Spiraling Down into Corruption: A Dynamic Analysis of the Social Identity Processes that Cause Corruption in Organizations to Grow

To date, theory and research on corruption in organizations have primarily focused on its static antecedents. This article focuses on the spread and growth of corruption in organizations. For this purpose, three downward organizational spirals are formulated: the spiral of divergent norms, the spiral of pressure, and the spiral of opportunity. Social Identity Theory is used to explain the mechanisms of each of these spirals. Our dynamic perspective contributes to a greater understanding of the development of corruption in organizations and opens up promising avenues for future research. Niki A. den Nieuwenboer is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Business & Society Management at RSM Erasmus University, The Netherlands. Her research interests include the growth and development of collective corruption in organizations. She holds a Master of Arts in Social Psychology from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. Prior to starting her academic career, she worked as a consultant in business ethics and fraud prevention for KPMG Forensic in Brussels, Belgium. Muel Kaptein is Professor of Business Ethics and Integrity Management at the Department of Business & Society Management at RSM Erasmus University, The Netherlands. His research interests include the management of ethics, the measurement of ethics, and the ethics of management. His␣research has been published in the Academy of Management Review, Business & Society, Corporate Governance, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Organization Studies, among others. He is the author of the books Ethics Management (Springer, 1998), The Balanced Company (Oxford University Press, 2002), and The Six Principles of Managing with Integrity (Articulate Press, 2005). He is also director at KPMG Integrity, which he co-founded in the Netherlands in 1995.     

试论用科学发展观反腐败的几个重大问题

科学发展观是我党的最新理论成果,用科学发展观指导反腐败,首先要看能否产生实际效用,其次要看能否站在人民的立场上,再次要看是否能运用统筹兼顾的方法,最后要看能否以可持续发展为基本目标。只有这样,我们才能既取得反腐败的伟大胜利,又能够保持我国社会的稳定和可持续发展,从而顺利实现我国建设富强民主文明和谐的社会主义现代化国家的宏伟目标。     

Setting Efficient Incentives for Agricultural Research: Lessons from Principal-Agent Theory

A conceptual analysis of important issues in the organization and management of academic research is presented. Principal-agent theory is applied to derive optimal compensation schemes for scientists when they differ in ability, risk aversion, cost of effort, and reservation utility, and to show the optimal trade-off between institutional risk and scientists' abilities. Implications for an efficient organization of research are derived, including how scientists' incentives should be structured to elicit optimal research efforts and direction, whether research direction should be centralized or decentralized, and whether the organization of research should be through external competitive grants or program and institutional funding.     

论当前党的反腐倡廉工作与监督机制改革

当前反腐倡廉工作的推进,必然会推动党的监督机制的改变。包括从权力监督机制,预防监督机制,公开监督机制,惩处机制多个方面进行全方位的改革。     

Understanding the Ethical Cost of Organizational Goal-Setting: A Review and Theory Development

Goal-setting has become a popular and effective motivational tool, utilized by practitioners and substantiated with decades of empirical research. However, the potential for goal-setting to enhance performance may come at the cost of ethical behavior. I propose a theoretical model linking attributes of goals and goal-setting practices to unethical behavior through two psychological mechanisms – ethical recognition and moral disengagement; and addressing the moderating role of individual differences (e.g., goal-commitment and conscientiousness), as well as the broader organizational ethical context.     

“The Worse You Behave, The More You Seem, to be Rewarded”: Bullying in Nursing as Organizational Corruption

This paper reports findings from the first, qualitative stage of a national sequential, mixed method study of bullying in the Australian nursing workplace. Twenty-six nurses who had experience of workplace bullying were recruited from two Australian public sector health care organizations. Examining the narrative data from the viewpoint of bullying being a corrupt activity we present an alternative perspective on group acts of bullying. By exploring bullying as corrupt behaviour, this paper challenges the assumption that bullying can be principally considered a series of isolated events stemming from interpersonal conflict, organizational pressures, or poor work design. Corruption in organizations has not previously been linked with or compared to bullying. In revealing the manner in which actors can engage in corrupt conduct that includes bullying, the findings from our study offer important implications for the management of workplace bullying as a serious and corrupt activity.     

Moral Disengagement in Processes of Organizational Corruption

This paper explores Albert Bandura's concept of moral disengagement in the context of organizational corruption. First, the construct of moral disengagement is defined and elaborated. Moral disengagement is then hypothesized to play a role in the initiation of corruption by both easing and expediting individual unethical decision-making that advances organizational interests. It is hypothesized to be a factor in the facilitation of organizational corruption through dampening individuals’ awareness of the ethical content of the decisions they make. Finally, it is hypothesized to contribute to the perpetuation of corruption in organizations, because if individuals who have a greater propensity to morally disengage are more likely to make decisions that advance organizational interests regardless of the ethicality of those decisions, they may also be rewarded for those decisions in terms of organizational advancement. Together these studies form an argument that moral disengagement plays an important role in processes of organizational corruption.     

政治体制上端改革:反腐败斗争的迫切需要

我国的反腐败已经进入了一个特殊的高原期,能否实现政治体制上端的重大改革,是决定中国反腐败能否实现突破的关键。政治体制上端改革要坚持三个不动摇、发展党内民主、完善人民代表大会制度和改革政党制度,可以建立"廉洁岛"式的政治特区。     

Capacity Depreciation, Implicit Rental Price, and Investment Demand for Farm Tractors in Canada

Among the different factors pertaining to the demand for durable inputs in agriculture, the way the input depreciates over time is an important issue. This study investigates four alternative capacity depreciation patterns for farm tractors. While published estimates from government agencies implicitly assume convex capacity depreciation patterns, the results of this study demonstrate that the use of agricultural engineering data which depict a concave rather than convex pattern better reflect farmers' investment decisions. An implicit rental price measure is also proposed to account for the fact that the purchase price of a durable input is not an appropriate measure of the implicit rental cost of the asset.
Parmi les facteurs déterminants de la demande pour les biens durables en agriculture, la rapidité avec laquelle I'intrant se déprécie est certainement importante lors des décisions d'investissement. La présente etude analyse quatre différents scénarios de dépréciation pour les tracteurs agricoles au Canada. Bien que les données publiées par les agences gouver-nementales supposent implicitement que les biens durables se déprécient à un taux annuel constant, les résultats de cette etude montrent que I'utilisation de données basées sur la valeur productive de I'intrant telle que calculée sur une base expkrimentale donne de meil-leurs résultats statistiques dans I'estimation de la demande pour les tracteurs agricoles. De plus, une mesure du coût implicite de I'intrant est également proposée pour tenir compte du fait que le prix d'achat n'est pas une mesure appropriée dans I'analyse de la demande pour un bien durable.     

转型时期腐败和地方政府公共投资效率的关联分析

运用寻租经济学的分析方法,本文对经济转型时期地方官员腐败和公共投资效率两者之间的内在关联进行了综合研究,结合中国情形进行简要的实证分析,指出基于转型时期有效监管制度的缺失,腐败对地方政府公共投资的规模效率、结构效率以及产出效率都产生了不同程度的负面效应.也就是说,作为带有高成本特性的一种"暗税",腐败租金的存在不仅会导致区域内私人投资偏离社会期望的适度投资率,也会人为增大区域公共投资规模、扭曲区域公共投资结构,并降低区域内公共投资的产出水平.