Neoliberal austerity and corporate crime: the collapse of the Maxima supermarket in Riga, Latvia.

The roof collapse of the Maxima supermarket in Riga, Latvia on November 21, 2013 left 54 dead. This analysis identifies the disaster as a "safety crime." Neoliberal deregulatory measures, intensified by the global economic and financial crisis and a programme of radical austerity, together with corporate and state disregard of public safety and well-being, combined to produce the disaster. The wider context and underlying causes of catastrophic safety failure exemplify the inherently contradictory character of the neoliberal "Baltic model" of austerity, recently much in vogue with international policymakers in both Europe and the United States. The authors conclude that the current renewed drive by the European Commission towards reducing regulation for business, especially in the aftermath of the crisis, further justifies longstanding anti-regulatory preferences of neoliberal domestic elites, with the result that the costs of disregard for public safety are externalized onto the general populace.

The intractable cigarette 'filter problem'.

BACKGROUND: When lung cancer fears emerged in the 1950s, cigarette companies initiated a shift in cigarette design from unfiltered to filtered cigarettes. Both the ineffectiveness of cigarette filters and the tobacco industry's misleading marketing of the benefits of filtered cigarettes have been well documented. However, during the 1950s and 1960s, American cigarette companies spent millions of dollars to solve what the industry identified as the 'filter problem'. These extensive filter research and development efforts suggest a phase of genuine optimism among cigarette designers that cigarette filters could be engineered to mitigate the health hazards of smoking. OBJECTIVE: This paper explores the early history of cigarette filter research and development in order to elucidate why and when seemingly sincere filter engineering efforts devolved into manipulations in cigarette design to sustain cigarette marketing and mitigate consumers' concerns about the health consequences of smoking. METHODS: Relevant word and phrase searches were conducted in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library online database, Google Patents, and media and medical databases including ProQuest, JSTOR, Medline and PubMed. RESULTS: 13 tobacco industry documents were identified that track prominent developments involved in what the industry referred to as the 'filter problem'. These reveal a period of intense focus on the 'filter problem' that persisted from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, featuring collaborations between cigarette producers and large American chemical and textile companies to develop effective filters. In addition, the documents reveal how cigarette filter researchers' growing scientific knowledge of smoke chemistry led to increasing recognition that filters were unlikely to offer significant health protection. One of the primary concerns of cigarette producers was to design cigarette filters that could be economically incorporated into the massive scale of cigarette production. The synthetic plastic cellulose acetate became the fundamental cigarette filter material. By the mid-1960s, the meaning of the phrase 'filter problem' changed, such that the effort to develop effective filters became a campaign to market cigarette designs that would sustain the myth of cigarette filter efficacy. CONCLUSIONS: This study indicates that cigarette designers at Philip Morris, British-American Tobacco, Lorillard and other companies believed for a time that they might be able to reduce some of the most dangerous substances in mainstream smoke through advanced engineering of filter tips. In their attempts to accomplish this, they developed the now ubiquitous cellulose acetate cigarette filter. By the mid-1960s cigarette designers realised that the intractability of the 'filter problem' derived from a simple fact: that which is harmful in mainstream smoke and that which provides the smoker with 'satisfaction' are essentially one and the same. Only in the wake of this realisation did the agenda of cigarette designers appear to transition away from mitigating the health hazards of smoking and towards the perpetuation of the notion that cigarette filters are effective in reducing these hazards. Filters became a marketing tool, designed to keep and recruit smokers as consumers of these hazardous products.

Academic-industrial relations before the blockbuster drugs: lessons from the Harvard Committee on Pharmacotherapy, 1939-1943.

Increasing discussion has developed in recent years over the nature of the relationship between academic medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. This article narrates the history of a little-known attempt at Harvard Medical School between 1939 and 1943 to establish an interdisciplinary, academic-industrial Committee on Pharmacotherapy to enhance and rationalize the relationship between the field of academic research in pharmacotherapeutics and the pharmaceutical industry. Using original archival materials, the authors depict the functioning of the committee, which was headed by Soma Weiss and included such members as Fuller Albright, Henry Beecher, and Walter Cannon. The committee would be collectively funded by seven pharmaceutical companies and was to be predicated on collaboration, both across the entire university and between academia and industry. It was expected to transform the bench-to-bedside study and testing of therapeutic compounds, to redefine the teaching of pharmacotherapy, and to create a unified forum through which to discuss the overall academic-industrial relationship and more specific issues such as patents. Unfortunately, the program proved to be short-lived, the victim of such contingent factors as the untimely death of Soma Weiss and America's entry into World War II, as well as such more fundamental factors as the inadequate and temporary nature of the funding stream and unresolved tensions regarding the goals of the committee on the part of both the medical school and its industry supporters. Nevertheless, these early forays into collaborative bench-to-bedside translational research and the rationalization of academic-industrial relations remain instructive today.

Manufacturing doubt: journalists' roles and the construction of ignorance in a scientific controversy.

In recent decades, corporate and special interests have developed a wide repertoire of methods to manufacture doubt about science that threatens their interests. In the case presented here, a trade association issued a rich assortment of rhetorical claims intended to sow public confusion about university studies that threatened to undermine its industry's activities. Journalists' use of these claims appeared to vary largely as a function of their perceptions of their journalistic roles and of their audiences, though their knowledge of science also appeared to play a role. Our findings offer insight into how and why reporters respond to rhetorical claims about scientific ignorance and uncertainty that actors use to discredit threatening science. In so doing, they contribute to growing scholarship on journalists' contributions to the social construction of ignorance in scientific controversies.

The company man: a case of white-collar crime.

Insider trading scandals on Wall Street have focused public attention on the abuse of money and power in the service of greed. The analytic situation described in this paper involves a patient who was involved in a major white-collar crime in the 1990s and imprisoned on charges of fraud. Release from prison brought his anxieties about money, work, and masculinity into sharp focus. The paper explores the some of the emotional conflicts and confusion around corporate success and failure, and the particular issues that arise when people identify themselves with the company they work for, something that corporate culture has always encouraged.

The business of ethics: gender, medicine, and the professional codification of the American Physiotherapy Association, 1918-1935.

The history of codes of ethics in health care has almost exclusively been told as a story of how medical doctors developed their own professional principles of conduct. Yet telling the history of medical ethics solely from the physicians' perspective neglects not only the numerous allied health care workers who developed their own codes of ethics in tandem with the medical profession, but also the role that gender played in the writing of such professional creeds. By focusing on the predominantly female organization of the American Physiotherapy Association (APA) and its 1935 "Code of Ethics and Discipline," I demonstrate how these women used their creed to at once curry favor from and challenge the authority of the medical profession. Through their Code, APA therapists engaged in a dynamic dialogue with the male physicians of the American Medical Association (AMA) in the name of professional survival. I conclude that, contrary to historians and philosophers who contend that professional women have historically operated under a gender-specific ethic of care, the physiotherapists avoided rhetoric construed as feminine and instead created a "business-like" creed in which they spoke solely about their relationship with physicians and remained silent on the matter of patient care.

The historical development of business philanthropy: social responsibility in the new corporate economy.

According to neo-liberal economists such as Friedman and Hayek, the prime function of any business enterprise is to generate profits; its central responsibility is to shareholders. The idea that business owners should also seek to perform social tasks is regarded as completely erroneous. Historical evidence suggests that not all business leaders have been content simply to perform a commercial role in society. Numerous industrialists and entrepreneurs throughout the nineteenth century made significant contributions to their local communities. The early efforts of socially responsible business leaders are well documented. This paper aims to build on existing historical analysis of business philanthropy and social involvement by analysing developments in post-war Britain. Three main historical developments are outlined. Firstly, the early post-war years, despite the formation of the welfare state, witnessed some notable efforts to engage business in society. These were mainly inspired by church-led organisations and Christian entrepreneurs. Second, the expansion of the corporate economy throughout the 1940s and 1950s placed increasing constraints on the social aspirations of businesses. Finally, from the mid-1970s onwards there grew a more general interest in corporate responsibility. This was consolidated in the 1980s. As part of the general redefinition of state functions in this period, the role of business in addressing social problems became more prominent. Such political and policy developments, it is argued, have made a significant contribution towards enhancing the social role of business.