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The normalization of corruption in organizations (2003) [pdf]
- daedrdev 7mo agoThe US supreme court allowed thank you gifts for politicians to not be considered bribes somehow in a 2024 ruling, I think that alone might break the US.
- treetalker 7mo agolest we forget luxury fishing trips, RVs, real-estate debt payoffs, or payoffs of relatives' tuition
- jacquesm 7mo agoThe US Supreme Court is the very worst a supreme court could be. They've been thoroughly co-opted and will only start to see the light when it is their asses that are on the line.
- simonh 7mo agoThe whole way the Judicial system in the US is beholden to politicians, and is thoroughly politicised looks completely horrific to me in the UK. Even the election officials responsible for overseeing voting are politicians. Combined with this elected King George III presidential nonsense (not just king in general either, specifically the powers George III had in the 1780s) and I despair sometimes. Get yourselves a decent parliamentary system. If you avoid proportional representation it works fine. Unfortunately the US population is somehow convinced the current US system is modern and up to date. They'll probably still think that in another 200 years.
- duskdozer 7mo agoWhat do you have against proportional representation?
- tialaramex 7mo agoWe can't "proportionally" represent a constituency which returns a single individual So, if you want PR you have to either: Have two distinct classes of MP: Some were directly elected and represent an area, others are just to make the up proportions - but obviously these are just worse right? Second class MPs. OR Abolish the constituencies entirely, now nobody represents your area and its particular concerns, or everybody does, which as we know amounts to the same thing because of how dilution works. Unlike other electoral reforms a PR system has deeper implications far beyond the elections themselves. Historically the UK actually didn't have a single electoral system for every constituency, and that was fine†, indeed it works fine in the US today, the thing which needs to be coherent is what happens after the election and PR meddles with that. † Well, not "fine", this is the era of the famous "Rotten Boroughs" but the fact that the system varies from one place to another wasn't key there.
- simonh 7mo agoIt also means that people are voting for party lists, not individuals, and the lists are controlled by the parties. In a proper parliamentary system the parliamentarians directly represent their voters, and have a mandate from them. Parties do not have that, only MPs have that. By passing the mandate from the representative to the party, and the party having list control, that puts far too much power over parliamentarians in the hands of unelected party functionaries that draw up the lists and have no mandate themselves.
- marcosdumay 7mo agoThat's way less bad than it appears, because in a proportional system you will have more than 2 parties. In practice, every election is an election of those invisible bureaucratic hands, instead of some heads on display.
- tialaramex 7mo agoParty affiliation is already a problem, List systems make that worse. Years ago two of my friends lived in Vauxhall in London. That spy building in central London where James Bond works? That's in Vauxhall (and it is really for spies, though real intelligence agents do not look like James Bond), they lived like 10 minutes walk from there. Vauxhall is pretty far left even for a city borough, but they ended up with Kate Hoey as their Labour MP. Kate - despite being a representative of a left party was nevertheless pro gun rights, pro fox hunting, and pretty luke warm on LGBT issues, she was also, which led to her finally be thrown out by her local party, pro-Brexit. But the people of Vauxhall weren't really voting for Kate Hoey the woman who likes fox hunting and isn't too bothered if they make abortion illegal again, and who is supporting Brexit even though they don't want it - they were voting for Labour, a centre left party and Kate had Labour's endorsement. Maybe under PR Kate ends up finding a home in some party that more closely tracks her personal beliefs, but, equally maybe not. And so people end up voting for something they don't really want. I think that given simply counting is apparently too untrustworthy in our post-truth world, we might as well do something more sophisticated like Instant Run-off or Approval, but I don't approve of Proportional as a goal.
- DeepSeaTortoise 7mo ago[flagged]
- watwut 7mo agoIt was SCOTUS, literally. They literally weakened the legislation. And by SCOTUS we mean conservative majority specifically. From dissent of disagreeing SCOTUS justice: "absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love."
- DeepSeaTortoise 7mo ago> They literally weakened the legislation. IMO that's not the case, because if a legislation looses its intended focus, it gains a lot of arbitrariness in return. The more interpretations you consider valid, the more options you can choose from when applying it. So, obviously, the legislation had to be returned to a single interpretation, the one Congress intended (or the one the court thinks is the best if you believe courts should hold legislative power). Which leads directly to the second issue: Which was the interpretation Congress intended? > From dissent of disagreeing SCOTUS justice: "absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love." The majority opinion analyses this issue with 6 different approaches, including a textual one, arriving at similar conclusions from each. The dissenting opinion on the other hand argues, that all other approaches but the textual one should be rejected. The dissenting opinion's textual interpretation strongly asserts, that Congress intended with "accepts or agrees to accept, anything of value from any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded" to address both bribes (intending to be influenced) and gratitudes (intending to be rewarded). The majority opinion argues that if you were to divorce the concept of a reward from the prior intent during the influenced/rewarded actions in a statute that criminalizes accepting something of value rather than the intent itself (because how would that even be possible?), you end up with a situation in which being promised something of value, but only receiving it after the influenced actions have been completed, would no longer fulfill the requirements to be considered a bribe. Basically the majority argues that if they are correct (666 being a bribery rather than a combined bribery + gratitudes statute), Congress still would have had to use language at least equivalent to the one at hand and therefore additional tests to deduce the intent of the 99th Congress can not be disregarded.
- gniv 7mo agoVery insightful on how this corruption develops: "How can a group hold a worldview so at odds with the wider culture and not appear to be greatly conflicted by it? The answer may lie in the distinction between particularism and universalism. An individual develops social identities specific to the social domains, groups and roles – and accompanying subcultures – that he or she occupies (e.g. manager, mother, parishioner, sports fan). [...] In the case of corruption, this myopia means that an otherwise ethically-minded individual may forsake universalistic or dominant norms about ethical behavior in favor of particularistic behaviors that favor his or her group at the expense of outsiders. [...] This tendency to always put the ingroup above all others clearly paves the way for collective corruption."
- dundercoder 7mo agoIt’s like they worked at my last workplace
- simonh 7mo agoThe brain actually has specific neurological system that compartmentalise reasoning contexts in different social contexts, so we operate according to different sets of assumptions and rules of behaviour and reasoning in different kinds of situations.
- rramadass 7mo agoCan you share some resources on the above?
- simonh 7mo agoThe the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) both play roles in this. Not a neuroscientist, just going on my own reading.
- justonceokay 7mo agoUnless you’re autistic
- csfNight167 7mo agoSuch an insightful article. Had to cover in 3 sittings though - the reading is a bit dense.
- jacquesm 7mo agoIt's Gwern! He's like a combine harvester for data in all forms, digesting it and putting stuff out there that is usually bullet proof and extremely enlightening. I've yet to see him put out something that didn't meet that standard. Well worth your time, also on other subjects.
- cyber_kinetist 7mo agoThe actual linked PDF is not from Gwern, it's a 2003 paper from two sociologists Blake E. Ashforth and Vikas Anand.
- marcus_lam 7mo ago[dead]
- Paracompact 7mo ago> Fear is induced by coercion, the threat of negative consequences such as ostracism and demotion. To be sure, blatant coercion facilitates the denial of responsibility and thereby compliance with corrupt directives. Such coercion, however, leaves less room for (perceived) volition, a key precondition for the dissonance reduction process discussed earlier. Newcomers subject to blatant coercion have a sufficient justification for their obedience – to avoid the threat – and thus do not need to realign their attitudes to accommodate the otherwise dissonant behavior. Indeed, blatant coercion may provoke resentment and reactance against the source of coercion and the targeted behavior (e.g. Nail, Van Leeuwen & Powell, 1996). The upshot is a greater likelihood of grudging compliance, whistle-blowing and voluntary turnover (and thus, risk of exposure). Further, coercion may affect behavior only as long as the pressure is applied. For these reasons, blatant coercion tends to be an ineffective means of sustaining corruption. Astute. When the average person is asked to imagine how corrupt leaders operate, I think they tend to overemphasize the effectiveness of simple violence. To foster a corruption that will last, you have to mold the circumstances so that corruption is the only option that makes sense.
- cpa 7mo agoAnother good read: https://www.scu.edu/ethics/focus-areas/business-ethics/resources/seven-signs-of-ethical-collapse/ https://www.scu.edu/ethics/focus-areas/business-ethics/resou...
- rramadass 7mo agoAbsolutely on point! You need only look at the bureaucracies in countries which rank high on the corruption index. Most join to just earn a livelihood but are soon "socialized into corruption". From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption#Causes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption#Causes Per R. Klitgaard corruption will occur if the corrupt gain is greater than the punitive damages multiplied by the likelihood of being caught and prosecuted. Since a high degree of monopoly and discretion accompanied by a low degree of transparency does not automatically lead to corruption, a fourth variable of "morality" or "integrity" has been introduced by others. The moral dimension has an intrinsic component and refers to a "mentality problem", and an extrinsic component referring to circumstances like poverty, inadequate remuneration, inappropriate work conditions and inoperable or over-complicated procedures which demoralize people and let them search for "alternative" solutions. The references section has lots of links for further study of which Robert Klitgaard's Controlling Corruption is a classic with case studies. One thing i would like to know more of is how Technology either reduces or exacerbates corruption.
- luke5441 7mo agoWell, I know of one technology whos primary use-case is corruption: Crypto.
- rramadass 7mo agoWith corruption, one needs to look at the overall system i.e. involving Society/Individual/Economics/Politics/Organizations/Processes/Technologies/etc. rather than narrow silos. On the whole, i feel technology has been a corruption mitigater since it reduces the human factor (i.e. the motivation/cause) from the process chain. This has been validated in my own personal experience. On the flip side, when used by people-in-control it concentrates power in the hands of the few and its non-linear disproportionate effects can exacerbate the problem tremendously eg. various Internet based scams. PS: Are emerging technologies helping win the fight against corruption? A review of the state of evidence - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016762452100038X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016762452...
- AxiomLab 7mo ago[flagged]
- scotty79 7mo agoThere should be a checklist of simple rules of thumb that any created or reorganized entity should undergo. For example if the organization is self-financing it breeds corruption. If an entity mediates between buyers and sellers it can't be financed by sellers. It should be fairly easy to compose that list by observing corrupt and underperforming setups that are already entrenched.
- rramadass 7mo agoSee the diagram; A Systems Thinking model of Corruption from the article Evaluating the Impact of Institutional Improvement on Control of Corruption—A System Dynamics Approach - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-Systems-Thinking-model-of-corruption_fig1_360574225 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-Systems-Thinking-model... Systems Thinking provides a holistic view of the interactions contributing to an outcome expressed as a Causal Loop Diagram (CLD). The CLD developed using Systems Thinking shows the full complexity of the problem at hand, and then simplifications are necessary to create a working quantitative System Dynamics simulation. Figure 1 was developed based on 43 in-depth interviews and 155 survey interviews with government officials, aid agencies, civil society organizations, business people, lawyers, and the general public in Pakistan. It shows the complete set of relationships considered to represent the problem of corruption in a nation. In the CLD, connections with directed arrows imply that a change in the tail variable leads to a change in the variable at the head of the arrow. An arrow labelled with polarity ‘+’ means changes in the same direction. Increasing the tail variable increases the head variable, and decreasing the tail variable decreases the head variable. On the other hand, ‘-’ implies changes in the opposite direction. For example, increasing the tail variable decreases the head variable, and decreasing the tail variable increases the head variable. These connections create highly non-linear behaviour because feedback loops develop where a change in one variable in the model will ripple through the cause-and-effect structure to return to its source and either reinforce or inhibit the change. The reinforcing feedback loop is labelled with an ‘R’ and inhibiting or balancing feedback loops with a ‘B’. Connecting these loops often leads to emergent and unexpected behaviours in the system.
- casey2 7mo agoCorruption is defined as deviation from universalism. Shouldn't orgs at least pretend to care about productivity or is that the ultimate sin for a universalist? Or is the ultimate sin not pretending that universalism is productive?
- justonceokay 7mo agoYoung people hate it when friends work together because it means they are at a disadvantage as they are not making friends
- ArchieScrivener 7mo agoThere are some great movies that deal with this: Wall Street, The Firm, The Big Short, Suicide Kings, Michael Clayton, among others. One can even consider the never ending Ethics classes in college an ironic form of corruption that never teaches anything we don't already know by secondary school, but used to pad credit numbers and tuition revenue.
- codechicago277 7mo agoMy business ethics professor just showed clips from Yes, Minister! and House of Cards in class and showed the tactics. Seemed odd at the time, but I got more out of it than a normal ethics class.
- stared 7mo agoAs a counterexample, here is an example of a Singaporean officer refusing to accept a bribe, as reported by Lee Kuan Yew: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nZv_UkMh0FA https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nZv_UkMh0FA
- _factor 7mo agoThe people who crave that money and influence tend to be control freak psycho/sociopaths. They need to feel superior to others because deep down they don’t/can’t value themselves. They don’t even know what they’re competing/fighting for anymore. They just can’t stop because they know no other way.
- NoToP 7mo agoThe 1972 Knapp Commission report is essential reading on the topic
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- quacked 7mo agoI take some issue with these kinds of articles that minimize the impacts of "street crime" in favor of the admittedly much broader and insidious effects of corporate crime. Corporate crime generally can coexist with a functioning system, even while it drains the prosperity of society, but street crime will just dissolve the society overnight. People physically abandon locations with high street crime. A corrupt system is still a system, meaning that in theory it operates to produce something of value for society (e.g. in addition to lying about climate change, causing cancer, and blocking renewable energy via lawfare and propaganda, BP provides a colossal amount of fuel for society) but street crime produces nothing and destroys community outright at the local level.
- Ensorceled 7mo agoBut street crime is often a symptom of the "much broader and insidious effects of corporate crime": social systems stripped of resources by politicians to provide grants to baseball stadiums, police patrols in quiet wealthy streets but abandoning poorer quarters, tax incentives to companies that then pay their employees so little they are a burden on the food security systems, mental health care priced out of reach for the poor so they end up homeless and violent. You can list these connected problems all day.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- cassepipe 7mo ago> People physically abandon locations with high street crime. Exactly. Which is why > ... street crime will just dissolve the society overnight is false. Street crime is also generally limited to poor areas and people who can't move out will be the first victims. Street crime does not dissolve trust at the societal level, it just dissolve trust of everyone into a few segments of the population (whose members are also now the first victims of that loss of trust) Whereas corruption is a cancer that takes hold of all institutions as anyone and you might need to leave your country altogether when it becomes a third world hellhole.
- FrustratedMonky 7mo agoThis is how the US falls. The entire US as organization, with corruption at the very top.
- derbOac 7mo agoThe rationalization aspect of their model can't be overstated enough in my opinion. It never starts with something clearly unethical; it starts with something more complicated. Something that is uncomfortable and morally suboptimal, but has some justification being appealed to — it benefits the group, it's otherwise unfair for some members to have to bear some small temporary cost for the benefits of others, or something of that sort. The level of the corrupt behavior becomes more and more extreme though, such that justification becomes more and more questionable, until you're left with something more seriously problematic. In the meantime, the people who questioned the slippery slope might have left, and you're left with people who aren't in a position of power for whatever reason (they're junior, or in small numbers) to question what has become clearly unethical cultural norms.
- rayiner 7mo agoI think the article is overlooking an important category of corruption where social norms treat certain acts as theoretically immoral but in practice impose little to no social sanction for such acts. In places like India, for example, taking bribes is just standard practice. It carries so little social sanction that it’s like jaywalking here in the US. People acknowledge it’s technically illegal, but it carries so little social sanction that people don’t consciously need to rationalize it. The same thing with cheating in schools, which is normalized in India and has become almost as normalized in the U.S.
- WhatsTheBigIdea 7mo agoI like this definition of corruption, though there are many... "The abuse of entrusted power for private gain" Jaywalking is breaking the law, but it is not corruption. Civil disobedience is also typically breaking the law, but is not corruption. It is important to recognize that just because a system is codified in law does not mean that it is not corrupt.
- rayiner 7mo agoThe “power” focus for corruption is not useful. Corruption by people without power is more harmful to society than high level corruption. People skimming off the top is undesirable, but survivable. But ordinary people taking bribes and cheating grinds society to a halt and makes it impossible to develop societal wealth. This is well evidenced in the development of asian countries in the 20th century. South Korea has plenty of corruption at a high level. But it’s clean at the lower level, and as a result it’s been able to become a rich society. By contrast, India has crippling corruption at lowest levels of society that imposes a huge drag on routine transactions and daily life.
- chaostheory 7mo agoCorruption is as normal as cancer in organizations. Sometimes it gets excised, and new cells form eventually starting the process again. Other times, it ends up killing the organization.
- socalgal2 7mo agoI feel like seeing people disregard traffic laws fits this topic in some related way. They could be patient, they might arrive at their destination 1-3 minutes slower (or not), but in the moment they choose to break the law and put others at risk. 1. You see others do it and feel compelled not to be taken advantage of 2. You start with small things as escalate 3. You normalize the behavior in one context and then it expands to other context. This feels like it's following similar patterns of normalization Even if it's not direct death, which, with at 4000lb car is certainly a possibility, it can indirectly cause severe repercussions. If you ruin someone's car they might not be able to get to work. They lose value in their car even if repaired. Repairs are never 100%. They also have to deal with all the time dealing with the time dealing with accident itself and time dealing with repairs etc. Time they could have spent earning a living or taking care of loved ones. Yesterday I was at a 1 lane road where there's enough room on the right to squeeze in for a right turn. A driver squeezed to that right turn area on the red. Then on the green they went through the light and illegally passed all other cars. I see this kind of stuff daily. Another one I see regularly. There's left turn lane with a left turn arrow. The lane to the right of the left turn lane is NOT a left turn lane, yet random drivers turn left from it. It's more common to see them turn left when there's the green turn signal but I've seen them turn left when the left turn signal is red. Another that escalated over the years is cutting across multiple lanes of traffic and the painted barrier to take a freeway exit at the last second.
- toteroni 7mo agoi agree 100% and it occurs more often the closer you drive near a big city where the traffic is already aggravating. that one driver doing something maneuver to save themselves 1-2 minutes while delaying everyone behind them 10 seconds..which adds up across the 10-20 people that just got cut off. curious what your solution/remedy to this problem is? more police on the streets with pre-filled tickets they can quickly hand out? self policing via dash cams and if you send in a video to the police they can ticket them and get a 30% cut of the ticket the law breaker paid? mass traffic surveillance and get sent a ticket instantly to your address/email when traffic laws are broken? when i travel outside of the US i usually take the country’s public transport instead of driving so don’t really know if this has been solved for successfully