Cognitive basis for corruption and attitudes towards corruption in organizations viewed from a structuralist adult developmental meta-perspective

Abstract

The paper focuses on corruption and attitudes towards corruption in organizations. It proposes an interdisciplinary framework for reassessing them. It is argued that an integrative theoretical and analytical framework based on the Model of Hierarchical Complexity (mhc) can provide new insights on corruption. Furthermore the proposed framework offers new theoretical horizons for understanding and evaluating public and scientific discourses on corruption. This approach compensates for frequent shortcomings and disciplinary reductionisms in large parts of the social science literature on corruption. It can thus offer a substantially new outlook on the field of behavioral ethics in organizations based on a meta-systematic theory integration.