In the Name of Transparency: Organizing European pharmaceutical markets through struggles over transparency devices
研究了欧洲药品市场中围绕透明度不同愿景的争论如何通过具体工具塑造市场组织，从国家透明、企业透明到国家联盟透明三个阶段，对理解市场政治和挑战现状者有用。
The controversies surrounding the heavily redacted contracts between the European Commission and Covid-19 vaccine producers have highlighted ‘transparency’ as a hotly debated concept in the pharmaceutical market. We combine research on transparency with literature on the organization of markets to investigate how such struggles over competing visions of transparency end up shaping markets and their politics. Focusing on the case of the European pharmaceutical market, we demonstrate how market transparency was implemented through devices that enacted specific visions of transparency and produced distinct market organizations over time: transparency for states (until about 1990), transparency for corporations (ca. 1990 to 2010) and transparency for state coalitions (since 2010). We discuss how the specific instrumentations and materializations of such visions of transparency play a crucial role in market politics. This debate also highlights why engaging in controversies over transparency has become increasingly important for those contesting the market status quo – in pharmaceutical markets and beyond.