ABSTRACT
Commencing from the position that corruption is best understood as a business relationship, this chapter explores the nexus between corruption and enterprise by broadly examining corruption and transitional market cultures. It addresses the transparency ‘paradigm’ in corruption control and posits the market model (rather than one based on morality or governance) as a more effective control foundation. Particularly in transitional cultures with markets affected by complex relationships of obligation and dependency (which are mirrored in many illegitimate market arrangements), the chapter proposes transparency in the form of reflexive accountability in specific market relationships and transactions of market power, as being crucial for control. The analytic purpose of the chapter is to postulate a business taxonomy of corruption which exposes its reliance on power imbalance, and thereby suggest that corruption is a force for market dis-embedding (with all its negative impacts on social good).
