Chapter 3: Psychological Processes in Organizational Corruption: The Role of the Campus Environment

The number, scale and persistence of corporate scandals in the last decade have provided cynics about business ethics quite a lot of fodder. Enron and Worldcom, the classic cautionary tales from the early 2000s of corporate practice gone wrong, are presently being supplanted by more recent stories, from rogue traders losing billions at Société Générale and Credit Suisse to the multinationals currently implicated in the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market. All of these juicy accounts have given rise to serious and legitimate interest among academics in corporate corruption; however, the literature on corruption has remained of inconsistent quality, lacking cohesion, and at the fringes of organizational scholarship (see the commentary in Ashforth, Gioia, Robinson, & Treviño, 2008a).