Institutional Corruption/sources
Sources in the study of Institutional Corruption
Please include a summary of the material cited and why/where it might be relevant.
[Moran] Below, I provide five categories of sources based on how the authors define corruption.
Social Psychology (including Business Ethics): Corruption is use of group resources for private gain, and it derives from socialization and role conflicts, being seen as deviance from group norms (i.e., people “go with the flow” of others and try to be—and be seen as—consistent)
Roebuck, J.B., & Barker, T. (1974) A typology of police corruption. Social Problems, 21(3), 423-437. This nearly 40-year-old article is more of a sociology study, but it does address deviance, role conflicts, and most importantly, institutional corruption: “Police corruption is best understood, not as the exclusive deviant behavior of individual officers, but as group behavior guided by contradictory sets of norms linked to the organization to which the erring individuals belong, i.e., organizational deviance…. a thoroughly deviant organization (one in which the power structure and/or a number of its members are corrupt) attempts to prevent investigation through cover-up tactics.”
Rabl, T., & Kuhlmann, T.M. (2008). Understanding corruption in organizations – Development and empirical assessment of an action model, Journal of Business Ethics, 82, 477–495. A structural equation model analysis of simulator data of business students found “an attitude and subjective norm favoring corruption led to a desire to act corruptly. Given high perceived behavioral control, this desire was transformed into an intention that finally resulted in corrupt action.” Intention to act corruptly is key in this model and explains 60% of variance in corrupt action. Their definition: corruption is a voluntary, secret exchange between at least two people who abuse their power (authority, position or knowledge) deviating from norms for private gain, yet corruption need not produce victims.
Hamilton, V.L., & Sanders, J. (1999). The second face of evil: Wrongdoing in and by the corporation. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 222-233. This literature review and theory-building article examines wrongdoing at three levels: individuals acting solo, individuals acting within hierarchies, and the corporation itself as a moral/immoral actor—thus, it provides fodder for discussions of where “institutional” corruption lies. In particular, authors address the mindlessness with which evil acts can occur within organizations, how organizations (with their MBA, accounting, finance “expertise”) are expected to act with foresight but rarely do, and how the scope of the consequences of corporate wrongdoing are so large.
Desensitization studies, indirectly (i.e., they don’t mention “corruption”), also fit here: how “good” people “go bad.” These studies focus on how becoming less ethical, or engaging increasingly in unethical behavior, occurs over time. They include Zimbardo’s prison guard study at Stanford (for overview, see Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. New York: Random House), as well as studies of how regular citizens became Nazi torturers (e.g., Lifton, R.J. (1986). The Nazi doctors: Medical killing and the psychology of genocide. New York: Basic Books). The counterpoint includes the “moral exemplar” studies that described regular citizens who, despite norms against good behavior as well as great actual and potential costs, were “heroes” in a variety of situations (e.g., Colby A., & Damon, W. (1994). Some do care. New York: Free Press; Oliner, S.P., & Oliner, P.M. (1988). The altruistic personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. New York: Free Press).
Cognitive Psychology: Corruption is caused by, and perhaps is itself, a thinking bias
Zyglidopoulos, S.C., & Fleming, P.J. (2008). Ethical distance in corrupt firms: How do innocent bystanders become guilty perpetrators? Journal of Business Ethics, 78, 265–274. This article describes a process model and attendant hypotheses. In general, the emphasis is on the notion of time discounting—the further out in the future the consequences of one’s actions, the less those consequences matter to the person’s decision/behavior now. The model suggests that innocent bystanders are more likely to become innocent participants, who are more likely to become active rationalizers when the consequences of the corrupt behavior are far in the future and unseen. However, the authors do not suggest that this discounting is what turns rationalizers into either perpetrators or whistleblowers (i.e., actual corrupt actors).
Moore, C. (2008). Moral disengagement in processes of organizational corruption. Journal of Business Ethics, 80, 129–139. Albert Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement states that “individuals with high levels of moral disengagement have made habitual the use of cognitive mechanisms which reframe those individuals’ actions in ways which downplay their ethical content or import, thus suspending the self-regulatory processes that socio-cognitive theory suggests govern individual moral behavior.” This article argues that moral disengagement initiates, facilitates, and perpetuates corrupt behavior.
Jing, R., Graham, J.L. (2008). Values versus regulations: How culture plays its role, Journal of Business Ethics, 80, 791–806. I put this article in the bias section because it frames culture as cognitive biases accepted and perhaps preferred by members of a social group. The article focuses on two biases in particular: power distance and individualism. “Relationship-oriented cultures [high on power distance and low on individualism], because of their higher values for maintaining relationships, tend to be more regulated and more corrupt.” Cultural values data predict both “regulatory environment” and “levels of corruption” (i.e., the two are not opposite poles of one dimension) because these values underpin how cultural members prefer and think. Thus, regulation may not be an antidote for corruption.
Bazerman, M., & Tenbrunsel, A.E. (2011). Blind spots: Why we fail to do what’s right and what to do about it. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bounded ethicality addresses the bias to use self-serving rationalizations of one’s behavior to maintain a positive self-image as a moral person, achieved through denials of harm or responsibility, appeals to “higher” purposes, and references to what one considers a balance to another’s infraction or point-of-view.
Gigerenzer, G. (2008). Moral intuition=fast and frugal heuristics? In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology: Vol. 2. The cognitive science of morality: Intuition and diversity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gigerenzer, G. (1998). Psychological challenges for normative models. In D.M. Gabbay & P. Smets (Eds.), Handbook of defeasible reasoning and uncertainty management systems, vol. 1 (pp. 441-467) Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer. Gigerenzer has produced an abundance of work that parallels that of the bounded rationalists (e.g., Tversky & Kahnemann). However, Gigerenzer takes a more positive spin on how these biases arose and function in everyday life, often quite well for many quotidian purposes. Understanding the functionality of these “biases” (which he calls “heuristics”) may be more helpful than trying to “de-bias” people.
Developmental (Meaning-Making) Psychology and Linguistic Semantics: Corruption is meaning-making that becomes “aberrant” meaning, often via metaphor/analogy channels (also in minor way in Counseling/Clinical, when the aberrant meaning is concluded to be mental illness)
Pinto, J., Leana, C.R., & Pil, F.K. (2008). Corrupt organizations or organizations of corrupt individuals: Two types of organization-level corruption. Academy of Management Review, 33(3), 685–709. In general, a comparison of two conceptualizations of corruption in/of organizations. In relation to psychology, the article posits that corruption arises from employees trying to make sense of surprises and confusions by interpreting environmental cues that are ambiguous. These individual sense-makings become contagious to other employees (and, thus, corruption normalizes) primarily through storytelling, which is a particularly powerful and concise way of conveying event-sequential information. (This article also discusses social psychological processes contributing to the two types of corruption, in particular, how people conform to what they think others are doing or others’ attitudes, even when no one actually thinks/feels that way.)
Gopinath, C. (2008). Recognizing and justifying private corruption. Journal of Business Ethics, 82, 747–754. Shawver, T.J., & Sennetti, J.T. (2009). Measuring ethical sensitivity and evaluation. Journal of Business Ethics, 88, 663–678. These are a few of the studies exploring how people are not very sensitive to categorizing a situation as having ethical dimensions and, thus, don’t proceed along an ethical pathway in sense-making. (Kirsi Tirri in Finland has also done some work in ethical sensitivity and developed survey measures to use primarily with adolescents. Rest and Narvaez’s work with the Defining Issues Test, I believe, also addresses ethical sensitivity.)
Jackson, J.L. (2009). To tell it directly or not: Coding transparency and corruption in Malagasy political oratory. Language in Society, 38, 47-69. A linguistic anthropology paper whose aim is to describe “how the rhetorical modes of an urban polity [in Madagascar] are reorganized in ways that reshape vernacular epistemologies of truth in language and shift the production of particular publics and their access to participation in political process.” This article examines how a new regime uses language to distance itself from past political rhetoric and to advance its own causes/beliefs/values. This study ties to sociology and social psychology studies because it positions language as a medium through which to shift social and cultural relations (Elinor Ochs is famous for this type of study).
Vygotsky, L.S. (1986). Thought and language, rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lakoff, G. (2003). Metaphors we live by, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peirce, C.S. (1991). Peirce on signs. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. These are examples of older developmental psychology and semiotic works that discuss how language itself develops new meanings–including those potentially judged as corrupt— via extensions and entailments (e.g., proverbs, metaphors, analogies, euphemisms). Euphemism has been directly connected to corruption, as has lying in general. Lakoff’s theory is relatively well known, stating that metaphorical extensions of language derive from people attempting to extend beyond their bodies but use their bodies to describe those extensions. These extensions then become reified and literalized; people no longer recognize they are speaking metaphorically and think they are speaking “the truth” or “telling it like it is” (thus, as the Jackson paper above concludes, these speakers believe they are being more “transparent”).
Scott, J.C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott has been labeled a “radical” political scientist because his work examines the point of view of people who live on the margins and even outside the State, including those who are “barbarians” by choice. He discusses ways that underprivileged people use indirect linguistic means to have a voice in politically repressive regimes (e.g., through gossip, rumor, euphemism). Those in State power, of course, would—and do—consider these strategies “corrupt.”
Institutions and Institutional Change: Why corruption is sometimes hard to see and can be confused with creativity or innovation or error
Schmid, A. Allan. (2004). Conflict and cooperation: Institutional and behavioral economics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. “Institutions are human relationships that structure opportunities via constraints and enablement. A constraint on one person is an enablement for another. Institutions enable individuals to do what they cannot do alone. They structure incentives used in calculating individual advantage. They also affect beliefs and preferences and provide cues to uncalculated action. They provide order and predictability to human interaction.” Institutions provide cognitive frameworks for people to make meaning of events, and these cognitive frameworks generalize into norms and expectations. In this way, institutions reduce uncertainty by limiting appropriate choices. Meanings can change, often well before the bricks-and-mortar aspects or the rules of an institution are altered. Institutional change evolves from the interaction of learning (creating new understandings), constitution (the institution’s rules for making new rules), and power (whose demands and needs count the most). Institutions most serve those in power, who are in a better position to learn and to make new rules. (The implication is that people in power are more likely to corrupt—because they can bend then change the rules—and more likely to charge others of corruption for behavior or options that go against their established rules.)
Jaques, E. (1970). Work, creativity, and social justice. New York: International Universities Press. Jaques, E. (1951). The changing culture of a factory: A study of authority and participation in an industrial setting. London: Tavistock. Institutions help people handle their anxieties about uncertainty. This defense against anxiety occurs at the symbolic level where people “mentally collude” in shared understandings (or misunderstandings/delusions) of social and power relationships that affect their well-being. Yet, if institutions are built to make people feel like life is more certain and controllable, rather than to educate and socialize people to maturely handle uncertainty, then people may “cut corners” to maintain stability instead of doing the harder work of maintaining their morals and purposes. Institutions that seem “strong” because people feel safe with them not only may be fragile themselves to unknown threats but also may be socializing their participants to be unable to handle “bumps in the road.” Jaques called effective institutions “requisite organizations”: “In a requisite organization, people work together in ways that strengthen bonds of mutual trust and fairness, enhance imagination and innovation, and reduce suspicion and mistrust; the organisation achieves its purposes and contributes to the health of the wider society. ‘Anti-requisite’ organizations support autocratic coercion and destructive anxiety, and thus inhibit creativity. Although they may appear to be effective for some years, they eventually flounder.” (The implication is that, then, corruption is more of a possibility as people and institutions no longer have sufficient capacity to address uncertainty.)
Everett M. Rogers. (1962/1983). Diffusion of innovations, 3rd ed. New York: Free Press. This book is a classic for how a new product/service/idea spreads through a group. A social system, including an institution, is a set of interrelated units engaged in joint problem solving toward a common goal. The system defines the boundaries for diffusion to be possible. Diffusion of an innovation occurs as people seek or receive information to reduce their uncertainty. This information-seeking addresses more about “how does it work?” than about “what are its consequences?” It is more difficult to anticipate the meaning of the innovation before it has been let loose in the social system because people add new meanings as the innovation is applied to wider situations or needs. Individuals communicate with others, and, over time, the group moves toward a shared meaning of a need, event, idea or product. This movement shifts the whole social system when a critical mass has changed their minds in favor of the innovation (what others have termed “normalization of corruption” falls here, as does “success of creative product”). Whether a new way of doing something (creative or corrupting) is adopted depends on (1) people’s perception that it is better in some way; (2) it is compatible with existing values and needs (suggesting that values and meanings must shift before the financial exchanges of corruption can become a viable option, so when we focus on finances, we are at the tail end of the curve); (3) it is easy to use (especially if it is easier to be corrupt than to follow arcane or byzantine rules/norms); (4) people can try it before they commit to it (which is an obstacle for most forms of corruption); (5) people receive clear feedback that it works.
Other Social Sciences: Corruption as deviating from formally defined duties
Sampford, C., Shacklock, A., Connors, C., & Galtung, F. (Eds.) (2006). Measuring corruption. Hampshire, England: Ashgate. Corruption undermines fairness, stability, efficiency. Corruption equals leakage of resources from the institution.
Haller, D., & Shore, C. (2005). Corruption: Anthropological perspectives. London: Pluto Press. This book focuses explicitly on institutionalized corruption in developing states. Corruption claims depend on how well a group of people distinguish the “public” from the “private” domain.
Lambsdorff, J.G., Taube, M., & Schramm, M. (Eds.) (2005). The new institutional economics of corruption. London: Routledge. This volume contains essays from a variety of authors. The description below provides a more general overview of the book’s emphasis. Corruption is misuse of social capital. Trust is based on values, and corruption is based on strategy. Trust and corruption have an asymmetric relationship: decreasing corruption does not lead to higher trust, but increasing trust does lead to lower corruption. To act corruptly means a person takes what rightfully belongs to another or others but doesn’t “steal in the open.” Corruption requires a level of complexity to manifest in a social group, with institutions that govern power over resources and transactions but that also can lead to redirection of resources from agreed-upon institutional purposes if institutional leaders aren’t vigilant against opportunistic behavior. Corruption is more likely to occur with particularistic trust (in specified and known others, which manifests a strategic “in-group” mentality). Generalized trust (in the whole of society, which is a moral and usually more liberal mentality) is a crucial factor for integrity and low corruption. Corruption is likely to grow when particularistic and universalistic norms conflict and when particularistic norms are more binding (thus, corruption not necessarily a violation of norms but a choice of one set of norms over another). When particularistic norms are dominant, individualistic corruption can occur. When universalistic and particularistic norms conflict and one group thinks it has the power to redefine the value hierarchy, corruption universalized (note that this is a shift in meaning, not necessarily that money is changing hands). Systemic corruption occurs when corrupt acts become seen as normal, when the conflict is over and particularistic norms prevail.