Organizational ethics and bureaucratic corruption in Chinese school

This paper takes issue with a central theme in the literature on corruption that a centralized bureaucratic structure necessarily promotes corruption. It argues that the growth of corruption after 1976 was not so much the result of a centralized bureaucratic structure as that of the changing organizational ethics in the schools. In an examination of the schools since 1949, it shows that their structures have not changed radically. But by separating the organizational ethics into their real and ideal dimensions, it demonstrates that despite the continuity in the official goals and codes of ethics, the ‘real’ or fundamental organizational ethic have changed, and new standards of behavior have prompted members to break organizational rules in the more or less decentralized organizational structures.