Layers of decision: Linking social definitions of corruption and willingness to take action

The literature available about social definitions of corruption is surprisingly discrete from that which addresses the issue of whistleblowing or the reporting of crime and corruption. The current study, however, empirically links the two. A survey of more than 1300 public sector employees was undertaken to explore: i) how and why public sector employees define some behaviours as corrupt; ii) factors which may hinder public sector employees taking action about corruption which they may observe at work; and iii) the link between i) and ii). The study found that within the New South Wales (NSW) public sector, views about what constitutes corruption are diverse and that this has a significant, though not exclusive, impact upon the action respondents said they would take in response to workplace corruption. The study discusses other factors which also impact upon the stated decision not to take action about corruption and suggests some possible courses of action for addressing these factors.The research upon which this paper is based formed part of the research program of the Independent Commission Against Corruption.     

Practicing psychologists' interpretations of and compliance with child abuse reporting laws

Despite mandatory reporting laws, several studies have found that 30%–40% of professional psychologists have elected not to report suspected child abuse at some time. In this study, we surveyed 226 licensed psychologists from two states concerning factors related to reporting suspected abuse. Thirty-two percent of participants indicated having not reported suspected abuse. Comparisons between participants who have consistently and inconsistently reported indicated that psychologists who have consistently reported rated legal factors as more important than those who have inconsistently reported. Additionally, clinicians who have inconsistently reported were more likely to indicate evidence of abuse as being important in reporting, and less likely to report subjective suspicions of abuse. Results show that a number of factors influence reporting decisions. Implications for public policy and professional training are discussed.     

Organizational corruption by public hospitals in China

This article studies the rise of organizational corruption by public hospitals in China since the 1990s and its impacts. Organizational corruption refers to the exploitation of public authority by a government agency for its monetary or material gains. This article argues that a combination of three major factors contributed to the rise of organizational corruption by public hospitals. First, the Chinese government substantially reduced its financial commitment to the health sector since the mid-1980s. To compensate for the retrenchment of government health outlays, public hospitals are authorized to earn revenue, keep and use all budgetary surpluses. This policy provided numerous opportunities and incentives for hospitals to engage in corruption. The second factor concerns the excessive and chaotic development of the pharmaceutical sector. Intense competition has prompted many drug firms to offer bribes to public hospitals so that their products would be purchased. Finally, the state regulatory infrastructure has failed to check the spread of corrupt practices. The study raised two broader implications. First, it highlights the pitfall of retrenchment of government outlays and the subsequent policy of allowing state agencies to generate, retain and use the revenue, in the absence of an effective regulatory infrastructure. Second, the prevalence of organizational corruption indicates that the nature of public hospitals in China has been transformed. Instead of providing efficient, safe and affordable treatment for patients, many public hospitals have engaged in predatory behavior that is harmful to patients’ health.     

Measuring Meritocracy in the Public Sector in Europe: a New National and Sub-National Indicator

Since the late nineteenth century, the presence of an independent and meritocratic bureaucracy has been posited as an advantage for effective bureaucratic behaviour and a means of limiting patrimonial networks and corruption, among other benefits. There is little consensus on how the features of an independent and meritocratic bureaucracy should be measured across countries, however, and broad empirical studies are therefore rare. What is more, the few such studies that exist have advanced measures which are constructed exclusively on expert surveys. Although these have indeed contributed to the knowledge in the field, the data on which they are built come with problems. This paper proposes a set of novel measures that complement existing measures and thus fill important gaps in this burgeoning literature. The measures we present are not based on expert assessments but on perceptions of public sector employees’ and citizens’. We create two measures—that can be combined into one—from a recent survey (2013) of over 85,000 citizens in 24 European countries. One is purely based on the assessments from public sector employees’ and the other is based on perceptions of citizens working outside the public sector. The paper also discusses the survey and explores the external validity of the measures provided here, showing correlations with alternative measures based on expert opinions, as well as variables from the literature that we would expect to correlate highly with a meritocratic bureaucracy.     

Fringe benefits: The hidden costs of unionization and collective bargaining in corrections

Public Sector Unionization is a phenomenon characterized by rapid growth. Many studies have found, however, that the pay differential between unionized and non-unionized public sector employees is relatively small. This study posits the theory that one possible explanation is that unionized public sector employees are making gains in an area where the cost of concessions is somewhat hidden. Specifically, that unionized public sector employees enjoy a substantial lead in number of fringe benefits. The public sector area chosen for study is that of corrections. A questionnaire was constructed and mailed to all 50 state correctional systems assessing whether or not employees received 35 fringe benefits. The fringe benefits are divided into five categories and reported in tabular form. In addition, the fringe benefits are examined as a composite index and a comparison is then made between unionized and non-unionized employees. The results clearly show that unionized correctional employees have a considerable advantage in the number of fringe benefits enjoyed.     

Can corruption constrain the size of governments?

This paper analyzes the relationship between government size and the level of corruption. We propose a theoretical model where production decisions and corrupt behavior are endogenously determined. We model corruption assuming production in the formal sector is regulated by public officials who can use their public power for private gain. In this context, the underground economy emerges as an outside option that allows entrepreneurs to avoid dealing with bureaucrats. The fact that investments in the informal sector may influence public finances, introduces the possibility of multiple equilibria with different levels of corruption. Consistent with previous theoretical works and recent empirical evidence, we find out that corruption and the shadow economy are complements as they positively correlate across equilibria, which implies that corruption may limit the size of the public sector.     

公司内部举报制度研究

公司内部举报制度是公司内部控制制度的重要部分,其本质是一种信息披露行为,激励公司员工作为社会公众的代表监管公司行为,以有效保护股东利益,防范公司经营风险,提高内部控制制度的有效性.因此,应重视公司内部控制制度中员工举报的重要作用,对私营部门举报的立法应聚集于公司内部员工,鼓励公司建立内部举报制度,加大对举报人的外部激励...     

Corrupt reciprocity - Experimental evidence on a men's game

Why are women regarded to be more resistant towards corruption? We address this question by letting students allotted the role of public servants receive a bribe and choose between reporting (whistleblowing), opportunism and reciprocity (delivery of a contract to the briber). Those acting as businesspersons choose whether or not to publicize at the end of the game. Male businesspersons more often depart from maximizing payoffs and allocate resources to punishing opportunistic public servants. Instead of acting opportunistically, some public servants tend to reciprocate or report. We find that female public servants are less inclined to reciprocate. Their resistance towards corruption is found to relate less to a willingness to report. Survey data from international households shows that men are more confident that bribes will be reciprocated, supporting our results.     

Business Response to Regulation: An Economist's Perspective

This chapter presents an economist's perspective on the interrelationship of the compliance and enforcement decisions of business and regulators in the context of regulations governing occupational health. Assuming profit-maximizing firms and harm-minimizing enforcement agencies, it is argued that a degree of preventive activity would be undertaken by businesses even in the absence of regulation. However, if employees are not fully informed about the risks of the workplace, it is likely that the profit-maximizing level of prevention will be less than socially optimal, and consequently there will be a need for regulation. An enforcement agency which attempts to minimize harm through inducing compliance with regulatory standards will be faced with similar informational difficulties to individual employees, and this suggests some scope for cooperative gains with individual firms through negotiated compliance, rather than prosecution.     

REFORMING THE POLICE: RACIAL DIFFERENCES IN PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR CHANGE*

While the literature has extensively documented popular discontent with various types of police misconduct, little is known about popular support for corrective measures. Such information, however, would be valuable for public policy and has the potential to enhance public confidence in the police. This article, using data from a recent national survey, reports public attitudes toward several specific reforms in policing. Findings indicate, first, that race is a predictor. Blacks and Hispanics are the most supportive of reform. Second, support for reform is strongly affected by the perceived frequency of police misconduct in one's city and neighborhood and by exposure to media reports of police misconduct. Respondents who believe that police corruption, unwarranted stops, and verbal and physical abuse of citizens are common are more likely to favor reforms. The same is true for those who are frequently exposed to news media coverage of incidents of police misconduct. The findings are consistent with the group‐position theory of race relations.     

Ancillary consequences of employee theft

The majority of research on employee theft considered the characteristics and predictors of workplace misconduct. When consequences were considered, research centered on the economic losses arising out of workplace offending. This article addresses the ancillary consequences of employee theft. Interviews were conducted with 457 business owners, managers, supervisors, and other employees to assess their experiences with employee theft. By fully understanding the costs, businesses can be prepared to carry out strategies that would offset many of the negative consequences resulting from workplace misconduct.     

Is a public reporting approach appropriate for nursing home care?

Publicizing quality information has been used as a quality improvement strategy in the acute care sector for more than a decade. Despite research showing mixed results of these efforts, publicly reporting quality measures is currently being pursued as a quality improvement strategy for nursing homes. Designed to empower consumers to make informed choices and to stimulate provider competition on quality, nursing home public reporting began in 1998 with the Nursing Home Compare Web site and has received greater emphasis in the 2002 Nursing Home Quality Initiative, both directed by the federal government. Focusing on the response of three key stakeholder groups across settings of care-consumers, providers, and purchasers-I identify several challenges that nursing home reporting must overcome to be successful. I conclude that publicly reporting quality measures for nursing homes will have a harder time promoting quality improvement than for acute care settings, where results have been disappointing thus far. In addition to the conceptual analysis, I evaluate whether the quality information reported on Nursing Home Compare had any impact on nursing home occupancy rates following its release. Using a pre/post-release design, I find that the effect of public reporting on nursing home occupancy rates has been minimal thus far. Although some estimates of effect are statistically significant and in the hypothesized direction, they all suggest very small effect sizes. It is unclear whether the absence of a larger reporting effect to date is specific to Nursing Home Compare or whether it inheres to the broader task of using quality information to promote change in the nursing home care sector.     

Does the job matter? Comparing correlates of stress among treatment and correctional staff in prisons

The wealth of literature on stress in the correctional workplace focused on correctional officers, frequently ignoring treatment personnel employed in these same institutions. This study advanced the literature on correctional workplace stress by: (1) testing for differences in workplace stress between correctional officers and treatment personnel, (2) examining personal and environmental factors to determine whether distinct precursors to stress existed for these two groups, and (3) utilizing multiple measures of stress. Self-report survey data from 3,794 employees in ten adult prisons in a southwestern state demonstrated that both groups of employees reported moderately high levels of job stress and stress-related health concerns. Apart from perceptions of safety, sources of stress as well as protective factors against stress were similar for both groups with environmental factors demonstrating the most robust impact.     

Workplace Sexual Harassment in Policing: Perceived Psychological Injuries by Source and Severity

Relatively little is known about employee perceptions of workplace psychological injuries following sexual and nonsexual harassment. In quasi-military occupational organizations, such as policing, the rate of sexual harassment to workplace injuries from other sources is comparatively high. In an exploratory 5?×?2 between-subjects factorial experimental projection study, 220 New South Wales Police Force officers responded to one of ten experimental vignettes in which sources of psychological injury and the gender of the injured worker were systematically varied. Results revealed an unexpected effect of experience. Employees aged 30 years and older were significantly more likely to anticipate psychological consequences and clinically diagnosable symptoms than their younger counterparts. As hypothesized, a main effect of injury source, but not gender of the target, emerged for the severity of psychological consequences: a physical injury was perceived to produce significantly more severe psychological injuries than sexual harassment in the form of coercion and unwanted sexual attention. Contrary to the hypothesis, participants rated gender-based hostility higher than other types of sexual harassment as a source of severe psychological harm. Participants believed that gender-based hostility requires more professional intervention and predicted more negative workplace consequences than other psychological injuries caused by other workplace events. As hypothesized, women employees were generally viewed as significantly more vulnerable to negative workplace outcomes than men. The police officers who participated in this study considered women as more likely to experience workplace problems following sexual coercion than other types of workplace injury. Physical injuries, gender-based hostility, and sexual coercion were distinguished from nonsexual harassment and unwanted sexual attention as significantly more likely to produce clinically diagnosable injuries, irrespective of target gender. Implications of these findings for research, practice, and legal policy are discussed.     

‘All About That Bass’? Is non‐ideal‐weight discrimination unlawful in the UK?

People of non‐ideal‐weight (overweight or severely underweight) are subjected to discrimination, in the workplace and elsewhere, based on attitudinal assumptions and negative inferences from their membership of a group, such as that they are insufficiently self‐motivated to make good employees. But is that discrimination unlawful in the UK? The Equality Act 2010 offers only a very tenuous route for protection, because the Act is based largely on a ‘medical model’ of disability. EU law, which embraces a ‘social model’ of disability, drawing from the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, offers more, at least in theory. But the mechanisms for enforcing individual EU law rights mean that entitlements in EU law are likely to be enforceable in practice only against state employers. This situation leaves a gap in the law which is remediable only by legislative reform.     

Dating violence perpetration and/or victimization and associated sexual risk behaviors among a sample of inner-city African American and Hispanic adolescent females

The purpose of this study is to examine the prevalence of physical and psychological dating violence victimization and perpetration reported by inner-city African American and Hispanic adolescent girls as well as associated risky sexual behaviors among this population. Participants in this study were 10th- and 11th-grade female students from seven inner-city Chicago public high schools. Participants were administered with the Safe Dates measures of physical violence victimization, physical violence perpetration, psychological abuse victimization, and psychological perpetration. Approximately half of the sample reported some psychological dating violence victimization and perpetration, and approximately one third reported some physical victimization and perpetration. Hispanic adolescents were significantly more likely to report psychological victimization, whereas African American adolescents were significantly more likely to report physical dating violence perpetration. Victimization was found to predict perpetration in this population, and adolescents who acknowledged being both victims and perpetrators of dating violence were more likely to report having had vaginal sex and a higher number of past-year sexual partners. Inner-city African American and Hispanic adolescent girls may be particularly vulnerable to dating violence victimization and perpetration, which may be due to a number of other social factors not explored within this study. Furthermore, African American adolescent girls continue to engage in behaviors that increase their risk for negative health outcomes, predominantly STIs, highlighting the need for effective interventions with this population.     

The Parliamentary Enquiry on Fraud in the Dutch Construction Industry Collusion as Concept Between Corruption and State-Corporate Crime

In December 2002 the final report of the Royal Commission concerning Irregularities in the Dutch Construction Industry was published. The broadcasting of the public hearings in the months before was breaking news. It proved the whole sector participated in illegal practices, ranging from fraud, unjustified subsidies and license issuance to real bribery and money or favours to individual politicians or higher-ranking public servants; from undercutting the market, monopolisation and forcing up prices, to selective control by partial inspectorates. In his article the author, an advisor to the Commission, summarises the mayor types of irregularities the report reveals with special interest in the network dimension they had in common. The Commission spoke about collusion as the key problem. Collusion can be described as secret agreement for a fraudulent or deceitful purpose, especially to defeat the course of law. Theoretically this concept can have many faces. In this parliamentary enquiry it was illustrated in three ways: as anti-trust illegalities, as a kind of governmental crime, and as kind of corruption. The report showed a long-lasting structural interrelation between these three types with a special role for the twining between collusion and corruption. Corruption research often mentions collusion as a cause, condition or explanation of corruption. But rarely is that argument illustrated in detail. This article seeks to do so. Especially when corruption is hard to grasp in modern society, a solution could be to take collusion as ‘a network offence’ more seriously. The collusion subsystems revealed hereare relatively stable networks, invulnerable to individualised anti-corruption legislation. The author pleads for stricter rules governing state-corporate interrelationships, more severe control on network abuses, and the introduction of minimum standards for public contracting as proposed by Transparency International.     

Start-ups among university employees: the influence of legitimacy,human capital and social capital

Using a sample of 7,260 university employees, we investigate how legitimacy, social and human capital influence the employees’ start-up propensity. We find that scientific legitimacy, as measured by the number of recently published peer reviewed scientific articles, and conference papers accepted had no significant effect. Scientific legitimacy measured as publications in non-peer review journals even had a negative effect. Popular legitimacy showed mixed results. Measured as number of articles in popular science publications showed positive correlations and other public media appearances had a non significant effect on start-up propensity. Individuals who are older and have higher level of human capital, measured as level of education are less likely to start firms. We also found that, people with more social capital, such as contact with external product development teams are more likely to start new firms. Taken together, the findings suggest that activities spanning the university-business divide increase the start-up propensity, while within university activities had no, or negative effects on the propensity. Consequently, universities interested in encouraging their employees to start firms should focus their attention on creating spanning activities rather than improving conditions for within university tenure.     

What can be done against public corruption and fraud: Expert views on strategies to protect public integrity

A number of questions dominate the debate about public corruption and fraud. First of all, of course, there is the question of the content of these phenomena. What is corruption, what is fraud and how is it related to power abuse and public waste? Some scholars stress that these questions are unanswerable if ethnocentrism is to be avoided. Others are more positive about the possibility to grasp the central meaning of the concepts. A second type of questions has to do with understanding public corruption and fraud. To define a concept is something; to understand it is something different. Understanding means knowing the causes and consequences. To be able to understand it, corruption should be given a place in the framework of knowledge about public structure, culture and behavior. This is all but a simple endeavor because it will make a difference which theoretical and methodological framework is chosen as a starting point. This article seeks to avoid this obstacle by choosing an approach which could be categorized as pragmatic and eclectic, trying to discover whether there are causes which are seen as important by a variety of experts with different academical and occupational backgrounds: is there a common core present in different approaches? Third, there is the normative debate. What are the positive and negative consequences of corruption and fraud and how can cost and benefits be compared and judged? Nowadays, most scholars and practitioners in the field stress the negative consequences of public corruption and fraud. Such a critical attitude almost automatically leads to a fourth type of debate, about the question “what to do about it?”. Which methods and strategies are thinkable and what works? This subject is the central one in this article.     

公务员创新行为:文献述评与研究展望

创新行为俨然成为公务员适应新时代高素质干部队伍建设要求的典型行为模式,以及公共部门适应职能转变和服务再造要求的内生动力。本研究基于对已有研究的系统梳理与深入分析,构建了一个系统的公务员创新行为研究框架。本研究从公私部门成员创新行为差异及争议切入,围绕公务员创新行为的概念内涵、多层次影响因素及复杂作用机制进行系统回顾并展开评述,呈现新制度主义理论、自我决定理论等在公务员创新行为塑造中的深层逻辑。在此基础上,本研究展望未来方向:(1)以回应跨国文化背景、科层制组织特征、现实工作场景实现公务员创新的情境化研究;(2)在新时代中国场景中实现公务员创新行为的量表开发、跨层次系统性形成机理探索;(3)拓展公务员创新行为的效能机制研究,实现微观层面行为创新与中观层面组织创新、宏观层面政策创新的呼应衔接。