Living Worth
eBook - PDF

Living Worth

Value and Values in Global Pharmaceutical Markets

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Living Worth

Value and Values in Global Pharmaceutical Markets

About this book

In Living Worth Stefan Ecks draws on ethnographic research on depression and antidepressant usage in India to develop a new theory of value. Framing depressive disorder as a problem of value, Ecks traces the myriad ways antidepressants come to have value, from their ability to help make one's life worth living to the wealth they generate in the multibillion-dollar global pharmaceutical market. Through case studies that include analyses of the different valuation of generic and brand-name drugs, the origins of rising worldwide depression rates, and the marketing, prescription, and circulation of antidepressants, Ecks theorizes value as a process of biocommensuration. Biocommensurationsā€”transactions that aim or claim to make life betterā€”are those forms of social, medical, and corporate actions that allow value to be measured, exchanged, substituted, and redistributed. Ecks's theory expands value beyond both a Marxist labor theory of value and a free market subjective theory, thereby offering new insights into how the value of lives and things become entangled under neoliberal capitalism.

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Yes, you can access Living Worth by Stefan Ecks in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Indian & South Asian History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Introduction
  5. One. Embodied Value Theory
  6. Two. Relative Value: Culture, Comparison, Commensurability
  7. Three. Never Enough: Markets in Life
  8. Four. Making a Difference: Corporate Social Responsibility
  9. Five. Pharmaceutical Citizenship, Marketing, and the Global Monoculture of Health
  10. Six. What Drugs Do in Different Spaces: Global Spread and Local Bubbles
  11. Seven. Acting through Other (Prescribing) Habits
  12. Eight. Culture, Context, and Consensus: Comparing Symptoms and Things
  13. Nine. Generic: Distinguishing Good Similarity from Bad Similarity
  14. Ten. Same Ills, Same Pills: Genealogies of Global Mental Health
  15. Eleven. Failed Biocommensurations: Psychiatric Crises after the DSM-5
  16. References
  17. Index