Resumen

TREJO ALONSO, Luis Jair. Corruption: The Understanding of the Multifaceted Concept from Different Approaches. Mexico’s Anti-corruption Policy to Review 2012-2021. Gest. polít. pública [online]. 2021, vol.30, n.spe, pp.37-79.  Epub 11-Sep-2023. ISSN 1405-1079.  https://doi.org/10.29265/gypp.v30i3.960.

This text reviews the notion of “corruption” that has been forming in the world over the last five decades, within the framework of an anti-corruption industry (Sampson, 2010), which has positioned it as a acceptable, measurable and even parsimonious concept. This text aims to stop the general idea of understanding corruption as that “cancer” which the nations that suffer from it must undertake the task of “fighting” it until it is “extirpated” from their social or organizational dynamics. This article makes a broad review of the concept and presents it as a “umbrella” concept with many facets, whose notion depends on the approach (“analytical glasses”) with which it explores the phenomenon. Here are three approaches that give rise to different explanations, instruments and actions of public policy also different to understand this phenomenon of broad spectrum as corruption. The economic approach, the political/organizational approach; and, finally, the sociological/anthropological, its tools and its classical methods of analysis provide multiple elements to reflect on the meaning of corruption, the behaviors, the nuances and the edges that surround it, which together expand the meaning and tools to understand it. Finally, to demonstrate the power of these approaches, Mexico’s anti-corruption policy in the period 2012-2021 is reviewed.

Palabras llave : corruption; anti-corruption industry; anthropology of corruption; systemic corruption; fight against corruption.