Polychlorinated biphenyls in the electrical machinery industry: an ethnological study of community action and corporate responsibility.

Environmental and occupational health problems cannot be understood through purely medical and epidemiological analyses, the social forces affecting biologically adaptive behavior must also be analyzed. Research on the political economy of health needs to generate an ethnology of community action relevant to the analyses of corporate structures for which it is best known. In studying the community of Pittsfield, Mass., where a General Electric plant is located, we encountered environmental and occupational health problems in just this context. This essay is, therefore, an effort to extend the political economy of health into the ethnological domain of community research.