Promissories and pharmaceutical patents: agencing markets through public narratives

Abstract

We investigate a body of data emanating from the 2008/2009 EU Pharmaceutical Sector Inquiry, interpreting the collection of submissions to it as a concerted attempt at market innovation that becomes fraught with challenge and contest. In the pharmaceutical market, interests associated with patient concerns, government budgets, global “Big Pharma,” and local “small pharma” coalesce and compete with patent law, technological innovation and drug lifecycles. Our research question is: What role do market narratives play in shaping the market's socio-technical agencements? By introducing market narratives, we focus on the performative effects of temporality and iteration. Our argument is that by acting as (contested) promissories, market narratives contribute to “agencing” a market, such that actors are engaged continually in juxtaposing and adjusting their representations of it and putting in place those socio-technical agencements that make the markets resemble those narratives. Narrating a market becomes a collective and iterative task of equipping actors to shape the markets that they desire.

Keywords:

• market agencement
• performativity
• promissory
• market representations
• narrative
• Sector Inquiry
• pharmaceutical industry
• market studies

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) Colloquium, Rotterdam, July 2014, at the European Science Forum on Agencing Markets, Corsica, September 2013, and at the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) Conference, Bordeaux, September 2014. We thank the participants of the Corsica workshop, the attendants of the EGOS Performativity track, and the IMP Market Shaping track for their many comments and suggestions on this paper. Our particular thanks go to our Corsica discussant C.F. Helgesson as well as the workshop conveners Franck Cochoy and Pascale Trompette, who together with Luis Araujo also edited this Special Issue. We are grateful to our anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Susi Geiger http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2400-7333

John Finch http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2480-8541

Notes

1. It was the first time that a Sector Inquiry opened with such raids, and for many commentators they represented an application that was unprecedented in its force and signaling value of the EU's antitrust regulations. To justify this approach, the FAQ Section of the DG Comp website reads:

The kind of information the Commission will be examining in this inquiry, notably concerning the use of intellectual property rights, litigation and settlement agreements covering the EU, is by its nature information that companies tend to consider highly confidential. Such information may also be easily withheld, concealed or destroyed. The Commission is keen to have immediate access to all such company information and has therefore ordered unannounced inspections.

2. A disclaimer is necessary at this point. In “Representing Reality,” Potter (1996) points out that any attempt at analyzing or deconstructing discourse within a conventional textual narrative such as a scientific text – as the present one – is essentially a self-referential exercise. (Social) scientific texts use the same procedures as other texts when they “separate descriptions from their own interests and produce them as neutral and external; that is, to give them a quality of out-there-ness” (15) are used. As a narrative in itself, the scientific text is always partial and incomplete. So too, by extension, is this article.

3. It is noteworthy that this Inquiry was from the outset couched in terms of safeguarding competition rather than public welfare, though the narratives constructed referred to both discourses.

4. The publication of this report followed a large-scale investigation by DG Comp including the analysis of more than 20,000 pages of texts obtained during the January 2008 inspections, interviews with a range of stakeholders, surveys of pharmaceutical companies and other stakeholders and requests for information.

5. One may note that the Rt. Hon. Sir Robin Jacob, Court of Appeal of England and Wales, found none of these market practices to be either remarkable or novel in his speech at the Commission Presentation of the PR.

6. It needs to be mentioned that some originator companies are also manufacturers of generic medicines and that many generic firms are large global entities, so this separation is not quite as clear-cut as made out here.

7. The Inquiry Report specifically excludes generic price competition from its purview.

8. This throws up interesting reflections on the reach and longevity of reports, as well as on the fact that the intertextuality is both synchronous and diachronous – older versions do not necessarily disappear when they are replaced with newer ones, such that the making of these texts remains visible.

9. So-called pay-for-delay transactions or those which limit market entry for generic companies and include value transfers from originator to generic company.