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    Supply chain information visibility and its impact on decision-making : an integrated model in the pharmaceutical industry : a dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management at Massey University, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2021) Nguyen, Thi Thanh Hoa
    Supply chain information visibility (SCIV) has been largely recognized as a key issue in pharmaceutical supply chain management. In recent years, there has been growing concern regarding the exponential growth and ubiquity of supply chain information as the result of the application of advanced technologies. Thus, the topic of visibility of information flow across a supply chain has attracted interest in both practice and academia. Despite the existence of considerable literature on SCIV, the concept is still under-theorized. The lack of a clear understanding of the characteristics of SCIV has made it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of SCIV and, consequently, hinders the improvement of SCIV (McIntire, 2014). Second, recent research identifies the potential of SCIV for operational performance through supporting managerial decision-making but also points out challenges and risks. In addition, there is a dearth of behavioral empirical research on supply chain management topics with which to achieve an increase in theory-building research in the field. This research addresses these gaps in the literature and investigates how SCIV across the pharmaceutical supply chain is perceived by pharmaceutical supply chain practitioners who are involved in supply chain decision-making, and how the decision-makers make use of SCIV in their supply chain decision-making process. This study adopted an exploratory, and qualitative approach to address two research questions: “How do supply chain professionals perceive SCIV in the pharmaceutical supply chain?” and “How do supply chain professionals make informed supply chain decisions?” The constructivist grounded theory methodology was used to guide the data gathering and analysis. The data were mainly drawn from semi-structured interviews with supply chain practitioners in New Zealand-based pharmaceutical firms, working at different levels of the supply chain, including manufacturers and distributors. Based on the findings a theoretical model was developed, the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Information-based Decision-Making Model. The model explains the behavioral supply chain decision-making process in the pharmaceutical supply chain, based on the existence of a given level of SCIV. The empirical findings suggest that SCIV is achieved both within and outside of the pharmaceutical firms and that human relational factors tend to be more beneficial than technological factors in developing SCIV. The importance of this finding is that it addresses a frequently asked question in recent literature about what constitutes SCIV and how to successfully build information visibility in a supply chain. Moreover, this research contributes to the behavioural supply chain management research literature by introducing a theoretical model of pharmaceutical supply chain information-based decision-making, which is grounded in the field data. The model offers significant theoretical insight into information-based decision-making in the pharmaceutical supply chain context based on empirical data, which has been largely overlooked in the supply chain management discipline. The empirical findings suggest that supply chain practitioners make information-based decisions in which they conduct an informative engaging mechanism with technological tools, with relevant stakeholders, and with themselves. Thus, the decision-making process involves extensive data analysis along with the crucial support of experience-based intuition and relevant stakeholders’ engagement. Another key contribution of this study is the identification of the constructive aspect of political behaviour in the supply chain decision-making process in which relevant stakeholders when invited to engage in the process tend to positively contribute and buy into the decision. Finally, this thesis provides significant practical implications and suggest directions for future research. Supply chain practitioners may benefit from the study by utilizing the study’s results to develop supply chain information visibility in their firms. In addition, the theoretical model of the information-based decision-making process explicates a useful step-by-step approach for supply chain practitioners to follow in making effective supply chain operational decisions. Recommendations for further research are provided, especially the recommendations for further studies that are crucially needed to assist firms to counter the pharmaceutical supply chain disruption risks caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
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    Patents, pills, the press and the poor : discourse and hegemony in news coverage of the global 'access to medicines' dispute, 1997-2003 : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communication and Journalism at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealan
    (Massey University, 2012) Owen, Thomas
    In the mid‐1990s a transnational civil society campaign emerged to advocate greater essential medicines access for the majority world. The campaign mobilised on a variety of fronts, but in particular around the argument that intellectual property protection was the central impediment to equitable medicines access. The campaign argued that strong patent protection created artificially high medicine prices, and that, in the case of global HIV/AIDS, such prices prohibited medicines access for the vast majority of those in need of it. The major pharmaceutical companies disagreed, arguing instead that absolute patent protection was essential for new medicine development. When a coalition of pharmaceutical companies sued the South African government over generic medicines access in 1998, the dispute became crystalised into a dramatic mediatised conflict. This thesis examines press coverage of the medicines access dispute in key United States, British and South African news outlets over the years 1997 to 2003. Adopting Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory as a macro‐theoretical guide, the thesis conceptualises the media space as a field of contestation between opposed political projects seeking to hegemonically articulate their particular discourse. Prior commentary on the medicines access dispute has suggested media coverage was a key driver in publicising the civil society campaign’s message. This thesis contributes previously missing empirical data to such claims, addressing the questions: did the news media discourse on HIV/AIDS medicines transform to better reflect the civil society campaign’s arguments over those of the major pharmaceutical companies? If so, what were the principal factors influencing this transformation? Through corpus‐assisted discourse analysis of a sample of a 1,113 newspaper articles, and consideration of personal testimonies from key journalists and activists, the thesis argues the media discourse did indeed transform in favour of the civil society campaign. However, while the campaign was successful in promoting a patentbased definition of the crisis, the solution most widely adopted was one that increased aid funding and decreased medicines prices, but which left the intellectual property infrastructure largely intact. In this way, the thesis documents both the successful articulation of a counter‐hegemonic discourse within the news media, as well as the process by which this challenge was reabsorbed into pre‐existing power structures.
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    Private interests and public money : the state provision of medicines in New Zealand 1938-1986 : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Massey University
    (Massey University, 1996) Baker, Astrid Theresa; Baker, Astrid Theresa
    Provision for free medicines was one aspect of the universal health service outlined in Part III of Labour's Social Security Act 1938. The official arrangements made during the next three years to supply medicines under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme were intended to benefit the ill, but also protected the interests of doctors and pharmacists. The Government's introduction of these benefits coincided with dramatic advances in organic chemistry and the subsequent development of synthetic drugs in Europe and the United States. These events transformed the pharmaceutical industry from a commodity business to a sophisticated international industry producing mainly synthetic, mass-produced medicines, well protected by patents. While no government in the early 1940s could have guessed at the cost of providing such products, no government committed to a public health service could deny these products once they were commercially available. Pharmaceutical benefits quickly became a crucial aspect of patients' rights to free medical care in general but, at the same time, represented income and profit to pharmacists, drug manufacturers and wholesalers, and an important aspect of doctors' professional and economic status. This tension between state commitments and private interests, still unresolved, is the central theme of this history. Through its control of access to the New Zealand market, the Department of Health was in theory in a strong position to bargain with local producers over drug prices. But in practice it was powerless to confront individual companies which held the patents on behalf of their overseas parent companies. Indeed the policies of the Department of Industries and Commerce were crucial in promoting the prosperity and profits of this small local pharmaceutical industry so as to guarantee access to paid employment and conserve precious foreign exchange. New Zealand was not alone in grappling with such problems and conflicts of interest. Governments in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia all had great difficulty controlling doctors' prescribing, and also had ambivalent aims when bargaining with local pharmaceutical manufacturers and importers. This thesis contributes to many studies on collaboration and compromise in government policy. It vividly demonstrates Heclo and Wildavsky's claim that governments operate as a federation of departments each linked to client groups. More importantly, this New Zealand history of the state provision of medicines extends and modifies British, Canadian, United States and Australian literature on the politics of national health services. Because discussion of state-funded and state-organised prescription medicines schemes in these studies is dominated by the politics of the medical profession, pharmaceutical companies and pharmacists are often only a shadowy presence. This thesis, for the first time, brings together the history of the medicines themselves, and the way in which they came to mean different things to each different provider - to doctors, drug companies, pharmacists and the state itself. An understanding of the history of this one aspect of government health services also enriches our understanding of the wider history of the New Zealand welfare state.