Reputation and Power

Winner of the 2011 Allan Sharlin Memorial Award, Social Science History Association Reputation and Power is ... and authoritative and well researched book. Political scientists will admire Carpenter's scholarship. It is, indeed, a good mix of history, politics, gossip, and intrigue. --Michael Rawlins, Lancet In his massive, magisterial Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA, the Harvard political scientist Daniel Carpenter provides both a history of the agency and an analysis of how it gained and flexed its most important regulatory power, the ability to keep new drugs off the market. Carpenter carefully documents the ways FDA bureaucrats have worked to exploit opportunities to expand their influence and reshape how the drug industry and the medical profession operate. --Keith E. Wittington, Reason This immense volume considers the Food and Drug Administration's regulation of the pharmaceutical industry, focusing on the connection between the FDA's stellar reputation and its ability to wield power as a regulatory body. The book is exceptional, successfully combining an array of methodological approaches. --Choice Carpenter?s book has much to offer. Reputation and Power will be a valuable resource for anyone who is interested in understanding US pharmaceutical regulation and the debates surrounding it. --Mary K. Olson, Health Affairs This book succeeds quite well in achieving its ambitious objectives. It provides a compelling and useful account for the exceptional role of the FDA in American society, government, and regulation. Perhaps more importantly for organizational scholars, it provides a very rich case study of the evolution of an organization?s reputation, image and power and how these combine to affect its performance. --Thomas D'Aunno, Administrative Science Quarterly Carpenter's book was ten years in the making and it shows. The research is wide ranging and groundbreaking and the impressive range of materials will certainly help expand the field... Reputation and Power is essential reading for modern historians of medicine. In a renewed climate of interest in regulation, it is a sober addition to the previous polemical debates about the world of pharmaceuticals and their regulation and is sure to generate a broad discussion. --Lucas Richert, Social History of Medicine Reputation and Power ... is a masterful study in the best tradition of political science and will stand as a definitive treatment of regulation, and not merely of the FDA's policies and practices. Along with his earlier work, this book will be an essential part of the emerging study of the American administrative state, whether that study takes place in political science, history, sociology, law, or, indeed, in schools of medicine and pharmacology. --John Ferejohn, Perspectives on Politics