Corruption necessarily involves particularistic advantages at the expense of the society as a whole. It might be, however, misleading to assume these implications are a priori negative. The moral assessment of corrupt practices depends on contemporary ethical standards, which differ from country to country and undergo change over time. As a result, some practices labeled as corrupt might become legitimate while others turn from legitimate actions to offenses. When ethical dimensions are considered, corrupt practices reveal an inherent tension between particularistic and universalistic normative standards. Particularistic standards belong to the person-specific obligations and the expectations of actors involved in corruption. These necessarily clash with universalistic standards, which are valid and applicable for everyone and are usually approved by legal provisions or codes of conduct. As a result corrupt exchanges reveal both positive social features between corruption partners—such as mutual trust—and negative societal ramifications—such as disadvantages of non-involved actors. Corrupt partners behave fairly and honestly with respect to their partners but unfairly and dishonestly with respect to anyone else.

This Article takes a preliminary look at some distinct, unintended effects of anti-bribery law. In an exemplary and exploratory way, it intends to examine structural socio-legal problems and dilemmas of designing and implementing legislation against corruption. Firstly, it outlines four ideal types of legal norms that are meant to combat corruption but display significant negative features. Secondly, the typology is briefly applied to selected recent developments in German federal anti-bribery legislation. The Article concludes, inter alia, that the design, implementation, and interpretation of anti-corruption law is full of functional, legal, political, and moral pitfalls.

The relationship of social morals and laws becomes particularly crucial and problematic with regard to foreign bribery. This is because of three reasons: Foreign bribery is embedded in social actions, has a transnational character, and is mostly committed in business contexts. Therefore, the author reflects on the relationship of social morals and laws. The author argues that even though social morals and laws have to be distinguished on a conceptual level, it is wise to work towards a factual synchronicity. In this context, the author provides some suggestions for linking social morals and anti-bribery laws more closely. However, this linkage becomes especially problematic regarding extraterritorial criminal liability. Nevertheless, after a critical examination the author concludes that the reproach of moral imperialism is not substantial.

When former state president C. Wulff stood accused of having received benefits from a film producer known to him for several years, he argued: “Is a politician not entitled to have friends?” Before such background, the question of where to draw the line between social life of a public servant or politician and criminal behavior arises. Are such persons subject to permanent threat of criminal prosecution if they accept invitations etc., or is it their obligation to the general public to refrain from accepting donations from persons who have interests in their decisions, even if these persons are long known friends of the public servant?

In response to the many facets of corruption, many scholars have produced interdisciplinary research from both the theoretical and empirical perspective. This paper provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of existing literature on corruption, utilizing these interdisciplinary insights. Specifically, we shed light on corruption research including insights from, among others, the fields of economics, psychology, and criminology. Our systematic discussion of the antecedents and effects of corruption at the micro, meso, and macro level allows us to capture the big picture of not only what drives corrupt behavior, but also its substantial ramifications.

Corrupt practices in organizations are commonly explained via the rational choice of individual employees, with the benefits of deviant actors at the heart of the theoretical approach. This Article challenges the rational choice perspective with reference to cases of corruption in which the organizational benefits are crucial and personal gains negligible. The authors propose to embed the concept of “useful illegality” (Luhmann) into an institutional theory framework and develop a set of indicators for the systematic comparison of individual case studies. Exemplary analyses of two landmark cases of corporate bribery on behalf of German corporations' subsidiaries abroad (Siemens Argentina and Magyar Telekom) show that active corruption was neither simply a function of individual deviance, nor of personal gain. In contrast, institutional theory allows the modeling of organizational deviance as a function of unwritten rules that lend legitimacy to the deviant behavior of bribe payers. Despite plentiful opportunities in the periphery of these two multinational corporations, the few instances of personal gain were either in line with the organizational incentive structures (as in Telekom) or attributable to the loss of membership (as in Siemens). Mostly high-ranking employees, loyal to their organization, committed those crimes at high personal risks. The discussion of factors that explain why these “company men” nonetheless complied with the unwritten rules, in support of organizational benefits, leads the authors to conclude with likely consequences for effective regulation. They argue that it is the usefulness of the illegal behavior for the organization, its entrenchment in organizational cultures, and amplified adaptation problems with regard to changing institutional environments that explain what makes corrupt practices so hard to control and to regulate in a formal legal organization.

Corruption should be understood as illustrative of an ethical problem that runs deeper than specific immoral actions. This Article sees corruption as an unethical exchange, a view that can shed light on the economic structure of normative morality (as distinguished from ethics which is the theoretical field that underlies normative morality)—a structure that enables the possibility of exchanging moral values against marketable prices in the first place. To go beyond normative morality, this Article will discuss two profound philosophical concepts and their relation to corruption: (1) a non-economic justice as founded by Aristotle's principle of épieikeia (equity), and (2) Levinas' notion of the Third with the ethical responsibility that is connected to it. In addition, the discussion of the Third will be informed by philosophical theories of gift exchange as proposed by, among others, Marcel Hénaff, who examined the connections between gift exchange, monetary exchanges and corruption. Based on this, a way of thinking about the suspension between ethics and corruption is developed that avoids falling back into the logic of economic exchange which is constitutive for corruption. Instead, an ethical perspective is suggested as the fundamental ability to adequately balance universal normative claims with the individual case. This kind of just balancing opens up new spaces of reflection to confront corruption.