All that glitters: a call for more research on corrupt entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT

We add to recent calls for more research on corporate corruption and argue that entrepreneurship researchers need to pay more attention to entrepreneurs who engage in entrepreneurial activities that corrode institutions and undermine the rule of law: what we call corrupt entrepreneurship. We conceptualise corrupt entrepreneurs as individuals who simultaneously act as traditional entrepreneurs seeking out and exploiting opportunities to profit from institutional voids; as institutional entrepreneurs involved in the creation and maintenance of the institutional voids that they profit from; and as cultural entrepreneurs that draw on various cultural resources to legitimate themselves in the communities in which they operate in order to maintain community support for their activities. As an example, we discuss the Sicilian Mafia and briefly describe how the existence of an institutional void played a central role in the formation of the Sicilian Mafia, how it continues to profit from institutional voids, what it does to maintain the voids it profits from, and how it legitimises itself in the local community by helping members of the community mitigate problems caused by the institutional voids that they are complicit in creating and maintaining in the first place. Building on this discussion, we highlight important future directions for research on corrupt entrepreneurship.

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneurship
• corrupt entrepreneurship
• corruption
• institutional void
• informal economy
• Mafia

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. By ‘transition economies’ we mean an economy that was once centrally planned and has transitioned to a capitalist system.

2. Cosa Nostra, or ‘our thing’, is the term used by members to refer to the organisation. The term ‘Mafia’ is not generally used by members.

3. There is also evidence that a second resource boom – in sulphur mining – also played an important role (Buonanno et al., 2015).

4. Sicily has about 1800 clinics compared to, for example, Lombardy, which has about 150 despite Lombardy having twice the population of Sicily.

5. This is a common requirement for organisations that are set up in opposition to the formal state system such as guerrilla armies (Taber, 1970).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.