The Private Life of Numbers: Pharmaceutical Marketing in Post-Welfare Argentina

Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 194-213

  Lakoff, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Audit firms; Biomedical expertise; Drug; Pharmaceutical marketing; Sales

Indexed keywords

EID: 84889491277     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1002/9780470696569.ch11     Document Type: Chapter

References (39)

1. Kathryn Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991);
2. Carlos Waisman, Reversal of Development in Argentina: Postwar Counterrevolutionary Policies and Their Structural Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
3. Martin Hopenhayn provides a lucid account of this process from the perspective of Latin American intellectuals and policy-makers. See M. Hopenhayn, No Apocalypse, No Integration: Modernism and Postmodernism in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
4. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose, eds., Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and the Rationalities of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
5. ISALUD, "El Mercado de Medicamentos en la Argentina," Estudios de la Economia Real, no. 13 (Buenos Aires: Fundacion ISALUD, 1999).
6. Gilles Deleuze, "Post-Script on Control Societies," in Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); for a wide-ranging description of the experiential implications of new forms of global capital
7. see Jean and John L. Comaroff, "Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming," Public Culture 12(2), 2000, pp. 291-343.
8. For the description of the practice of denunciation as the uncovering of impurity within regimes of action, see Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot, De la Justification: les economies de la grandeur(Paris: Gallimard, 1991).
9. Paul Rabinow shows that as early as Pascal's plan to sell transportation infrastructure to the Parisian bourgeoisie, truth-seeking has coexisted with enterprise. See P. Rabinow, Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). On the "impurities" that patient activism introduced to clinical research into HIV/AIDS
10. see Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
11. See, for example, Marcia Angell, "Is Academic Medicine For Sale?" New England Journal of Medicine 342(20), 2000, pp. 1516-1518.
12. David Healy, "The dilemmas posed by new and fashionable treatments," Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 7, 2001, pp. 322-327.
13. See Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
14. As Steven Shapin has shown, relations of trust and socially sanctioned authority have underpinned scientific knowledge production from the earliest moments of what came to be known as the Scientific Revolution. See S. Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
15. Charles Sabel, "Constitutional Orders: Trust Building and Response to Change," in Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions, J. Rogers Hollingsworth and Robert Boyer, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
16. ISALUD, "El Mercado de Medicamentos en la Argentina." Data on the number of reps in 2002 comes from the union of agentes de propaganda medica (APMs). Their website, which features an animated suitcase-bearing rep, can be found at http://www.apm.org.ar
17. IMS Health website; http://www.imshealth.com (accessed December 1998).
18. Ian Hacking describes the "avalanche of printed numbers" produced by nation-states, beginning in the Napoleonic era, in The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
19. Michel Foucault, " 'Omnes et Singulatim': Toward a Critique of Political Reason," in Foucault, Power, James Faubion, ed. (New York: New Press, 2000).
20. See Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989).
21. Nikolas Rose, "Numbers," in Powers of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
22. See Nikolas Rose, "The Death of the Social? Refiguring the Territory of Government," Economy and Society 25(3), 1996, pp. 327-356.
23. Deleuze, "Post-Script on Control Societies."
24. For the history of the use of "territory" measures in sales management, see Timothy Spears, 100 Years on the Road: Traveling Salesmen in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
25. I describe this dynamic in more detail in Andrew Lakoff, Pharmaceutical Reason: Technology and the Human at the Modern Periphery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
26. Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999);
27. Marilyn Strathern, ed., Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (New York: Routledge, 2000).
28. The course was part of Lilly's efforts to promote new uses of its anti-psychotic medication Zyprexa as Prozac went off patent.
29. Van der Geest et al. make this point in their important survey of the anthropology of pharmaceuticals: "Pharmaceuticals are often recast in another knowledge system and used very differently from the way they were intended in the 'regime of value' where they were produced."
30. See Sjaak van der Geest, Susan Reynolds Whyte, and Anita Hardon, "The Anthropology of Pharmaceuticals: A Biographic Approach," Annual Review of Anthropology 25, 1996, p. 166.
31. IMS Health sales reports. Data obtained through anonymous sources.
32. Horacio Cecchi, "Una noticia para comerse las uñ as," Página 12, August 16, 2001.
33. "Los Argentinos se sienten devaluados," BBC Online, January 24, 2002.
34. Sophie Arie, "Argentina Hits Rock Bottom," The Observer, December 9, 2001.
35. Jorge Palomar, "El Ranking de los Remedios," La Nación On Line, 1996.
36. For the concept of explanatory models in psychiatry, see Arthur Kleinman, Rethinking Psychiatry: From Cultural Category to Personal Experience (New York: Free Press, 1988).
37. Miriam Gattari, Susana Scarpatti, Inés Bignone, Ricardo Bolaños, and Ulises Romeo, "Estudio de utilización de ansioliticos y antidepresivos en cuatro entidades de la seguridad social de la Argentina, periodo 1997-2000," unpublished MS, 2001.
38. I am very grateful to Nikolas Rose for obtaining and sharing this most valuable data.
39. Unofficial data: over the two and a half year period, Paxil sales had gone from an annual $6.2 million to $11.5 million. Unit sales of paroxetine and sertraline also increased markedly.