This paper aims to establish how organization and management research, an extensive field that has contributed a great deal to research on corruption, could apply insights from other disciplines in order to advance the understanding of corruption, often considered as a form of unethical behavior in organizations. It offers an analysis of important contributions of corruption research, taking a 'rationalist perspective', and highlights the central tensions and debates within this vast body of literatures. It then shows how these debates can be addressed by applying insights from corruption studies, adopting anthropological lens. The paper thus proposes a cross-disciplinary approach, which focuses on studying corruption by looking at what it means to individuals implicated by the phenomenon while engaging in social relations and situated in different contexts. It also offers an alternative approach to the study of corruption amidst claims that anti-corruption efforts have failed to achieve desirable results.

Purpose This paper aims to problematize existing conceptualization of corruption by presenting alternative perspectives on corruption in Indonesia through the lens of national/cultural identity, amidst claims of the pervasiveness of corruption in the country. In so doing, the paper also sheds light on the micro-processes of interactions between global and local discourses in postcolonial settings. Design/methodology/approach The study applies discourse analysis, involving in-depth interviews with 40 informants from the business sector, government institutions and anti-corruption agencies. Findings The findings suggest that corruption helps government function, preserves livelihoods of the marginalized segments of societies and maintains social obligations/relations. These alternative meanings of corruption persist despite often seen as less legitimate due to effects of colonial powers. Research limitations/implications The snowballing method of recruiting informants is one of the limitations of this paper, which may decrease the potential diversity and lead to the silencing of different stories (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2013). Researchers need to contextualize corruption and study its varied meanings to reveal its social, historical and political dimensions. Practical implications This paper strongly suggests that we need to move beyond rationalist accounts to capture the varied meanings of corruption which may be useful to explain the limited results of existing anti-corruption efforts. Social implications This study calls for a greater use of qualitative methods to study broad social change programs such as anti-corruption from the perspective of the insiders. Originality/value This paper contributes to the discussion of agency at the interplay between the dominant and alternative discourses in postcolonial settings. Moreover, the alternative meanings of corruption embedded in constructions of national identity and care ethics discussed in this paper offer as a starting point for decolonizing (Westwood, 2006) anti-corruption theory and practice.

Corruption is of central interest to business ethics but its meaning is often assumed to be self-evident and universal. In this paper we seek to re-politicize and unsettle the dominant meaning of corruption by showing how it is culturally specific, relationally derived and varies over time. In particular, we show how corruption's meaning changes depending on its relationship with Western-style liberal democracy and non-Western local experience with its implementation. We chose this focus because promoting democracy is a central plank of the international anti-corruption and development agenda and yet the relationship between corruption and democracy is rarely specified. Adopting a critical-discursive approach that draws on poststructuralism and postcolonialism, we explore how the meaning of corruption constructed The Jakarta Post (TJP) changed in relation to Indonesia's experience in implementing democratic reform, a condition of the international financial aid it received following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. In the 1990s, corruption was seen as an illness, and democracy the cure; from 2000-2011 experience with democracy brought disillusiondemocracy had not cured corruption but caused it to spread; while from 2012-2014 democracy was constructed as a valued end in its own right, but needed protection from corruption in order to survive. From translating the international development agenda in a relatively straightforward way, TJP moved towards constructions of increasing complexity and ambivalence. This demonstrates how corruption's meaning is fundamentally contingent and unstableeven dominant meanings have the potential to be contested, showing how they are an effect of power and raising the possibility of alternatives.Here James Wolfensohn uses a disease metaphor to assert that corruption is universally dysfunctional and should be eradicated because of its costs and consequences. This view, and the World Bank's (1997) more precise definition of it as 'abuse of public office for private gain' has been extremely influential,