An Eventful Interactionist Approach to Organizational Corruption

In this paper I address the plea for a "deep" and "long" view of organizational corruption put forth by Ashforth and colleagues (2008) by proposing a novel "eventful" way to approach corruption as socially constructed and historically situated. First, I briefly problematize the current scholarship on organizational corruption. Then, I build an approach to understanding organizational corruption as a constructed event embedded in scenario, utilizing concepts from history, cultural studies, and the interactionist tradition in sociology, as well as the overlap among these disciplines. To offer scholars a way to articulate this eventful conception of organizational corruption and inform how it might be approached through interpretive textual reading and narrative, I draw in an example of a highly publicized accusation of corruption by the financial services firm Goldman Sachs. In closing, I present implications for theory-building and research.