Corruption System

Bridging the Disciplines: a System Approach to Corruption

Emile Kolthoff, from the Open University, made a contribution to the 2012 Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, in the category “Traditional and New Forms of Crime and Deviance,” under the title “Bridging the Disciplines: a System Approach to Corruption”. Here is the abstract: Most research into corruption so far, focuses on the scope of the problem and on causes situated in differences between countries and organizations. Although valuable conclusions can be drawn from this kind of research, the question is not answered why in one particular organization a specific individual does engage in unethical behavior while his close colleague does not, and why seemingly law obeying and decent people can in specific circumstances engage in the most unethical forms of behavior. That type of knowledge seems vital to achieve a drastic reduction of unwanted behavior in organizations and is scattered about many fields that hardly communicate with each other. The presumption of this paper is that we have to look at organizations as systems; the behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made. Based on a literature review on causes of corruption a proposal is presented for an integrated theory, comprising elements from the criminological, the human resource, the organizational sciences, the public administration and the (social) psychological field.[rtbs name=”criminology”]

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Further Reading

• “Bridging the Disciplines: a System Approach to Corruption”, by Emile Kolthoff (Proceedings)