On using the literature

Abstract

Several of my colleagues and I recently had occasion to review the literature dealing with corruption in order to come up with some idea as to its cause. We improvised a procedure that turned out to be similar to TKJ, a widely used creativity enhancing procedure. The procedure we developed may be useful to others working in other areas; I describe it briefly here. In order to avoid getting caught by the theories authors used to explain corruption, most of which were not justified by any data or the data provided, we extracted from their alleged explanations a list of variables employed. Fiftysix were identified, for example, bad laws, bad men, weakness of men, breakdown of moral fibre of society, and so on. It was apparent that these variables were not independent and that most of them interacted with others. This suggested that they could be aggregated into more general variables and that doing so might facilitate our understanding of the explanations taken collectively. Proceeding impressionistically rather than systematically, we put down what we thought were the main ideas contained in the list, without trying to assure ourselves that each item on the list was accounted for. This yielded 12 statements associated with the causes of corruption, for example, unstable social conditions--rapid social change, inefficient and ineffective political systems and government--social disorganization, power that is fragmented, unpopular, and distrusted, and so on. Then we attempted systematically to formulate a still smaller number (four) of composite statements about the causes of corruption that were suggested by the 12 impressionistic statements. Each of the 56 variables was then associated with one of the four statements. A number of modifications in our initial statements was required. The result was the following four statements.