and poor health conditions are in the main the responsibilities of the world’s national governments and international governmental organizations, which possess society’s mandate and appropriate organizational capabilities. Private enterprises have neither the societal mandate nor the organizational capabilities to feed the poor or provide health care to the sick in their home countries or in the developing world. Nevertheless, private enterprises do have responsibilities to society that can be categorized as what they must do, what they ought do, and what they can do.

Type
Special Issue
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , October 2005 , pp. 577 - 594
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2005

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References

Notes

1. Searching for “social responsibility” on Google yields more than 9 million entries, while looking for “corporate social responsibility” yields 1.6 million results; searching within these results for the pharmaceutical industry still points to 127,000 sites (in November 2003). Several organizations make it their business to help corporations do the right things—see, e.g., www.bsr.org, www.csreurope.org, www.crsforum.com, www.worldcsr.com, www.globalreporting.org, and www.conference-board.org; for a corporate site, see www.novartis.com/corporatecitizen/en/index.shtml.

2. International Monetary Fund and World Bank Development Committee, “Comprehensive Development Framework,” Washington, D.C., 19 April 1999, p. 2; see also, e.g., D. Narayan, R. Chambers, M. K. Shah, and P. Petesch, Voices of the Poor. Can Anyone Hear Us? (New York: Oxford University Press for World Bank, 2000); U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), Poverty Report 2000. Overcoming Human Poverty (New York: 2000); and World Bank, World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

3. See C.-E. A. Winslow, The Cost of Sickness and the Price of Health (Geneva: World Health Organization [WHO], 1951), p. 9.

4. See, e.g., T. Donaldson and T. E. Dunfee, Ties That Bind: A Social Contracts Approach to Business Ethics (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999); J. W. Houck and O. F. Williams, eds., Is the Good Corporation Dead? Social Responsibility in a Global Economy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 1996); and United Nations, The Social Responsibility of Transnational Corporations (New York: 1999).

5. See E. B. Kapstein, “The Corporate Ethics Crusade,” Foreign Affairs 80 (2001): 105–19.

6. See Donaldson and Dunfee, Ties That Bind, 235–62.

7. See Environics, The Millennium Poll (New York: 1999); and Edelman Public Relations World Wide, poll, November 2001.

8. See, e.g., Médecins Sans Frontière, “Access to Drugs Denied: How Politics Is Failing the Dying,” Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines, Paris, 2002; see also Oxfam, Generic Competition, Price, and Access to Medicines: The Case of Antiretrovirals in Uganda, Oxfam Briefing Paper No. 26 (Oxford: 2002); Oxfam, Save the Children, and VSO, Beyond Philanthropy: The Pharmaceutical Industry, Corporate Social Responsibility and the Developing World (Oxford: 2002); and WHO, Globalization, TRIPS, and Access to Pharmaceuticals, WHO Policy Perspectives on Medicines, No. 3 (Geneva: 2001).

9. See, e.g., G. Enderle and G. Peters, A Strange Affair: The Emerging Relationship Between NGOs and Transnational Corporations (London: PriceWaterhouse, 1998).

10. See, e.g., World Bank, World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

11. See, e.g., www.novartisfoundation.com.

12. See Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (Chairperson: Jeffrey Sachs), Macroeconomics and Health: Investing in Health for Economic Development (Geneva: WHO, 2001).

13. K. Abbasi, “Healthcare Strategy,” British Medical Journal, 3 April 1999, 933–1006; D. Gwatkin, “The Burden of Disease Among Global Poor,” Lancet 23 (October 1999): 586–89.

14. WHO, World Health Report 2000—Health Systems: Improving Performance (Geneva: 2000).

15. P. Jha, A. Mills, K. Hanson, L. Kumaranayake, L. Conteh, C. Kurowski, S. N. Nguyen, V. O. Cruz, K. Ranson, L. M. E. Vaz, S. Yu, O. Morton, and J. D. Sachs, “Improving the Health of the Global Poor,” Science 295(5562) (15 March 2002): 2035–39; D. Filmer, J. Hammer, and L. Pritchettet, Health Policy in Poor Countries: Weak Links in the Chain? Policy Research Working Paper no. 1874 (Washington: World Bank, 1998); “Weak Links in the Chain II: A Prescription for Health Policy in Poor Countries,” The World Bank Research Observer 17(1) (2002): 47–66.

16. See, e.g., www.caa.org.au/campaigns/trade/wto/agriculture.html.

17. See www.novartisfoundation.com/en/articles/access/index.htm.

18. See www.unglobalcompact.org.

19. See K. M. Leisinger, K. Schmitt, and R. Pandya-Lorch, Six Billion and Counting: Population Growth and Food Security in the 21st Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press for IFPRI, 2002).

20. M. Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” New York Times Magazine, 13 September 1970; see also M. Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business,” in Ethical Theory and Business, ed. T. L. Beauchamp and N. E. Bowie (Old Tappan, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1983), 81–83. With a “presumption of innocence” attitude, one could easily interpret the “rules of the game” as including a lot of what is defined to be corporate responsibility.

21. See Environics, The Millennium Poll.

22. For the Novartis example, see K. M. Leisinger, “Towards Globalization with a Human Face: Implementation of the UN Global Compact Initiative at Novartis,” Journal of Ethics and Globalization, January/February 2003 (online version on www.parallaxonline.org/peglobalhuman5.html).

23. United Nations, The Social Responsibility of Transnational Corporations, 19.

24. See Oxfam, TRIPS and Public Health, Oxfam Briefing Paper No. 15 (Oxford: 2002), but also the debate about the role of multinational corporations in the political affairs of Chile in the early 1970s.

25. This argument is made on the understanding that governments in OECD countries are—as one of their good governance duties—providing the necessary social safety nets to ensure that their poor or uninsured citizens have access to essential medical care, including essential medicines.

26. Oxfam, Save the Children, and VSO, Beyond Philanthropy.

27. See, e.g., the Annual Report of the Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development, www.novartisfoundation.com.

28. See www.foundation.novartis.com/leprosy/index.htm.

29. A. Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 283.

30. See www.nitd.novartis.com.

31. Important work in this context is done by Davidson R. Gwatkin; see, e.g., “Health Inequalities and the Health of the Poor: What Do We Know? What Can We Do?” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 78(1) (2000): 3–18.

32. See R. T. De George, Competing with Integrity in International Business (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

33. WHO, Health—A Key to Prosperity: Success Stories in Developing Countries (Geneva: 2000), 10.

34. See UNDP, Human Development Report 2003—Millennium Development Goals: A Compact Among Nations to End Human Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press), 12.