ABSTRACT

In the postface, Sergio Sismondo starts on discourses of key opinion leaders (KOL), and on the management of these professionals by the pharmaceutical industry, as a way to consider the pervasive influence of corporate actors in the medical sector. He underlines that COI is part of accounts focused on individual human agency in which many of the actors of this domain are enormously invested. For him, this conception of influence tends to put too much of an emphasis on psychology, which leads many people to think in terms of actual biases, while the hegemonic position of the pharmaceutical firms is more fundamentally at stake.