The morality of corruption in organisations

This chapter presents the normative and moral aspects of corruption by taking an anthropological perspective. It focuses on moral aspects of work in public administration, making use of ethnographic field data gathered in 2016-2017 as part of a large European Union research project. The chapter discusses the critical analysis of morality as a proxy for the emergence of corruption in organisations. It argues that morality needs to be problematised because of the existence of plural moral standards that make corruption acceptable in situations that may fall into the category of ‘grey areas’. The chapter addresses when it is contextualised into the culture of the organisation as well as into a larger framework of social and institutional transformation. It describes different moral aspects of corruption by introducing an ethnographic perspective that relies on data collected from interviews in different organisational contexts and reviews the individual motivations that underpin corrupt behaviour.