Recent controversies over the safety of drugs such as Vioxx, a painkiller manufactured by Merck, and Seroxat, an SSRI antidepressant manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, have led to a consequence that at first seems entirely positive: they have attracted more attention to the suppression of negative...

Philanthrocapitalism – the harnessing of pro-market strategies in order to increase returns on philanthropic investment – is starting to polarize opinions in the worlds of philanthropy, global health and development. With the term coined in just 2006, “philanthrocapitalism” has yet to...

In 2004, a former FDA medical officer named David Ross watched news coverage of one of the highest-profile pharmaceutical controversies in recent years: Merck’s withdrawal of Vioxx, its bestselling painkiller, from the global marketplace. At the time, David Ross railed to his wife about the...

This workshop, organised by InSIS, aimed to foster an exchange between different approaches in science and technology studies and political and economic sociology about the study of heterogeneous arrangements – assemblages in which economic relations are always entangled with political,...

From the subprime crisis, to the war on terror; from the politics of climate change to the rise of ‘evidence’ based medicine, this workshop will examine whether it is ignorance, and not knowledge, that serves as the main bulwark of economic, political and financial strength. In the context...

The economy is back at the centre of sociological analysis. This, of course, only means that it has recaptured the position it once held in the works of the sociological ‘founding fathers’, Simmel, Pareto, Weber, Marx, and Durkheim.The so-called ‘new economic sociology’ (NES) is a field...

Review of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism

Review of Tim Congdon's Keynes, Keynesians, and Monetarism

The selective publication of clinical trials by the pharmaceutical industry and by academic investigators has long been a contentious area in medicine. Clinicians and scientists such as Iain Chalmers, one of the founders of the UK Cochrane Centre, have worked for over two decades to address the...