XClose

UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

Home
Menu

Four Fridays for Corruption: Informal Practices, Corruption, and Institutional Change

13 November 2020, 9:00 am–11:00 am

Coins on a map

This online workshop series aims to bring together researchers from different disciplines to improve our theoretical, empirical and methodological understanding of different aspects of corruption, rent-seeking behaviours, and informal practices within different institutional contexts.

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

SSEES

Location

zoom

A general consensus exists that corruption and other forms of rent-seeking behaviour impose tremendous costs on society, because they reduce funds devoted to public goods including safety, social services, and infrastructure. They create economic distortions, lower economic growth, and increase inequality. From the institutional perspective, institutions – as rules and norms able to constrain and shape human interactions (Hodgson 2006; North, 1990) – should minimise these collective action problems by discouraging and penalising rent-seeking behaviours. Within the literature on individuals’ conformity and compliance to rules (broadly defined as social norms), emphasis has been placed on the study of the reasons why institutions designed to contain such behaviours fail to act as expected (Batory 2012). Across different social science disciplines a consensus is emerging that corruption and other forms of rent-seeking behaviours cannot be reduced to a lack of institutional quality.

This workshop aims to provide an ad-hoc research platform to further this debate. We are interested in work that sheds light on corruption and other forms of rent-seeking behaviours within different institutional and socio-cultural contexts from a broad and interdisciplinary perspective. The workshop also aims to explore different aspects of informality, the complementarities existing between informal practices and different forms of institutions, and the relational mechanisms linking informal practices and corruption.

Once you have signed up, you will receive a Zoom link a few days before the event.

Event Programme

John Heathershaw, David Lewis & Tom Mayne, University of Exeter

What Happens in London Stays in London? The relationship between overseas AML enforcement and the domestic position of kleptocratic ruling elites 

Kyong Jun Choi, Jeju National University, Korea

Jonson N. Porteux, Kansai Gaidai University, Japan

Leviathan for Sale: Maritime police privatization, bureaucratic corruption and the Sewol disaster

Emrah Gülsunar, University of Lund, Sweden

Making Economic Growth Sustained: British Parliament, legislation and abolishing rent-seeking in cotton textile industry during Industrial Revolution, 1748 – 1832

This event is jointly organised by SSEES CCSEE, Loughborough University and Birkbeck University.