Arizona Chapter

Association of Certified Fraud Examiners

 

CORPORATE CORRUPTION

Business as Usual:

How Corruption Becomes Taken for Granted in Organizations

 

Speaker:   Blake Ashforth is the Russ Lyon Chair in Management in the W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, and a Fellow of the Academy of Management

             

When:       Tuesday, April 10, 2007   12:00 – 1:00 (sign-in 11:30am-12)

 

          Where:      Arizona Industrial Commission

                             800 W. Washington St., Phoenix, 5th floor conference room

 

Blake received his PhD in organizational behavior from the University of Toronto.  Blake has published over 75 journal articles and book chapters on identity and identification of organizational settings, socialization and newcomer work adjustment, the dysfunctions of organizational structures and process, and the links among individual-, group-, and organization-level phenomena.  He is also the author of Role Transitions in Organizational Life:  An Identity-Based Perspective, Lawrence Eribaum Associates (2001).  Blake won the 2004 Academy of Management Executives Best Paper Award on his paper on “Business as Usual:  The Acceptance and Perpetuation of Corruption in Organizations”.

 

Presentation Scope/Topics:

 

Organizational corruption often requires the knowing cooperation of numerous employees – employees who are often upstanding community members and caring parents. How is this possible? We discuss three mutually reinforcing processes that cause corruption to become more or less taken for granted: (1) institutionalization, where an initial corrupt decision or act becomes embedded in organizational structures and processes, thereby becoming routine; (2) rationalization, where self-serving ideologies develop to justify and perhaps even glorify corruption; and (3) socialization, where naïve newcomers are induced to view corruption as permissible if not desirable. The result is that corruption becomes self-perpetuating, in short, business as usual. Popular accounts that demonize individuals as evil-doers miss the point that individuals (bad apples) and systems (bad barrels) are mutually reinforcing.

                   For information about the ACFE and/or the Arizona Chapter visit www.acfe.com and/or www.cfe-arizona.org.