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

Luca J. Uberti
Additional contact information
Luca J. Uberti: Department of Politics, University of Otago, Aotearoa/New Zealand

Progress in Development Studies, 2016, vol. 16, issue 3, 261-277

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: corruption; growth; ‘post-Washington Consensus’; patron–client networks; power (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1464993416641587 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:prodev:v:16:y:2016:i:3:p:261-277

DOI: 10.1177/1464993416641587

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Progress in Development Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().