Developing areas in the world often seek to improve their economies by attracting large corporations to site production facilities locally. Puerto Rico has often been cited as a model of development for other Latin American nations and the rest of the developing world because of this strategy. However, capital-intensive (as opposed to labor-intensive) industries like the pharmaceutical industry have created successful sites for private corporations while incurring public costs like pollution of the local environment, while not creating significant numbers of jobs for local workers. This anthropological dissertation research project will investigate the ways corporations contribute to a local community in which there are five multinational pharmaceutical production facilities, several Superfund sites (federally-recognized areas of environmental contamination), and chronically high unemployment. It will consider the perspectives of corporate managers, local government officials and community leaders, and local residents and their interest groups. The project will examine whether the corporations are seen as a successful means for improving the local economy, and what local residents perceive to be the risks or drawbacks to the factories. It is specifically designed to identify whether there is a standard working model of "community", based upon mutually recognized benefits or exchanges, that is shared across these diverse sub-populations. The research expands typical corporate-impact research beyond the workers to the surrounding residents, and broadens the scope of social theory to consider how corporations act as citizens in the social-political-economic arena. Broader Impacts: The findings of the study will be of interest to policy makers concerned with how for-profit institutions relate to the communities in which they effectively "live." The project will also contribute significantly to the training of a young social scientist.
