INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP: MULTILEVEL ORDERS OF CORRUPTION (MOC Research Network)

Lund University, Sweden, 24-25 August 2020 (Deadline 20^th March 2020)

Workshop organizers: Rustam Urinboyev and Måns Svensson, Lund University, Department of Sociology of Law

Preliminary date and venue: Lund University, Lund, Sweden, August 24-25, 2020

Rationale and Purpose

The overall purpose of the proposed two-day workshop in Lund is to contribute new empirical and theoretical insights to the global academic and policy efforts of understanding and counteracting corruption. Corruption has become, without a doubt, a buzzword in both academic and policy debates over the last three decades. The initial view that “corruption greases the wheels of economic growth” in the newly independent states of Africa and Asia (Leff 1964, Huntington 1968, Scott 1972) has lost its validity in the light of the current ever-growing global coalition against corruption, spearheaded by Transparency International (TI) and the World Bank. According to these international bodies, this whole debate is now closed: Corruption, as they confidently assert, is “the abuse of public office/entrusted power for private gain” (World Bank 2002) and thereby “sands the wheels of economic growth”. This rests on the understanding that corruption, primarily affecting weak states in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America, is the main cause of poverty and inequality. It distorts public expenditures, increases the cost of running businesses, deters foreign investors and leads to social instability, weak rule of law and bad governance. These ideas are reinforced by the frequent use of “disease” and “cancer” metaphors to describe corruption (World Bank 2013).

Reflecting these global tendencies, over the last three decades, the amount of academic literature on (anti-) corruption has increased rapidly. These trends are particularly visible in the fields of economics and political science, the two disciplines that have contributed most extensively to the corruption literature and significantly shaped the globally circulating set of anti-corruption campaigns, policies, and laws. Notwithstanding these global efforts, one thing seems clear: There is no such thing as a remedy to this “cancer”. Indeed, anti-corruption efforts can be regarded as a huge policy failure: global anti-corruption bodies continue to rely on a “one-size-fits-all” approach. It is based on the assumption that the best way to combat corruption is to develop institutional and legal configurations and socio-economic settings in which public officials act with integrity so that corruption does not thrive.

Accordingly, mainstream anti-corruption policies emphasise the need to improve institutional and regulatory frameworks by frequently focusing on: formal law enforcement; the behaviour of actors in particular public-office settings; the system of formal rules and institutions; the role of political institutions; how the ruling elites are composed, the kind of competition that exists among them, and how accountable they are. Another factor that adds to this complexity is that most definitions of corruption are Western-centric and rest on the separation between the state (or its agents) and the rest of society, where salaried public officials, politicians, bureaucrats and judges are expected to draw a sharp distinction between their personal interests and the public resources they administer (Haller and Shore 2005, Nuijten and Anders 2007). Any deviation from the formal rules and duties of a public role in favour of private gain is interpreted as an act of corruption. The quantitative analyses of these processes lead to a set of correlations between certain factors and corruption, which form the basis for prescriptions against corruption.

Challenging the aforesaid mainstream frameworks, anthropological accounts of corruption have presented abundant evidence to support the claim that the public-private dichotomy is context-dependent and that even the meaning of the word “abuse” varies according to local legal and cultural standards (Gupta 1995, Haller and Shore 2005, Torsello and Venard 2016). They probed into the ways of how certain informal and illegal practices and transactions are perceived as instances of corruption from a legal standpoint (Heidenheimer et al. 1989, Della Porta and Vannucci 1999, TI 2007). However, from an anthropological perspective, moral codes and social norms vary across cultures, it is possible that each culture could have very different ideas of what constitutes corruption. Likewise, what is termed corruption from an outsider’s perspective is often linked to a code of values and behaviour that are widely known and accepted from an insider’s perspective (Pardo 1996).

The analysis of the existing (anti-) corruption debates and frameworks indicates at least three main tendencies:

First, most definitions of the corruption (e.g. presented by TI and the World Bank) and anti-corruption frameworks are seen as universally applicable regardless of the culture in which they are implemented. However, these approaches are problematic given that people in various cultures have very different ideas of what constitutes corruption (Lloyd Bierstaker 2009) and react differently to the institutional and regulatory norms imposed (Heywood 2018). This implies that in some cultures and societies, corrupt practices may be deemed to be not only morally acceptable but also functional and socially cohesive, whereas in some other cultures such practices are heavily condemned. Part of the reason for the broad failure of anti-corruption policies is that they do not account for cultural differences and fail to consider the contextual factors and mechanisms that explain the persistence of corruption. So, traditional economic-based attempts or legal centralistic normative approaches (Rose-Ackerman 1999, Acemoglu and Verdier 2000, Heidenheimer and Johnston 2011) should be complemented with the (micro-level) anthropological insights that account for cultural differences and include perspectives built on micro-level, everyday life observations (Gupta 2005).

Second, a tendency common in the bulk of corruption literature is that it either focuses on a global (anti-) corruption context, or on national/macro-level processes or meso/micro-level informal practices (Kaufmann 1998, De Sardan 1999, Ledeneva 2013, Kubbe and Engelbert 2017), but does not simultaneously address the complex interdependencies between these different levels/orders of corruption. This means that there is a need to connect these different orders of corruption by developing a multilevel approach that will enable us to study and understand the interconnections and contradictions between: (a) non-binding international anti-corruption agreements and indicators (“soft law”), (b) nation-state regulations (“legal norms”), and (c) meso- and micro-level norms and practices (“law in everyday life”). Thus, corruption can be better understood and combatted when we study simultaneously the interconnections between different levels and orders. These include international institutions and actors, the central state institutions, local government, corporations and business actors, civil society and non-state actors, and individual actors such as civil servants, micro-entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens.

Third, as pointed out above, there is extensive research on corruption. Much of the corruption literature comes from economics, political science, sociology, organisation studies, and social and legal anthropology. While recognising the importance of the aforesaid disciplinary scholarships, it should be noted that the research on corruption is very fragmented and has so far not been synthesised into an overarching framework (Prasad et al. 2019). There is a lack of interdisciplinary communication and researchers show insufficient interest or reluctance to engage with corruption research undertaken in academic disciplines outside their field (Jancsics 2014). As a result, approaches and models developed by different disciplines remain largely isolated from each other. This factor indicates the need for an interdisciplinary study of corruption, combining the perspectives from various disciplines, an approach that may provide more nuanced understanding of corruption which can inform anti-corruption policies.

In the light of the aforesaid tendencies, it can be inferred that we cannot rely merely on the mainstream economic approaches and rational-legalistic perspectives (i.e. rational actors and structural approaches) as standards against which informal practices and transactions are evaluated as being corrupt or non-corrupt. Rather, when trying to understand corruption, we also need to incorporate the relational approach that considers local contexts and cultural-specific knowledge, as well as to account for the mutually transforming interactions between the different levels and orders of corruption: global, national, meso- and micro-levels. 

With these insights in mind, the proposed two-day workshop is conceived as an effort to link various disciplinary approaches to corruption (rational-actor, structural and relational approaches) as well as to develop the multilevel orders of corruption perspective by explaining the contradictions and interdependencies between: (a) meso- and micro-level face-to-face interactions of individuals and groups, (b) macro-level institutional and legal arrangements and actual practices, and (c) global norms, discourses and practices. To construct this narrative, and to link various disciplinary approaches and clearly articulate the multilevel orders of corruption framework, we will organize workshop papers around five panels:

Panel 1: Global anti-corruption laws, institutions, indicators, and discourses

Panel 2: Domestic (central level) institutions, anti-corruption laws, policies and initiatives

Panel 3: Meso-level norms, practices and actors

Panel 4: Micro-level (everyday) social norms and practices

Panel 5: Synthesizing and Bridging Perspectives

Approach

To meet the objectives of the above five panels, we will encourage workshop participants to present fieldwork-based/empirically grounded studies, while prompting a reflection on the theoretical implications of their empirical data for the for the multilevel orders of corruption framework presented earlier. We will organize papers around 5 panel sessions based on the thematic focus. The workshop will also be used as a platform for creating new research network “Multilevel Orders of Corruption”. We are planning to initiate a journal special issues on the workshop theme as well as invite contributors to submit their chapters to an edited volume. In order to increase the visibility and impact of the workshop, we are planning to link it to the Annual meeting of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law which will take place in Lund, Sweden, 24-26 August 2020.

Technical information

– You will be informed by the 25^th of March 2020 on whether your abstract has been selected. 

– Meals and accommodation during the workshop will be covered for all selected participants.

– We will provide travel funding up to 15 selected participants. If you expect us to cover your travel expenses, please mention this information in your abstract.

How to apply

If interested, please submit by the 20^th of March 2020 in a single word document named after your surname containing: 

1) An abstract and your contact details (300 words)

2) A short biographical statement (300 words)

3) if you need financial support for your travel

to Sevara Usmanova at [log in to unmask] and cc your message to [log in to unmask]  and [log in to unmask]