Abstract
Recent North world initiatives for economic development with a human face have encouraged a wave of corporate benevolence that cultivates dependency rather than dignity. Seeking to re-moralize this corruption as a tool in market power displacement, the market powers of commodification have co-opted rule of law discourse and rebranded corruption as facilitation through foreign direct investment. By unpacking corruption in the context of South world exchange market dynamics, its role is revealed in advancing neo-liberal capitalism under the banner of free trade that has decimated the fragile market economies of the global South. The chapter concludes that communitarian movements creating a new contestatory collective conscience must remain deployed to protect the social against neocolonial, neoliberal attacks on its providence.
The author expresses his thanks to Gloria Lee for her intellectual input into various themes developed in this paper.
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Notes
- 1.
The relationship between law, property, fictitious commodification, scarcity pricing and market dis-embedding is expanded in Findlay (2017).
- 2.
That is, Julia Black’s (2001) definition of regulation as: ‘the intentional use of authority to affect the behaviour of a different party according to set standards, involving instruments of information gathering and behaviour modification’.
- 3.
The limitations inherent in defining corruption in terms of generic offense types are well represented in the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (2012) summary on defining corruption.
- 4.
For the purposes of this chapter, we employ the term ‘transitional economies’ to refer to postcolonial economies transforming usually from protected subsistence markets to fragile free trade market environments experiencing the strains of North/South world global economic dominance.
- 5.
In this sense, we are using ‘culture’ as an epithet for the business body corporate (in that sense market cultures) as well as the social and community frames of bonding that explain relationships of obligation and dependency.
- 6.
- 7.
Law and development studies are in crisis because some scholars have come seriously to doubt the liberal legalist assumptions that ‘legal development’ can be equated with exporting United States institutions or that any improvement of legal institutions in the Third world will be potent and good. They have come to see that ‘Legal change may have little or no effect on social economic conditions in Third World societies and, conversely, that many legal ‘reforms’ can deepen inequality, curb participation, restrict individual freedom and hamper efforts to increase material well-being’ (Trubeck and Galanter 1974: 1080).
- 8.
For the purposes of this analysis, we draw the market distinction between organic and mechanical forces as relating to those that originate and operate within closer market social bonds (organic) and those that originate externally and are introduced into the market without purposes primarily directed to social good.
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Findlay, M. (2018). Trading Corruption North/South. In: Carrington, K., Hogg, R., Scott, J., Sozzo, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65021-0_19
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