The ‘sociological turn’ in corruption studies: Why fighting graft in the developing world is often unnecessary, and sometimes counterproductive

Since the mid-1990s, an ‘anticorruption consensus’ has emerged in international development policy: because corruption is taken to be invariably deleterious for investment and growth, eliminating or reducing corruption has come to be seen as a necessary precondition for development. This article takes issue with the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of this proposition. To do so, it reviews and codifies an emerging strand of literature that transcends the narrow assumptions of economic models of corruption and theorizes much more carefully the social structures within which corruption takes place. This body of research, which heralds a ‘sociological turn’ in corruption studies, provides a robust framework to account for the economic effects of corruption in specific country contexts and suggests that fighting corruption per se might not always be necessary for development; in fact, it might sometimes prove counterproductive.