Understanding firm- and field-level change toward sustainable development: insights from the pharmaceutical industry and access to medicine, 1960-2020

Insufficient access to medicines is a persistent global problem that affects billions of people in low- and middle-income countries. In this chapter, we use access to medicines as a case to understand how business can become instrumental in making progress on persistent and global problems we associate with sustainable development. We examine the emergence and evolution of access to medicines as a mandate for the pharmaceutical industry to contribute to sustainable development. More specifically, we trace the historical developments of corporate social initiatives in the industry and revisit existing research on access to medicines in management and related fields. We then introduce three distinct analytical perspectives — field emergence and change, firm heterogeneity, organizational processes — to examine access to medicine, expose managerial challenges and offer a research agenda that helps to advance research on access to medicines and, more generally, on corporate efforts to address pressing global problems subsumed under the Sustainable Development Goals.