John Trumpbour

The Globalization of Innovation: Pharmaceuticals: Can India and China Cure the Global Pharmaceutical Market

Multinational pharmaceutical corporations are searching for means to broaden their capacity for drug development while decreasing costs. Pharmaceutical firms in India and China are increasingly forging partnerships with these corporations to gain revenue and to develop their own expertise. These relationships largely appear to be symbiotic. As a result of the movement of research to their countries, Indian and Chinese scientists are rapidly developing the ability to innovate and create their own intellectual property. Several firms in India and China are performing advanced R&D and are moving into the highest-value segments of the pharmaceutical global value chain.

Labor in the information age: a special issue of Labor History

Revolutions in communication have shaped the world of work, including the control of workers and their ability to mount resistance. In the introduction to his classic work Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener spoke of the ways in which ‘the first industrial revolution, the revolution of the ‘‘dark satanic mills’’’, brought ‘the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery’. He then speculated that ‘|[t]he modern industrial revolution’, based on the computerization of society, ‘is similarly bound to devalue the human brain’. Wiener still held out hope for ‘a society based on human values other than buying and selling’, but for this ‘we need a good deal of planning and a good deal of struggle’. He approached labor leaders in the 1940s about momentous things to come, but he regretted that they did not have ‘a broader training’ to tackle ‘technical developments with great possibilities for good and for evil’. With the advance of automation, they seemed ‘totally unprepared to enter into the larger political, technical, sociological, and economic questions which concern the very existence of labor’. In the twenty-first century, there are communities of labor activists and intellectuals who seek to master the new technologies on behalf of workers and their causes. Some are also attentive to profound dangers, from enhanced capabilities for surveillance to the de-skilling and degradation of work, to the erosion of older forms of community, the last signaled by the tottering collapse of many urban newspapers in North America. Communication revolutions have many partisans who regard them as heralds of democratic promise. The rise of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century is often regarded as a precondition for the sixteenth-century triumph of the Protestant Reformation, which a haughty James Froude liked to call ‘the hinge on which all modern history turns’. Though the Reformation may have spread less through print and more through oral means via armies of mobile preachers taking the Gospel to the semi-literate multitudes, the wider dissemination of books strengthened the consolidation of a national community and the diffusion of a national language, advanced by those insistent that God’s Word sounds more spectacular in the vernacular. Later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the rise of cheaper

Labor in the Information Age

Labor in the Information Age John Trumpbour a; Alex Bryson b; Rafael Gomez c; Paul Willman c; Kim Scipes d; Greg Gigg e; Janet Wasko f; Rose Tang g;Tom Mertes h a Harvard University, b National Institute for Economic and Social Research and Centres for Economic Performance (CEP), London, UK c Department of Management, London School of Economics, London, UK d Purdue University North Central, e Teamster member IBT Local 25, Boston f University of Oregon, g Ferris Fellow of Journalism/Visiting Professor, Princeton University, h University of California, Los Angeles