Explaining Corruption: Why Don’t We All Commit Acts of Corruption?

To conform and abide by the law(s) of a country was for many years considered an axiom in criminology. The focus was on explaining criminal behaviour as one possessed by evil spirits, biological defects, personality disorders, community social disorganization, subcultures of life and inequality of economic opportunity. However, the most important step in a solution to a problem is to ask the ‘right’ questions about it, and for many years, in attempting to explain ‘crime’, assumptions about human nature and social order considered conformity to be the natural order for the majority of its citizens, and thus focussed on non-conformity and the ‘problem of crime’ rather than why people adhered to the law (Lilly et al. 1989). The approaches that fall under the umbrella of control theory instead suggested that crime and delinquency is to be expected unless the sociocultural controls—family, teachers, police—are operating effectively in preventing crime (Reiss 1949, 1951; Nye 1958; Reckless 1967; Hirschi 1969; Hagan 1989). It is these approaches we now consider in trying to understand corruption.