New concepts for old?

There has been an explosion of interest in corruption in the past 10 years and the literature on the causes, consequences and control of corruption is now substantial. But there has not been a corresponding concern with the concept of corruption and how it can be defined and refined. Dissatisfaction with the approaches used in earlier decades has, in the 1990s, encouraged many analysts to turn to other, primarily economic, concepts. This article explores how the concept of corruption has evolved in contemporary social science and examines whether the new concepts constitute an important advance on the approaches used in earlier studies. It concludes that the new concepts are attempts to explain the circumstances most likely to give rise to corruption rather than original ways of defining it.