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In The Lab Blog

May 16, 2013

Bangladesh

Please watch the original footage that accompanies this blog post.

In the aftermath of the Rana Plaza fire there has been a lot of finger-pointing as to who bears the majority of the blame for the disaster that left over 1,100 workers dead.

May 15, 2013

This is the third is a set of blogs devoted to strengthening the concept and theory of institutional corruption (IC). A previous blog urged that IC would be greatly strengthened by drawing on moral philosophy to establish a normative, external foundation for both defining when IC is occurring and for developing legitimate reforms for institutional integrity.

May 14, 2013

Good, Clean Data

Brooke Williams

In our recent story for The New Republic, Ken Silverstein and I examined think tank scholars who simultaneously work as registered lobbyists. We knew of situations worth examining: a resident think tank fellow also representing Polish oil interests, and the director of a homeland security program lobbying for defense contractors, to name a couple. But we wanted to go beyond the anecdotal and gain context. Was this part of a larger system in which registered lobbyists have access to think tanks from the inside?

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Twitter

1 voice, 1 vote? Not if you're poor. #LabWPs 10 by Lab Fellow Dan Weeks: http://t.co/KQk9GJ16vX #iCorruption #poverty

Extraordinary video & post by Heather White on #iCorruption causes of the tragedy exemplified by 4/24 Savar collapse http://t.co/MRnqu8QYkN

Featured

Physicians and the Pharmaceutical Industry: Where does this Story Begin?

Kirsten Austad and Aaron Kesselheim

This blog post discusses the article "Changing Interactions Between Physician Trainees and the Pharmaceutical Industry” published in the February 27, 2013 electronic edition of the Journal of General Internal Medicine. The study was conducted by former Fellow in the Lab on Institutional Corruption Kirsten Austad, Lab affiliates Aaron Kesselheim M.D. J.D. and Eric Campbell Ph.D., and Jerry Avorn M.D. and other members of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Within a week of its online-first publication the article received worldwide coverage, including The Boston Globe, Stuttgarter Zeitung, Popular Science, Pharmalot, HealthDay (in English and Spanish), and a host of medical and legal themed news portals and blogs.

Institutional Corruption Working Papers Series

The Lab has released our new working paper series on Institutional Corruption on our SSRN imprint. The series includes:

WP 01. March 15, 2013. Lawrence Lessig, Institutional Corruptions.
WP 02. March 21, 2013. Donald W. Light, Strengthening the Theory of Institutional Corruptions: Broadening, Clarifying, and Measuring.
WP 03. March 28, 2013. Brooke Williams, Influence Incognito.
WP 04. April 4, 2013. Maryam Kouchaki, Professionalism and Moral Behavior: Does A Professional Self-Conception Make One More Unethical?
WP 05. April 11, 2013. Malcolm S. Salter, Short-Termism At Its Worst: How Short-Termism Invites Corruption... and What to Do About It.
WP 06. April 18, 2013. Gregg Fields, What Institutional Corruption Shares with Obscenity.
WP 07. April 25, 2013. Jay Youngdahl, Investment Consultants and Institutional Corruption.
WP 08. May 2, 2013. Miriam Schwartz-Ziv, Does the Gender of Directors Matter?
WP 09. May 9, 2013. Lisa Cosgrove and Robert Whitaker, Finding Solutions to Institutional Corruption: Lessons from Cognitive Dissonance Theory.
WP 10. May 16, 2013. Daniel Weeks, Democracy in Poverty: A View from Below.

For more on this series, go to Tools