Corruption and Organizational Communication

Abstract

Corruption research is cross‐disciplinary and focuses on the violation of rules and norms for individual or organizational benefit and at the cost of wider publics, as epitomized by corporate payment of illegal bribes to public officials with the goal of gaining a contract. Corruption research is both microscopic and macroscopic and is subject to conceptual and methodological challenges with respect to empirical investigation. It generally aims to understand the dynamics whereby individuals and organizations engage in corruption, the implications of corruption at the individual, organizational, and societal levels, as well as how corruption is and can be responded to through public scandals and more elaborate communicative strategies of corruption control, or anti‐corruption. A focus on corruption and corruption control provides organizational communication scholars with entry points to explore the powerful communicative dynamics playing out between the local organizational meanings of particular practices and externally imposed definitions of what constitutes appropriate organizational behavior.