It has been shown that large pharmaceutical companies set up groups whose job it is to ensure integrity, quality, and safety in the company's output...

Ludzie pragną czasami się rozstawać, żeby móc tęsknić, czekać i cieszyć się z powrotem.

They do this because it is in the interests of profit to have groups totally committed to these goals. Yet it is also in the interests of profit to have other groups like regulatory affairs, public relations and top management itself who can take matters out of the hands of the pro-public-interest groups when integrity will cost too much money. Pharmaceutical com­panies do not want their scientists to do dishonest research. They want scientists uncompromisingly committed to scientific integrity. However, they also want to be able to use that scientific integrity selectively: to ignore it when they want, to have studies repeated when results are not favourable, to have the public relations department exaggerate the findings when results are promising.
The more organisational clout pro-public-interest constituencies are given, the more the over-ruling of those constituencies will be confined to matters of only major consequence for profit. Already, pharmaceutical companies frequently let compliance groups have their head in ways that will reduce profits. They do this to maintain morale in the group and to avoid undermining their authority in the organisation. With more organisational clout for the compliance group, the increased disruptiveness and conflict from over-ruling them makes it prudent to limit even further the situtations where corporate goals are asserted over them.
Examples of strengthening organisational clout for pro-public- interest constituencies include giving the international medical director an unqualified right to veto any promotional materials from a subsidiary which do not meet corporate standards of full dis­closure of product hazards, having the plant safety officer answer­able to a head office safety director rather than subject to the authority of the plant manager whom s/he might need to pull up for a safety violation, having quality control independent from marketing or production pressures, having an international com­pliance group answerable only to the chief executive officer.
More simply, it is important that compliance executives be senior in the organisational hierarchy. A preliminary study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found that companies with low employee accident rates were more likely to have 'their highest safety officials at top management levels of their firms' (cited in Monahan and Novaco, 1979). Monahan, Novaco and Geis (1979) found that two of the 'Big Four' Detroit automobile manu­facturers make recall decisions at the middle-management level and two at the level of top management (vice-presidents and members of the board). National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data show that the two companies whose recall decisions were made by middle management were audited by the government for product- safety violations a total of ten times while the two in which decisions were made at top management level were audited only once. While this kind of evidence is highly tentative, it is consistent with the views expressed by pharmaceutical executives in the present study.
In addition to strengthening the bargaining position of explicitly pro-public-interest subunits, it is important to render all subunits more responsive to the public interest. A dangerous situation is one where line supervisors regard safety or quality as the responsibility of safety or quality staff. Both line and staff must be held account­able for problems within their sphere of responsibility. The costs of recalls or industrial accidents can be externalities to the economic calculations of production subunits. Petersen (1978: 49-51) has suggested that these costs be sheeted back to the subunit by charging accident costs to the profit and loss statements of subunits, prorating insurance premiums according to subunit safety perform­ance and putting safety into the supervisor's appraisal.
The next requirement for effective self-regulation is that there be provision to ensure that 'bad news' gets to the top of the cor­poration. There are two reasons for this. First, when top manage­ment gets to know about a crime which achieves certain subunit goals, but which is not in the overall interests of the corporation, top management will stop the crime. Second, when top management is forced to know about activities which it would rather not know about, it will often be forced to 'protect its ass' by putting a stop to it. Gross has explained how criminogenic organisations frequently build in assurances that the taint of knowledge does not touch those at the top.
A job of the lawyers is often to prevent such information from reaching the top officers so as to protect them from the taint of knowledge should the company later end up in court. One of the reasons former President Nixon got into such trouble was that those near him did not feel such solicitude but, from self- protective motives presumably, made sure he did know every detail of the illegal activities that were going on (Gross, 1978: 203).