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A Short History of the Sociology of Corruption: the Demise of Counter-Intuitivity and the Rise of Numerical Comparisons

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Abstract

This article examines the history of the sociology of corruption. It is shown that from the 1950s until the early 1970s, the sociological discourse on corruption was dominated by a functionalist approach that tried to offer a counter-intuitive perspective on deviant behavior in arguing that corruption has positive functions for political and economic development. Because of a political reading of this discourse, its ambiguous terminology and some difficulties in methodology, it was largely abandoned in sociology. However, this not only led to a change in paradigmatic orientations in the sociology of corruption, but also to a general decline in interest for the phenomenon in sociology. This gap was filled by economic models of corruption that could bypass some terminological difficulties in defining corruption and, building on this, also enabled a largely quantitative approach in numerically comparing, correlating and ranking corruption. The effect was a consensus on the mostly negative effects of corruption on development, a proliferation of the transparency ideal and the disability of sociology to offer an alternative perspective on evaluating the effects of corruption.

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Notes

  1. I am grateful to Lawrence Nichols for reminding me that structural functionalism still attracts many scholars in Russia. Another example is contemporary German sociology, where e.g. Parsons and Merton are still broadly discussed, yet mostly through the conceptual filters of Niklas Luhmann and Jürgen Habermas.

  2. Although Huntington does not discuss this point, several modern authors dealing with the intellectual history of corruption have argued that while there are semantic equivalents for corruption in many traditional societies, the meaning of these concepts considerably differed from the contemporary use. In ancient Greece for example, the term coming closest to corruption was diaphteirein. But this actually meant a “corruption of the mind”, i.e. the inability to make proper judgments (Bratsis 2003: 12). More generally, in traditional societies semantic equivalents for corruption often in fact meant decay or erosion of a natural order.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Ben Merriman, Christian Dayé and Marc Mölders for comments on earlier versions of this article.

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  1. Department of Social Sciences, University of Osnabrück, Seminarstraße 33, 49074, Osnabrück, Germany

    Fran Osrecki

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Osrecki, F. A Short History of the Sociology of Corruption: the Demise of Counter-Intuitivity and the Rise of Numerical Comparisons. Am Soc 48, 103–125 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-016-9320-2

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