Charting Corporate Corruption: Agency, Structure and Escalation

Citation

Murphy, A. (2012), "Charting Corporate Corruption: Agency, Structure and Escalation", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 33 No. 2, pp. 217-218. https://doi.org/10.1108/01437731211203492

I finished writing this review in the weeks that saw the spontaneous emergence of an anti‐Wall Street movement in New York City and a growing consciousness of the social impact of corruption at the highest global financial level on the local and the individual. It would be disingenuous to the protesters to suggest that they are naïve if they consider that there ever was an era of big business devoid of corruption. History tells us that popular protest, and indeed popular revolutions, are frequently triggered by collective anger and outrage. The target for that anger and outrage is usually a powerful but “unjust” ruler or government system. The Wall Street protestors are, to some extent, a very visible popular realisation that we live in a globalised world which facilitates global corruption regardless of the good governance practices of individual states or regions. Where it will end is yet to be seen. But, in any case, things can never be quite the same again.

Against this rather scary backdrop the Fleming and Zyglidopoulos book makes “cool” reading. Granted, the authors probably worked on the book across 2007, 2008 and 2009 and could not have foreseen the eventual escalation of the banking and stock market crisis of 2011. Granted we still consider the Enron, Barings, and Nick Leeson scandals as catalysts. Perhaps we should now just consider them the unfortunate few who were exposed! How many of us foresaw the undermining of meta‐economies and the potential implosion of nation states in these scandals?

Using the Fleming and Zyglidopoulos conceptual framework related to distinguishing among agency, structure and escalation we can re‐conceptualise banking and stock‐market failures as both a failure among corrupt individual “agents” working as lone wolves, and as a failure of structures that should have stopped them. The model then pushes the framework to create lenses by which to track and plot the escalation of corruption from the individual within his/her structures to the more extreme local and global systems, drawing from organisational theory, psychology and business ethics to construct the framework. Using some of the book's lenses we could suggest that the Wall Street protesters embody a sense of outrage that corrupt bankers and dealers have violated societal expectations and norms to the extent that is way beyond “normal” corrupt practice for the sector, even though it is assumed that there is no explicit set of ethical principles to regulate their affairs in the first place!

This very readable and engaging book fills what the authors describe as a lacuna in the literature about the dynamics and cultures in the escalation of corruption which snowballed out of control into global trauma since 2000. The analytical lenses bring us through the concept of the bad apple, the amoral organisational culture and the socially mediated benchmarks of “ethically” humane actions among the powerful. It is written in a very accessible style without the pre‐requisite scholarship one usually associates with works of this sort. The pace and structure of the chapters leads the reader into the proposed conceptual framework, supporting arguments with examples from literature, from history and from recent political and banking events. While the references and cultural frames in the book are predominantly from the English‐speaking world, they are sufficiently well known globally to be useful across all continents. There is a particular, if disappointing, worry here in that the book is probably more relevant in 2011 than it was at the time of writing. We anticipate a second volume some time soon.