This study is an empirical approach to answering the question: are there any universal factors that account for the origin, diffusion and persistence of corruption in human societies? The paper enquires whether the perception of corruption in politics and economics can be tackled as a form of cultural adaptation, driven by exogenous and endogenous forces. These are respectively: freedom of access and management of economic resources, and the pressures towards human grouping. Following the analytical insights of cultural theory, developed by (...) Mary Douglas and later Aaron Wildavsky, variation is introduced through the ways in which corruption is perceived through the different behavioral and cultural biases that prevail in societies. This research introduces a cross-country comparative analysis of 57 countries attempting to test quantitatively whether institutional pressure and emphasis towards social grouping are correlated with corruption perception at country levels. (shrink)

Is rhetoric just a new and trendy way toépater les bourgeois?Unfortunately, I think that the newfound interest of some economists in rhetoric, and particularly Donald McCloskey in his new book and subsequent responses to critics, gives that impression. After economists have worked so hard for the past five decades to learn their sums, differential calculus, real analysis, and topology, it is a fair bet that one could easily hector them about their woeful ignorance of the conjugation of Latin verbs or (...) Aristotle's Six Elements of Tragedy. Moreover, it has certainly become an academic cliché that economists write as gracefully and felicitously as a hundred monkeys chained to broken typewriters. The fact that economists still trot out Keynes's prose in their defense is itself an index of the inarticulate desperation of an inarticulate profession. (shrink)

To be effective, whistleblowing policies should be adapted to the organisational culture. They need to be custom-made and not follow a one-size-fits-all logic, specifically when they are installed to stimulate responsible peer reporting, a highly sensitive and value-laden type of whistleblowing. This paper attempts to illustrate that grid-group cultural theory could help to construct a whistleblowing policy by linking reporting styles to the organisational culture. First, we will identify four types of policy measures that are hypothesized to be effective in (...) four types of organisational culture. Second, we develop the hypothesis that certain organisational cultures can induce peer reporting that is harmful for the organisation. The whistleblowing policy can then be used as a catalyst for cultural change. (shrink)

The paper examines the ramifications of naturalism with regard to the question of individuality in economics and biology. Economic theory has to deal with whether households, firms, and states are individuals or are mere entities such as clubs, networks, and coalitions. Biological theory has to deal with the same question with regard to cells, organisms, family packs, and colonies. To wit, the question of individuality in both disciplines involves three separate problems: the metaphysical, phenomenist, and ontological. The metaphysical problem is (...) concerned with purposeful action: Is the firm or organism exclusively the product of efficient causality (optimization) or is it motivated by final causality (purposefulness)? The phenomenist problem is interested in the substantiality of essences: Is the firm''s or organism''s scheme of institutions/traits deep or is it extraneous to identity? The ontological problem is related to the issue of reductionism: Is the behavior of lower-level organization governed by a pre-constituted entities or is it context-sensitive? The paper finds that theoretical differences run along the naturalist/anti-naturalist divide rather than along disciplinary specialization. Also, the paper finds that it is not inconsistent for the same theorist to be naturalist with regard to one problem and anti-naturalist with respect to the other two problems. (shrink)

ArgumentKuhnian phases of paradigmatic development correspond to characteristic variations of citation measures. These correlations can in turn be predicted from a simple model of human information processing when applied to the common environments of scientists. By combining a scientometric and a human information processing approach to the history of scientific thought, structures of disciplinary development, and in particular paradigmatic cycles, can be more reliably assessed than before. Consequently, the quantitative historian of science is liberated to some extent from the vagaries (...) of qualitative judgment, as exemplified by traditional narrative type approaches to the history of science. (shrink)

Explaining the seizure of power by the National Socialist Party and the totalitarian workings of the Nazi regime in the Third Reich is still difficult not only with respect to the atrocities committed but also to understanding whether the German population and society had to be terrorized into complying with the regime or were part and parcel of it. The paper introduces a notion of swarm to advance the idea that the German population was terrorized into a deliberate compliance with (...) the regime. The notion of swarm is sociologically controlled by a complementary notion of form, which serves to reconstruct and model the social calculus realized by the swarm to differentiate and reproduce itself inside a complex society. The data I use are the results of historical research done in the last 60 years. (shrink)