Armed with deep insights from more than a quarter century in senior public sector service and years of passionate research into the vexing phenomenon of corruption, the author presents a scholarly yet lucid 360-degree review on the topic for serious students of the subject and practitioners of ethical oversight and vigilance. Merging the hitherto separately explored streams of ethics and corruption research, the author builds a case for a holistic, multidisciplinary, and most importantly, preventive outlook on corruption. Vinayan first collates the perspectives on corruption from all the streams of social science research and then positions corruption in the backdrop of the other organizational misconducts. He follows this up with an exhaustive discussion on the antecedents and theories attempting to explain the phenomenon. He then explores and presents new insights on certain less-explored facets such as precursors, mediators, and moderators of corruption. He also discusses the effects of, control over, and measurement of corruption. He has included a special chapter on the anticorruption scenario in India, where corruption has emerged as a hot topic of discussion and, recently, a subject to be formally taught in colleges. He has laid the ground for his research findings on corruption vulnerability of organizations, to be brought out in the near future, which hold promise for both scholars and practitioners. He introduces a new concept of corruptance of organizations, which promises to be a much studied theme in future. Prepared after years of research into the latest and seminal articles from international journals, books, and field studies among the vigilance community and supported by his doctoral work at IIM Indore, this book is perhaps the first serious academic effort on corruption to come out of India in this decade.
