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1 – 4 of 4Corruption is a fundamental concern for all political regimes, but particularly for republics where power is vested primarily in a legislative body. While political thinkers…
Abstract
Corruption is a fundamental concern for all political regimes, but particularly for republics where power is vested primarily in a legislative body. While political thinkers across times and places have grappled with this perennial problem, this chapter focuses on the modern American republic and its founders. The authors begin with a brief historical sketch that illustrates the continuity and evolution of corruption discourse, spanning the distance between ancient political philosophy and modern political science. Turning to the American founding, and focusing particularly on the debates at the Constitutional Convention and the essays of The Federalist, the authors show how the framers of the US Constitution engaged with this tradition as they confronted the threat of corruption head on. Although these early American documents provide an ambiguous definition of corruption, the authors endeavor to parse the separate but intertwined meanings of corruption: constitutional, institutional, and moral. While the framers' system draws upon both ancient and modern approaches, their final position is that correct institutional design can provide the solution to political corruption. Ultimately for the framers, this comes down to the design of the legislature and its relationship to the other branches. The authors suggest that while contemporary readers may find much to be dissatisfied with in the framers' proposed solutions, their subtle and wide-ranging conceptualization of the problem of corruption might usefully inform contemporary theory building in this area.
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Amanda Williams, Katrin Heucher and Gail Whiteman
At the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit, the Club of Rome in collaboration with a network of global contributors issued a statement calling for nations to declare a…
Abstract
At the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit, the Club of Rome in collaboration with a network of global contributors issued a statement calling for nations to declare a planetary emergency. The statement calls for urgent action to prevent a global crisis due to the impact of human activity on the stability of the Earth’s life-support systems. Implications of the planetary emergency pose intriguing challenges for how managers address paradoxical sustainability challenges across spatial and temporal scales. In this chapter, the authors have two aims. First, the authors show that the planetary emergency is inherently paradoxical. To do this, the authors build an embedded view of the planetary emergency and argue that it is paradoxical due to key dynamics that emerge across organizational, economic, social, and environmental systems over time. Second, the authors advance paradox theory by exploring the paradoxical nature of the planetary emergency and propose a three-sequence framework for collective action including: (1) building a view of the planetary emergency across spatial and temporal scales, (2) collectively making sense of the planetary emergency, and (3) levering a paradoxical view of the planetary emergency to ensure effective action.
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