Suspicious Gifts

Bribery, Morality, and Professional Ethics

Malin Akerstrom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781412852913
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351487382
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Gifts have been given and received in all eras and societies; gifts are part of a universal human exchange. The importance of creating and sustaining social bonds with the help of gifts is widely acknowledged by social scientists, not only from anthropological but also from economic, sociological, and political science perspectives. Contemporary anti-corruption campaigns, however, have led gifts to be viewed with ever-increasing suspicion, because it is feared that the social bonds created by gift giving may contaminate professional decision-making. Suspicious Gifts investigates the sensitive issue of gift exchanges and how they become an object of contention. Malin akerstro;m considers the moral dilemmas presented by bribes and gift giving as experienced by Swedish aid workers and professionals working in the public sector, business, and adoption agencies. She also deals with professionals' interaction with foreign officials or contractors. Often a gift is just that, although sometimes the gift giving may be seen by others as a bribe. akerstro;m highlights the tensions between strict regulations designed to prevent corruption with the human affection for the institution of gift giving. She argues that bribes and gifts are important social phenomena because they are windows into classic sociological and anthropological research issues concerning interaction, social control, exchange, and rituals. This unique analysis will be of keen interest to all sociologists, public officials, and professionals.

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Sensitive Gifts

Gifts have been given and received in all eras and all societies: they form part of a universal human exchange. Insight into the gift institution’s universality was the subject of one of the most influential books in social anthropology: The Gift, by Marcel Mauss (1925). The importance of creating and sustaining social bonds with the help of gifts has since been acknowledged and analytically developed by social scientists, not only from anthropological but also from economic, sociological, and political science perspectives.

Contemporary anticorruption efforts, however, have come to look upon gifts with ever-increasing suspicion because it is feared that the social bonds thus created may contaminate professional or occupational decisions and deliberations. Not only expensive gifts but also relatively small gifts may be targeted as blameworthy, even criminal. For example, a Swedish lawyer who sent a small fruit basket to a staff member at the local court, in what he claimed was a thank-you gesture, was subsequently convicted of bribery. Accusations of corruption can also cover invitations for drinks or dinner—acts that used to be considered standard, everyday courtesies or tokens of appreciation. These accusations can involve top politicians, as in the case of the Clinton coffee scandals, in which prospective campaign contributors were invited to the White House (Bratsis 2003, 7), or the dinners involving the British prime minister David Cameron and the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, when the latter was involved in a scandal.¹ Yet the same accusations can also be directed at district nurses who accept coffee and cake from their patients during home visits (Stone 2000).

The problem of corruption has received a great deal of attention, but much less thought has been paid to political, administrative, and media reactions to the anticorruption movement (Sampson 2005). The social consequences for people as they go about their work in relation to an “anticorruption project” are, with some exceptions (for example, Anechiarico and Jacobs 1996), given less consideration.

The intricacies of gifts and bribes in contemporary society reveal a collision between cultural virtues: the classic functions of the gift as social glue, the ritual of giving and receiving, the practice of showing gratitude and appreciation, and a contemporary emphasis on “purity” in practices that are not endangered by social and interpersonal relations and commitments. These frictions demonstrate similarities with the frictions arising from common cultural conceptions of how economic transactions inevitably corrupt intimacy, and vice versa, when people constantly mingle intimacy and economic activities, as noted by the American sociologist Viviana Zelizer in her analysis of “connected lives” (2005, 2011).

The transformation into bribes of what were once seen as gifts, hospitality, or common work routines thus creates everyday dilemmas faced by various professionals, street-level bureaucrats, staff working in schools and in the care sector, and the like. Some of these workers have had to defend themselves for gift exchanges that they claimed to have been unaware constituted the crime of bribery, having instead viewed them as part of normal courtesy.

The Transformation of Gifts into Bribes: Expanding the Bribery Gaze

Viewed in historical terms, it is only relatively recently that gifts between work colleagues, between acquaintances or friends who also have some form of work relationship, and between bureaucrats and their clients can be seen as an occupational risk. During the sixteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, both the cultivation of “connections”—instrumental forms of friendship—and the giving of gifts were more a condition for getting coveted positions and the like, according to historians. Historians have, for instance, discussed patronage and corruption in England (Peck 1990) and commented on the differences between clientelism and nepotism in Sweden (Persson 1993).

According to Nathalie Zemon Davis (2000), who has specifically analyzed gift systems, gifts were highly integrated into sixteenth-century France: “Gifts … sustained connections among friends, neighbors, kin and co-workers at all levels in society; they softened oppressive relations across lines of class and status … and were everywhere present to ease the way in social advancement and political transaction” (2000, 124).

Davis and other historians such as the Swedish historian Eva Österberg (2007), however, are careful to note that gift giving and the use of “connections” in all periods have had the potential to be seen as corruptible. Still, over the centuries, there has been a continuous process in which meritocracy has become increasingly emphasized; monarchs and governments have discovered that talent and competence are necessary to win wars, collect taxes, and so on, and in the process, regulation of friendship, family relations, and gift giving has become stronger. This tendency has increased during the last century.

Students of politics, law, and government have, for instance, noted that the American discourse on administrative and political morals has changed profoundly: politicians in New York in the early decades of the twentieth century could still openly brag about their ability to use government money to enrich themselves, whereas now “most states have expanded the concept of bribery to include gifts and payments to public officials whether or not there was an intent to corrupt or a provable quid pro quo (so-called antigratuity statutes)” (Anechiarico and Jacobs 1996, 6).

To understand why a gift, without any intent to corrupt by the giver, may be understood as a bribe, we can enlist the help of Marcel Mauss, who emphasized the power of the gift. Even though his book, The Gift, came out almost a century ago and his material was mainly drawn from studies of archaic societies, he managed to capture something that seems to be common to humankind, bridging temporal and geographical divides. Gifts create obligations, writes Mauss. They are part of a cycle of gifts and reciprocal gifts, which, according to him, were governed by three moral rules. First, you have to give—to give a gift is the same as creating and maintaining social relationships. Second, you have to receive—to refuse to accept a gift is the same as not accepting the relationship. Third, you have to give a gift in return. It is this last situation, the moral obligation to return, that the anticorruption project wants to counteract.

With the “bribery gaze” that has developed in recent years, small presents, as mentioned above, in themselves can have suspicion cast upon them. Gifts can therefore be transformed from something you want to give or something you accept as a courtesy into something that causes suspicion. One of the ways in which the anticorruption project is done in contemporary Sweden is by publishing guidelines that warn employees against accepting gifts; yet it is never easy to refuse to receive a gift, and so flout Mauss’s second rule, when refusing that gift is to refuse the proffered relationship.

Difficulties can be seen on several levels, not just the everyday level my data are largely concerned with. A memorable illustration is provided by the diplomacy debacle that arose from the Swedish Army Council’s inability to refuse the gift presented to them by a representative of Pakistan during a visit to Stockholm. The commander-in-chief of the Pakistani army gave Sweden three of its finest Arabian thoroughbreds. Despite knowing that according to quarantine rules the horses could not be brought into Sweden, the Swedish officers could not bring themselves to say no. The horses were stopped at the border and subsequently put down, whereupon “the truth got out, and although Åke Sagrén [the Swedish commander-in-chief] went to Islamabad to apologize, the prime minister of Pakistan at the time, Benazir Bhutto, said on Swedish TV: ‘We are shocked and furious over this slaughter’” (DN, December 28, 2004).

Ambiguity and Clarification Efforts

The thin line between gifts and bribes seems to constitute an almost perpetual moral dilemma, according to the American social historian and lawyer John T. Noonan (1987). Although the central definition of bribes tends to be remarkably constant regardless of time and culture, the concrete constituting element, what counts as “an inducement” and “improperly influencing,” changes with culture: “the concept of a bribe contracts or expands with conventions, laws, practices” (Noonan 1987, xi). Studies carried out by anthropologists and others of contemporary so-called gift cultures in various countries reveal that the meaning of bribes and gifts differs, just as in societies that we now regard as corrupt—what Leslie Holmes (2006) calls “rotten states”—there are difficulties and tensions in determining what is regarded as a gift and what is a bribe (Pavarala 1996; Rose-Ackerman 1999, 91–110; Werner 2000).

From a sociological perspective, gifts are part of an interaction ritual in which meanings are multifaceted. A gift intended by the giver as a ritual gesture of gratitude can also be considered a bribe in legal terms. Conversely, a gift can be given with the intention of bribing someone without its being legally defined as such. A business dinner with a small accompanying gift may be defined as a social occasion instead of a strategic business move to soften up a client meeting (Sturdy et al. 2006). This ambiguity in meaning can be useful but also sometimes bring doubts and uncertainty. Is a present to a visiting development aid consultant a legitimate welcoming courtesy or will it fall into the category of illegal “bribe”?

While there is a contemporary tendency to stricter moral boundaries through anticorruption efforts, there is also a frustration of the ambiguity among those encouraging regulations, and consequently efforts to peel away the ambiguity that surrounds gift giving. The legal assessment of what constitutes a bribe was thus commented on by a representative for the Anti-Corruption Unit in an op-ed stating that “Today’s legislation is a lottery” (Sydsvenskan, January 28, 2008).² Manuals and guidelines are produced to clarify matters, and these often emphasize that it is not the value of the gift that is important; it is the relationship between the recipient and the giver that matters. However, these relationships also need to be assessed….

Thus, there is not only an inherent ambiguity surrounding gifts—their size, their extent, their expectation of reciprocity—but also a tendency, marked by various efforts, to clarify what is a gift and what is a bribe. This tendency is illustrated in discourses such as those formulated in handbooks and national guidelines. For instance, the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention urges officials to “discourage hospitality and gratitude,” two classic cultural virtues: “The most effective way of discouraging hospitality and gratitude is to develop clear rules that all members of an organization can share.”³ In Britain, the cabinet has decided to publish a quarterly list of gifts, hospitality, travel, and the like, from which one can learn that a pen set given by the president of France to the prime minister was “over the limit” and thus “held by department.”⁴ Such lists, in which some objects are pronounced “over the limit,” are visible symbols in a moral sorting process intended to reduce boundary work and draw clearer distinctions between what is morally acceptable and what is not: that is, the objects “over the limit.”

The classic sociologist Georg Simmel maintained that most social phenomena include opposing forces. In the present case, there is a regulative striving toward clarification. But some gift exchanges still belong to an ambiguous space, and people might want them to keep such a space. Thus, businessmen might court someone by giving an unobjectionable gift—so small as to seem harmless, but intended to strengthen a business relationship—as strategic as a bribe exchange. According to Swedish law, it is not the economic value that decides whether something is a gift or a bribe; it is the intention and the positions of the people involved in the transactions. Still, a businessman might appreciate the ambiguity of small gifts, as he believes their insignificance safeguards the interpretation of bribe transactions in the eyes of both the law and the recipient.

Contested Meanings

This book is about everyday experiences of bribery and gift giving. While analyzing the data, it became apparent that the discourse of bribes involved objects and practices that did not belong to the popular image of bribery. The meanings of gifts and bribes were often contested, generating, as in Chibnall and Saunders’s study (1977), two quite contradictory conceptual machineries. While our interviewees could maintain that something was a gift by accounting for various situations or exchanges using a terminology of “generosity,” “aid,” “respect,” and the like, prosecutors or employers endeavoring to remove suspect employees could use a rhetoric of bribery that included terms such as “undue influence,” “unfair competition,” “conflict of interest,” and “excessive entertaining.”

People who exchange gifts may maintain their definitions of a gift as a gift (and not a bribe) by drawing on the old cultural and religious moral norms of the praiseworthiness of gift giving. Giving to the poor is acclaimed in all religions; Christians, for instance, are brought up with the story of the poor widow who gave two mites (Mark 12:42). In cases such as assistance to orphanages, our interviewees, for instance, stubbornly rejected the labels attached to it by the judicial machinery. This book thus not only charts the ambiguity of gift and bribe exchanges, but also the highly contentious nature of many anticorruption efforts when it comes to everyday exchanges.

Why Study Small Gifts?

Studying small gifts is sociologically productive. With their help, and more specifically the way people talk about them, one can discern various moral visions being advanced in a way that discussions of “grand corruption” might not allow. Small gifts are particularly interesting in that, according to our data, the borderline between bribes and gifts is unclear and invites people to ascribe different meanings to them. Such meanings are inseparable from the moral reflections where different ethics are played out in interviews, police reports, and court proceedings. In cases of large-scale corruption, meanwhile, the meaning is generally unambiguous.

Although bribes are often described as extraordinary events involving high-profile scandals, large sums of money, and dramatic consequences, the assemblage of data used here (from interviews, court cases, media texts, and Internet data) gives the lie to this notion. Small gifts or objects designated as bribes often show up in legal contexts. Katarina Jacobsson, who has studied Swedish court cases, writes of the incomprehension that met her from both researchers and lawyers when she reported on the legal cases she studied—“As if in disappointment about the paltry nature of the value”—and exemplified her “typical court cases”: “It could be a ferry ticket paid for, or a dinner, or a gift voucher” (Jacobsson 2004, 23). These criminalized actions thus fall into the territory of the exchange of small gifts. The contrast between the cultural image of bribes, involving large sums, and the relatively small value of the contested gifts in the typical court case is interesting in itself.

Furthermore, with the help of small-gift illustrations, one may investigate the collision in professional life between gift-related morals and regulation striving for “purity” by looking at the daily lives of various representatives of different occupations, such as aid workers, nurses, lawyers, and others. These occupational categories share an interaction with external clients who seek some kind of quality service or access to better services. They all run the risk of losing their jobs if found guilty of corruption and experience uncertainty over whether their relations may lead them to be accused of impropriety.

Severe regulation and the definition of gifts as bribes risk debasing the expression of generosity or gratitude and thus causing people to behave in a manner that appears rude or ungrateful. The regulations can in this way create...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Sensitive Gifts
• 2 The Gift and the Bribe—Theoretical Perspectives
• 3 The Bribery Gaze
• 4 The Questioned Gift in the Context of Adoption
• 5 Scandal Victims
• 6 Media Scandals as Muzak
• 7 Friendship and Risky Gifts
• 8 Alternative Meanings—Generosity and Gratitude
• 9 Bribes as Part of Professional Realities
• 10 The Bribery Gaze and the Gift—Moralities Caught in a Cleft Stick
• References
• Index