The etiquette of bribes – learning, teaching and knowing

ABSTRACT

How are bribes supposed to be given or taken? In this article, we study how individuals from countries with low tolerance of corruption learn, teach others and present themselves as knowledgeable about the etiquette of bribes. This involves the social practices of everyday corruption and petty bribes when working as ’strangers’ in countries where such exchanges are more common. Previous interviews on bribery with Swedish and Danish aid workers, and Swedish representatives from adoption organizations, were searched for descriptions of giving, receiving and avoiding petty bribes. We argue that an appreciation of the etiquette of bribes is important for understanding the social practices of giving and/or taking bribes. Such an etiquette is not ‘random’ but addresses and resolves practical and interactional concerns for the actors involved in those exchanges.

KEYWORDS:

• Etiquette
• corruption
• bribes
• practices
• interviews

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

At the time when the empirical material was gathered, there was no need for formal approval from an ethical board.

Notes

1. In the introduction to their anthology on economies of favours (some which include what is commonly understood as bribes), Henig and Makovicky (2017) state that they want to ‘ … refocus our attention from functional questions of exchange and reciprocity to questions about the ethical and expressive aspects of human life’ (2017, p. 3). For similar arguments, see, Åkerström (2017).

2. https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021. Denmark shares the number 1 position with Finland (and New Zealand), and Sweden shares the number 4 position with Norway (and Singapore), in the yearly published Corruption Perceptions Index.

3. In Ledeneva et al. (2018), several such forms of informal practices and exchanges are described, in the grey zone somewhere between gift and commodity, and between gift and payment.