Corruption as Socially Embedded

The main claim of the paper is that corruption is a fundamentally social object and should be

understood in connection to the social organizational context in which it develops. A view of

corruption as socially embedded used to be central to the study of corruption. In the old

“sociology of corruption” of the 1960s, Samuel Huntington, James Scott, and others – political

scientists and yet deeply sociological in their approach – understood corruption as emergent

behavior. This behavior came to be seen as “corrupt” in the context of modernization. By the

1970s, this approach had fallen out of fashion. A new generation of scholars rejected its

functionalism and teleological bent and largely abandoned the study of corruption or approached

the topic critically and idiographically, emphasizing the variety of practices and meanings of

corruption across time and space (Osrecki 2017). By the early 1990s, the study of corruption had

been taken over by a disembedded view. The proponents of the new model were primarily

economists in academia and the World Bank. They understood corruption within a rational

action/principal-agent framework, basically as the mismanagement of self-interest. This

formulation was coupled with a view of corruption as unequivocally bad for economic

development and an obstacle to the consolidation of political institutions. A narrow focus on

bribery facilitated the quantification of corruption and then its comparison and ranking globally

(Johnston 2005). Consensus on its effects, meanwhile, informed an approach to corruption

almost exclusively in terms of anti-corruption. The aim of much of this scholarship has been to

identify corruption in order to eradicate it.

This is a laudable aim, certainly, but the model behind it is unsatisfactory from a

sociological point of view. The problem is that it delinks behavior from its social structural

1
context. Because behavior is taken to be autonomous or self-driven, social context is treated as

incidental. Sociologists, in contrast, regard social context as constitutive of behavior, so much so,

in fact, that behavior cannot be understood fully outside of it. The loss of social context

represents a loss of meaning and thus of understanding. I would contend that the sociological

perspective is a crucial one and sorely needed in the study of corruption. The aim of the paper,

therefore, is to recover a view of corruption as socially embedded. This effort builds on recent

work in this vein, including Granovetter 2007, Zaloznaya 2013, Jancsics 2014, and Prasad et al.

2019.

The paper proceeds as follows: First, I identify a set of propositions that I take to be at the

core of a socially embedded approach. Second, I distinguish this approach from other more

prominent ones. Third, I develop an analytical framework on the basis of the propositions

identified previously. Fourth, I demonstrate the analytical power of this framework through a

case study; specifically, I trace the emergence and institutionalization of corruption in the

Cambodian land market. Finally, I consider the implications of this approach for social change.

Corruption as Socially Embedded

What does it mean to take corruption as socially embedded? Here I take Granovetter’s classic

statement (1985) as a starting point. Granovetter argued for a view of economic action as

embedded in concrete, ongoing systems of social relations. Instrumental and functionalist

approaches share a view of social actors as atomized—of individuals and groups interacting as

distinct, independent entities. An embedded approach views this interaction as constitutive of

2
their interests and identities; it produces a shared context for action. Actors form social networks,

and these networks develop particular properties—trust, for instance—that condition how actors

relate to one another. It is imperative, therefore, to understand behavior in the context of social

structure; social networks, as Granovetter discussed, but also various other forms of social

organization. The task is to specify empirically the “details” of social structure, or the concrete

patterns of social relations.

Granovetter has been criticized for his narrow focus on social networks and social

structure generally. Beckert (2003), Krippner et al. (2004), and others have pushed for a

“thicker” conception of embeddedness; in particular, one that gives a better accounting of

agency.1 Social action is not mechanical after all—not simply determined by self-interest or

dictated by social norms—but constructed in situ. This process is an active one. People have to

“translate”—interpret and enact—the social pressures of a particular situation into appropriate

behavior (March and Olsen 1989). They possess a degree of autonomy in doing so but must also

contend with various contingencies, and thus outcomes may vary even when structural contexts

are similar. These details too have to be empirically determined.

The solutions people devise to the problems they face, however imperfect or suboptimal,

become institutionalized over time. They come to be taken for granted and form part of the stock

of meanings to which a group resorts for guidance. In this way, a course of action such as

corruption is normalized and becomes part of a group’s or organization’s culture (Vaughan

1996). Hence what looks like deviant behavior may actually be conformity. Finally, we must

analyze behavior not in isolation but as articulated to—that is, connected to and contingent on—

1
See also Zukin and DiMaggio (1990).

3
a set of other behaviors. By seeing a practice as part of a system of practices, we are better able

to understand how adaptive or makeshift behavior becomes entrenched and even coercive.

Thus, we might construct a socially embedded approach to corruption around the

following four propositions:

1. Actors are not atomized but embedded in social structures. This leads to a view of

corruption as emergent or inextricable from organizational processes.

2. Action is not mechanical but situated. This leads to a view of corrupt behavior as

constructed in situ.

3. The quality of action is not static but changes over time. This leads to a view of corrupt

behavior “hardening” or acquiring durability as it becomes routine.

4. Behavior is not isolated but articulated to a set of other behaviors. This leads to a view of

corruption as a property of a system of corrupt practices.

Following from these propositions, we might distinguish analytically between different layers of

embedding: Actors as embedded in social structure, action as embedded in situations, action as

embedded in organizational or group culture, and practice as embedded in a system of practices.

We might further highlight the corresponding processes to follow empirically: The organization

of actors, the construction of action, the normalization of action over time, and the articulation of

practices. Table 1 lays out these distinctions. The focus throughout is on the relationship between

behavior and social structure. We attend to the processes by which action is structured and

becomes social structure; that is, to the emergence and institutionalization of social action. We

treat social structure and agency dialectically, linking micro and macro levels of analyses. This

4
represents a distinctly sociological approach, and one that can help us better understand

corruption over and above existing approaches.

Table 1. Corruption as Socially Embedded

Layers of embedding Processes to follow

1. Actors as embedded in The organization of actors

social structure
Emergence
2. Action as embedded in The construction of action in situ
situations

3. Action as embedded in The normalization of action over time

group culture
Institutionalization
4. Practices as embedded in The articulation of a set of practices
a system of practices

Corruption as Disembedded and Culturally Embedded

A disembedded view of corruption takes the definition as the whole of the phenomenon.

Corruption is generally defined as the abuse of public office or public trust for private gain.

Nothing is wrong with this definition per se. It serves to demarcate a class of behaviors, and in

this regard is indispensable. Being merely a heuristic, however, it is insufficient by itself to grasp

the phenomena at stake. For one, it is too narrow. The definition leads us to view behavior as

either corrupt or clean, blocking out the myriad circumstances impinging upon it. We are led to

5
ask whether this framing is adequate to reality.2 At the same time, the definition is too sweeping.

It leads us to lump together behaviors which may look like corruption on the face of it but mean

very different things in context as a result of being configured culturally or structurally in

different ways. The question to ask is whether these behaviors are really all instances of the same

thing. Third, the definition holds behavior to a particular standard, one that is easier to meet in,

because it was developed with reference to, contexts where the public/private distinction is clear

and well established and norms of “integrity” (upholding the distinction) largely prevail. Within

this context, corruption represents a deviation from these norms. However, this is not the case in

many developing countries particularly where corruption is normal in the sense of being

widespread if not accepted. Thus we are led to ask whether this behavioral standard is

appropriate. Finally, the dominant, economic model of corruption involves an undersocialized

conception of behavior. In this model, corruption may take on various cultural hues but

ultimately boils down to greed or self-regarding interest (Rose-Ackerman 1999). The focus then

is on how to better manage self-interest. The problem has less to do with bad actors than with

bad incentives, and thus reform requires getting the incentives right and channeling self-interest

more productively. Is this a credible account of human action? From a sociological point of

view, the answer to all of these questions is no. This is not just an academic issue. An

analytically reductive account of corruption has real world ramifications. As I will discuss

eventually, treating corruption as a generic problem—as if it were pretty much the same object

2
Adequacy is a high bar for Weber (1904). An adequate explanation has to be concrete or close
to the ground and fully engaged with the “richness of reality” (p. 80). The more general or
abstract it is, the more devoid of content and significance.

6
everywhere—can lead to policy prescriptions that are detached from the reality on the ground

and hence inappropriate, ineffective, or perverse in their effects.3

A sociology of corruption does not require redefining corruption to better reflect

sociological priorities. Rather, it represents a particular approach to the topic. The definition of

corruption is only the beginning of investigation; a means to an end, as Weber (1949) said of

ideal types, the end being to understand “the characteristic uniqueness of the reality in which we

move” (p. 72). The crucial step is embedding behaviors defined as corrupt in their constitutive

contexts.

If economists and some political scientists tend to treat corruption as disembedded,

anthropologists are more likely to view corruption in terms of a society’s values and cultural

codes. The so-called moral economy approach focuses on identifying the cultural logics that

inform and justify corrupt behavior, e.g., logics of gift-giving, negotiation, solidarity,

redistribution, etc. (Olivier de Sardan 1999). The idea is that these logics and the values

underlying them help shape corrupt behavior and make it culturally acceptable. They enable a

“corruption complex,” a wide range of practices in some way violating the public trust, including

nepotism, embezzlement, misappropriation, insider trading, and the abuse of official authority.

These logics are not determinative, however, and a culturally embedded account should not be

confused with a “culturalist” or culturally determined one (Smith 2018). Actors enjoy some room

for maneuver. They are able to appropriate cultural logics, combine them, and refute them. I can

understand the appeal of this approach. It recalls Swidler’s conception of culture as a toolkit

3
Scholars have sought to better specify corruption by linking different forms of it to different
patterns of wealth and power (Johnston 2005) or different political systems (Mungiu-Pippidi
2015). These efforts are significant but represent an exercise in indexing rather than embedding.
Embedding requires accounting for the processual dynamics constituting the phenomenon in the
first place.

7
(1986) and thus is not too far off from how many sociologists understand the matter. However, I

would argue that it is ultimately limited by its focus on the application of available meanings as

opposed to the construction of new ones. To be fair, Olivier de Sardan (1999) is not entirely

neglectful of social structure. He views the moral economies of West African societies as having

developed in the process of postcolonial state building. The values supporting corrupt practices

are syncretic, not traditional holdovers. Nevertheless, his analysis and that of others in this

school (Pierce 2016) tend to emphasize cultural continuity as opposed to emergence. This

account is insufficient in my view. Agency is not just a matter of fitting available rules to new

situations. It may involve conceiving a new relationship to the rules and devising new procedures

through a contingent, pragmatic, and haphazard process. This is especially true in periods of

institutional flux. A sociology of corruption should keep this process squarely in focus.

Another culturally embedded account focuses on the discourse of corruption. This

approach is best represented by Gupta’s work (2012) on the Indian state (see also Smith 2008).

Narratives of corruption form a distinct genre of folklore, Gupta writes. While relatively

autonomous of actual incidents of corruption, they perform significant ideological work. They

shape how citizens relate to the state; how they view and evaluate it, how they interact with state

agents (and how agents interact with them), and how they imagine transforming it. The approach

highlights the scope, plasticity, and power of the label corruption. It shows the idea of corruption

to anchor a discursive field generating a particular and deeply consequential image of the state.

The focus of this account is on the relationship between discourse and practice, with discourse

seen as shaping practice and practice discourse. This is different from and does not preclude a

structural account focused, rather, on the institutional underpinnings of representations of

8
corruption. The key idea in this case is that how people are organized shapes how they see the

world and thus the stories they tell about it.

These approaches have their uses, to be sure. I am not rejecting them so much as arguing

for their insufficiency. Between a decontextualized account and heavily cultural ones, there is a

need for a distinctly sociological perspective attentive to the dynamic relationship between

structure and agency. An approach to corruption as socially embedded—viewing corruption as

behavior-in-context and corrupt behavior as constructed in situ, normalized over time, and

articulated in a system of practices—is missing in the scholarship. In the following section, I

develop a framework on the basis of this approach.

Analytical Framework, Case, and Data

An embedded approach to corruption is not exactly new. Embedding was at the core of the old

sociology of corruption. The exponents of this approach, including McMullan (1961), Leys

(1965), Nye (1967), Huntington (1968), Scott (1969), and others, defined corruption in terms of

the transgression of the public/private distinction. Corruption, Leys wrote (1965:221), “breaks

some rule, written or unwritten, about the proper purposes to which a public office should be

put.” At the same time, they understood this “rule” to be a construction, an ideal everywhere but

particularly difficult if not impossible to follow for countries in the throes of modernization. This

was because modernization made the public/private distinction salient in the first place. It also

created new sources of wealth and power and led to the expansion of public roles and activities.

These changes served to define the category of corruption as well as provide both incentive and

9
opportunity for corrupt behavior. In other words, corruption emerged in the context of

modernization. Within this context, transgressive behavior was all but inevitable given the

novelty and fragility of modern standards. Huntington (1965) pointed to the weak

institutionalization of these standards and McMullan (1961) to the divergence and discrepancy

between them and attitudes on the ground.

These scholars went beyond grounding corruption structurally. They saw it as functional.

Corruption fulfilled certain requirements associated with building a market economy and modern

state. It facilitated political participation. “At a high level [corruption] throws a bridge between

those who hold political power and those who control wealth” and at a lower one it serves to

incorporate subordinate groups into the political system (McMullan 1961:196). It stimulated

economic development by enabling capital accumulation and the circumvention of bureaucratic

hurdles. It helped build political parties by generating the resources used for patronage

(Huntington 1965:59-71).

Despite their functionalism, early corruption scholars were not insensible to its costs.

McMullan (1961) begins his “Theory of Corruption” with a litany of the ills caused by

corruption: injustice (for the poor, whom corruption puts at a disadvantage), inefficiency,

mistrust of government, waste of public resources, discouragement of enterprise, political

instability, and so on. “Understanding is desirable,” he remarked, “but it is wrong to underrate

the evil consequences of widespread corruption” (p. 181). This acknowledgment was coupled to

a structural analysis, however, one which preceded and informed thinking about interventions;

hence corruption was not colored entirely by an anti-corruption attitude, as it tends to be today

under the economic model. In general, these scholars rejected a “moralizing approach” to

corruption as myopic, involving a view of corruption stripped of its structural determinants and

10
driven purely by avarice, as well as ethnocentric, involving some version of the complaint, as

Leys (1965:60) wrote, “‘Why does the public morality of African states not conform to the

British?’”

The impetus to do something about corruption was also, perhaps, allayed by the faith that

corruption would sort itself out in the course of modernization. Huntington (1965) posited that

corrupt behaviors would diminish over time but also that some of these behaviors would become

accepted and even formalized, and in this way behaviors and rules would align. In other words,

he believed that eventually political institutions would consolidate or become strong, and the

public/private distinction become ingrained. Scott (1969:1156) pointed to political machines in

the United States dying “a more or less ‘natural’ death” as a result of industrialization. People

became less poor and thus less susceptible to material blandishments. They developed horizontal

loyalties to social class and occupational groups, which superseded their vertical ties to political

patrons and parties. Scott supposed the same would happen in transitional countries. There was

some uncertainty on this point, however, given the recalcitrant realities of development. Scott

ends his paper wondering why political machines in the “new nations” did not develop or

develop in the same way as in the US and goes on to list several reasons. McMullan (1961:181)

notes that if corruption is “a passing phase” then it is unlikely to pass quickly.

I propose renovating the old sociology of corruption: preserving its emphasis on

embedding corruption in organizational processes while removing analytical scaffolding rightly

regarded as decrepit, namely, its functionalism and teleological bent. Its functionalism is

problematic because it leaves little room for human agency. If corruption exists to fulfill

developmental imperatives, then corrupt behavior is mechanical and actors empty vessels simply

carrying out their preordained functions. This oversocialized view of human action as dictated by

11
system requirements is untenable theoretically (Wrong 1961). The account’s teleological bent is

an artifact of its association with modernization theory. The obvious problem is that it has been

sixty years since these predictions and corruption continues to plague nations no longer new. The

real issue is not how long it is taking for corruption to pass away—adherents of modernization

theory would probably argue that it has not been long enough—but, rather, that the faith that

developing countries are moving in the right direction, as opposed to being stuck in place, has

been profoundly shaken (e.g., Merkel 2004).

In the first case we need a better account of agency. The focus on organizational context

should be coupled with attention to the situated construction of action within these contexts. In

the second case we need a better account of the durability of corrupt behaviors; their stability and

resistance to change. Here the focus on emergence should be coupled with a focus on

institutionalization. I develop both accounts below drawing upon scholarship on the new

institutionalism in sociology and pragmatism/practice theory.

Agency. Rules are generally followed because they are seen as appropriate (March and

Olsen 1989). They possess normative power, we might say. In periods of transition, the new

rules being introduced may lack this power. They may lack clarity being unsupported by a body

of precedent, or it may be that people simply cannot follow them because they lack the resources

to do so. Consequently, these rules are less fixed or prescriptive, and the scope of self-

determined action increases. People are tasked with devising an appropriate course of action.

They confront situations marked by uncertainty (Beckert 1996, 2003). These situations are

“doubly contingent” in the sense that neither party is sure how the other will behave, leading to

an indeterminacy of outcomes. A touch of contingency may attend every situation, but it is

characteristic of this kind of situation. Whereas previously parties could refer to commonly held

12
and well-known standards of comportment, they now have to coordinate their actions with one

another, beginning by coming to a common definition of the situation. They do this work

intersubjectively, that is, by taking into account the views of relevant others, but also in response

to the various opportunities and pressures given by their particular situation. We should

understand action as situated in a set of nested contexts (Vaughan 1996). These contexts

represent sources of structure. They bring expectations and constraints to bear on agency,

limiting its scope and predisposing its outcome. Action cannot be understood outside of them.

The process of construction is thus both underdetermined (or contingent) and structured.

Durability. Corruption becomes durable by being normalized. Corrupt behaviors

represent solutions to organizational problems. These solutions may be suboptimal or

dysfunctional, but they become institutionalized over time as behaviors are rationalized and

become routine or baked into organizational procedures (Ashforth and Anand 2003). Eventually,

they form part of the stock of meanings and procedures to which a group resorts for guidance,

passing into group or organizational culture (Vaughan 1996). Newcomers are socialized into

them, learning to view them as acceptable. Deviant or unconforming behavior is sanctioned,

even when “deviance” in this context means following the formal rules. Indeed, once corruption

is organizationally embedded, it is misleading to speak of deviance or to single out bad actors. At

this point, the issue is conformity and the locus of responsibility largely, although perhaps never

entirely, organizational (Silver and Geller 1978).

We might also identify processes of institutionalization occurring beyond the

organization at the level of the system. At this level, we see corrupt behaviors in different

domains come to be articulated and mutually dependent. The imbrication of corrupt practices—

their overlap like the shingles of a roof—binds them together and locks them in, making them

13
resistant to interventions targeted at just one domain. Allow me to illustrate. According to Un

(2004:174-230), judges in Cambodia have to pay senior ministers to acquire their positions. They

have to pay to be promoted or transferred to more lucrative posts. Once in office, they use their

positions to recoup their “investment,” accepting or actively soliciting bribes from litigants in

return for a favorable ruling. (It is the job of lawyers to fix or arrange these payments.) The

bribes they collect have to be understood in relation to the bribes they pay, these practices being

linked and mutually supportive. Generally, the imbrication of corrupt practices at the executive

and bureaucratic levels of government has important implications. Practically, it means that

corrupt politicians are unlikely to discipline corrupt bureaucrats and corrupt bureaucrats unlikely

to expose corrupt politicians because their interests and fates are intertwined. Analytically, it

means that in places like Cambodia to think of corrupt behavior as isolated or contained within

one or a few organizations or groups is misleading. We have to think about corruption

systemically and trace the connections between behaviors across different domains. This

approach is particularly relevant to the study of corruption in contexts of transition precisely

because appropriate procedures are in the process of being worked out and corrupt behaviors

tend to develop in tandem and extend across multiple levels of government.

This framework better enables us to account for the emergence and institutionalization of

corruption. Verdery (2003) provides us with an exemplary account of emergence.4 She followed

the social fallout of decollectivization in a Transylvanian community in Romania over the course

of the 1990s. Privatization meant the massive devaluation of wealth accumulated during the

socialist period. Socialist property was recast in terms of market value—i.e., what a foreign

capitalist would be willing to pay. Firms were sold for the price of an expensive house and

4
See also Hodgkinson 1997 and Scheppele 1999.

14
factories still capable of producing goods reduced to scrap metal. As people’s relationship to

property changed, so did their relationships to one another. The title of Verdery’s book, The

Vanishing Hectare, refers not primarily to the loss of land but to the loss of land’s meaning and

value. As a result of privatization, it could no longer serve, as it once had, as a viable source of

income and symbol of status and place. To say that the value of land is emergent means that it is

not intrinsic to the thing itself (land) but underwritten by a complex web of social relations and

their associated meanings. It is a property of social structure, and therefore to abstract it from this

context is to misconstrue it.

Studying corruption in the context of transition enables us to see clearly what might

otherwise be obscured: The constitution of a social fact within a particular milieu. We see it take

shape and acquire objectivity. In settled times, this context is too easily taken for granted. It

recedes into the background, becoming invisible. The object is taken to be autonomous, natural,

and the same everywhere; that is, we end up misperceiving it. Embedding is a means to develop

the fuller picture and thus a more adequate understanding of corruption.

In the following section, I demonstrate the analytical utility of a socially embedded

approach through a case study of corruption in the Cambodian land market. First, I lay out the

crucial context: the assembly of a market economy and legal regime of property rights in the

years following the devastation wrought by the Khmer Rouge. Second, I trace the emergence of

corruption within this context. A situation of normative ambiguity prevailed, shaping how people

related to the new rules. Relatively powerful people were able to exploit the rules or simply

follow them, while relatively powerless people found themselves not only unable to follow the

rules but subordinated to them. Thus we might understand corruption as a response to structural

opportunities. Third, I trace the construction of appropriate action given individual situations

15
marked by economic insecurity and organizational ones by resource scarcity and bureaucratic

incapacity. Actors (tax and cadastral officials) developed procedures that, while illicit, managed

to solve these problems however imperfectly. We might understand their rent-seeking behavior

as a kind of bureaucratic capacity-building. Fourth, I trace the imbrication of corrupt practices. I

show that the development of a land market and private property regime went hand-in-hand with

the establishment of a neopatrimonial political order. Corruption is so bound up in this order that

it is hard to “operate on” effectively. Hence we might understand corruption as a property of a

system of practices.

The move is to put corrupt behaviors in context—in the context of social upheaval in the

first case, of individual and organizational situations in the second, and of a political system in

the third. The payoff in each case is a better, more adequate understanding of corruption. We are

not just able to see more but able to see through the common sense surrounding corruption.5

Embedding complicates the array of distinctions grounded by a conventional understanding of

the term: corruption as illegal v. legal and as deviance v. conformity; appropriation through the

market v. expropriation by force; the corrupt bureaucrat v. the “Weberian” mission-directed one;

civil service v. civil society, the former seen as rife with corruption and the latter morally

vaunted; and even corruption v. anti-corruption efforts.

The data for the case study come from 40 reports, dissertations, and working papers and

numerous academic books and articles on the land situation in Cambodia during the 1990s and

early 2000s. The reports and papers were largely produced by local and international

nongovernmental organizations—e.g., the Cambodia Development Resource Institute, Oxfam,

5
As Osrecki (2017) reminds us, the singular virtue of a sociological gaze is its ability to
penetrate and upend common sense.

16
the World Bank, the United Nations, etc.—and the dissertations by Cambodian scholars

completing their PhDs in American, European, and Japanese universities. I enumerate these

documents in a separate bibliography.

The Crucial Context: Upheaval and Restructuring

The development of a market economy and legal regime of property rights in the 1990s and

2000s transformed how people related to property and the state. This context, of upheaval and

social reorganization, fundamentally conditioned the emergence of “corrupt” behaviors.

The Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh in 1975. By that point, Cambodia had been

destabilized by spillover from the Vietnam War and wracked by civil war. The country was ripe

for the taking. The Communist insurgents evacuated the city and marched its residents to the

countryside, where they forced them to work the fields. They sought to rebuild Cambodian

society anew, but first they had to raze it to the ground. Declaring 1975 “Year Zero,” they

abolished private property and all forms of currency and trade, destroyed administrative

documents including land titles and birth certificates, closed schools, abandoned factories, and

demolished churches and pagodas (Mysliwiec 1988). In the brief course of Khmer Rouge leader

Pol Pot’s reign of terror, nearly two million people—a quarter of the Cambodian population at

the time—were executed or died from hunger, disease, and overwork. Hundreds of thousands

fled to neighboring Thailand and Vietnam. The country was summarily emptied of professionals.

By 1979, only 45 doctors were left in the country out of 450 in 1975; only seven thousand

17
teachers out of twenty thousand. Eva Mysliwiec, an American aid worker on the ground, recalled

the devastation:

The country, by 1979, had no currency, no markets, no financial institutions, and virtually
no industry. There was no public transport system; no trains ran and the roads were
damaged and unrepaired. There was no postal system, no telephones, and virtually no
electricity, clean water, sanitation, or education (p. 11).

Vietnam invaded in 1979, having been provoked by repeated Khmer Rouge attacks on

villages along its border. It routed the insurgents and installed a government consisting largely of

defectors. It set up a Soviet-style command economy and organized the rural population into

collective work units. The new government of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, as the

country was now called, took steps towards liberalization in 1989. Vietnamese troops were

withdrawing, and it hoped to curry popular support with reforms (Frings 1994). It granted

possession rights over land and set up a cadastral or land title department to begin the work of

surveying and registration. These reforms were formalized in the 1992 Land Law. The ability to

claim land on the basis of possession coupled with the fact that most Cambodians lacked formal

or, indeed, any form of land title set the stage for widespread land grabbing (Van Acker 1999). A

UNDP report (2007) described the land law as “a get rich quick manual” for people who knew

how to navigate the new rules. This was especially true of government and military officials,

who began land grabbing even before the new law had been passed. The New York Times

described a fire sale of public assets after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords officially ending

Cambodian-Vietnamese hostilities (Sanger 1991). Reportedly, government ministers were selling

off whatever they could to foreign investors—factories, warehouses, dormitories, villas—and

pocketing the money. Meanwhile, the cadastral department was flooded with applications for

18
legal title but ill-equipped to handle them. It managed to process only 14% of an estimated 4.5

million applications (Sovannarith et al. 2001). By the end of the decade, only a tiny fraction of

the population held legal title to agricultural land; one percent according to Ramamurthy et al.

(2001). Most had nothing or held application receipts and other documents short of full title.

A new land law was passed in 2001 in order to fix these problems. It afforded bona fide

ownership rights and established formal title as the ultimate means of ownership, overruling

various informal mechanisms including communal title and “acquisition by the plough”

(cultivation). The law was implemented through a World Bank-funded program called the Land

Management and Administration Project, which established a systematic land registration

program providing formal title at nominal cost (WB n.d.). The program was designed to achieve

“cadastral sustainability” and thereby strengthen tenure security. It sought to create a centralized

land register for purposes of legal protection, tax collection, and land use planning and

development (So 2009). The 2001 Land Law also allowed for the concession of large plots of

land to domestic and foreign investors for developmental purposes.

The new framework crystallized the development of a legal regime of private property

rights. Over the course of a decade a new relation to land, as a commodity, had taken shape. New

and powerful actors emerged as key players on the scene: industrial and commercial ventures

looking to develop land for business, government and military officials seeking to control land

for concession to the highest bidder, and rich people interested in land as an investment. They

approached land as a source of profit particularly and power generally. The number of formal

land transactions spiked in the 1990s: 16,000 between 1995 and 2001, 7,000 of which concerned

agricultural land (Sophal and Acharya 2002). The majority of agricultural transactions occurred

in just two provinces, both sites of industrial development, and Phnom Penh residents were

19
involved in almost 80% of them. It was not just elites, however; even ordinary people were

scrambling for land. The incidence of land conflict increased sharply during this period, and

most of these disputes were small scale. Sovannarith et al. (2001) describe boundary disputes

between neighbors and family members, and between villagers and creditors, local authorities,

and outside parties. As they write, people had come to view land certificates as “gold.” In 2001,

land conflicts were the fourth most common kind of lawsuit in Cambodia after crimes, breaches

of contract, and divorce (So 2009). By one estimate (Williams 2000), they affected more than

4% of the population.

Landlessness was on the rise, but this had more to do with demographic pressures than

expropriation (Biddulph 2000). The country’s population had nearly doubled between 1990 and

1998, with 43% under the age of 15. According to one report (Ramamurthy et al. 2001), 15% of

rural households were landless and 40% land poor, owning less than half a hectare of agricultural

land. The enclosure of the commons presented the more pressing threat to the livelihoods of the

poor. The concession system enabled the exploitation of the country’s natural resources at a

breathtaking rate. State public land, particularly forest land, was being doled out hand over fist to

developers foreign and domestic. In 1995, the government awarded 32 forest concessions

covering 6.5 million hectares or 35% of the country’s land area (So 2009). Between 1973 and

1993 the rate of deforestation was approximately 70,000 hectares per year; between 1993 and

1997 it was more than 180,000 hectares a year (Hughes 2003:44). Traditionally, rural

Cambodians resort to common-area forests, fishing grounds, and uncultivated land when their

primary livelihoods fail to provide or in periods of economic downturn. They fish or catch small

animals and collect forest and aquatic products to sell. As the commons acquired owners, the

20
people who depend on these areas found themselves shut out. They now had to pay fees to access

them or were fined for using them (Vinary 2000).

These changes were part of a broader transformation. Cambodia’s economy grew rapidly

in the 1990s, its growth rate outpacing even China’s by the early 2000s (Ballard et al. 2008). The

economy was driven primarily by the garment industry followed by tourism and construction.

The industrial sector grew by as much as 30% a year and its share of GDP nearly doubled

between 1995 and 2011 (Chhair and Ung 2011). The new industries pulled people into cities and

provided them with jobs. As they became dependent on wages, the use and need for money

increased. Household consumption grew by nearly 40% between 2004 and 2011 (WB 2014).

Money also flowed into the country in the form of foreign aid at a rate of over USD 500 million

annually in the 1990s. Even in 1998, after a drastic reduction in aid following a political coup the

year before, the amount of external assistance remained significant—equivalent to 14% of GDP,

70% of domestic exports, and 167% of government revenue (Ramamurthy et al. 2001)!

Poverty decreased substantially during this period, and yet a new kind of economic

insecurity had taken hold. With the development of a market economy, people needed money

more than ever and often sank into debt as a result of various financial shocks, illness

particularly (Ballard et al. 2007). Indebtedness intersected with landlessness. The inability to

repay debt led to “distress sales” and the seizure of land, forcing people to migrate to cities in

search of work and to surrounding provinces in search of land. The commons, meanwhile, were

shrinking. In sum, the situation for much of the rural population had become utterly precarious.

This much is reflected in the titles of various reports published at the time: “All Our Livelihoods

are Dead” (Vinary 2000), “We are Living with Worry All the Time” (Ballard et al. 2007),

“Where Have All the Poor Gone?”—the World Bank’s answer (2014) being not far, as most

21
Cambodians if no longer technically poor were near poor—and “Growing Up in Anxious Times”

(Estes 2019).

As I will discuss in the following section, insecurity was not just economic but

normative. The new rules concerning property clashed with the old, and most Cambodians found

them confusing and difficult to follow. People with office or means, however, were able to

exploit these rules. It is in this context of normative ambiguity that a particular kind of behavior

comes to be defined as corruption.

Corruption as Emergent

In Cambodia, land can be acquired in five different ways. It can be inherited. It can be acquired

“by the plough,” that is, by clearing and cultivating it. It can be acquired through an informal

registration process involving a written agreement witnessed by the village or commune chief or,

less commonly, by a simple verbal agreement between parties. So (2009) calls the first mode

“quasi-formal” in order to distinguish it from the second “informal” mode. Fourth, land can be

acquired through a formal process by registering it with tax and cadastral officials and obtaining

a certificate of title. Finally, the state can grant companies and communities large tracts of land –

Economic Land Concessions for development purposes and Social Land Concessions for

livelihood ones. These modes appeal to different normative sources. Inheritance, cultivation, and

informal registration follow customs of various vintage. The practice of inheritance is ancient.

Acquisition by the plough dates back to a time when all the land belonged to the king and one’s

claim to land was based on use (Diepart 2015). The informal system was developed under

22
French colonial rule, suspended during the Khmer Rouge period, and revived afterwards. It

started to become popular in the 1990s when land reforms afforded possession rights. Today it is

the most common mode of land transaction despite lacking legal standing. In So’s survey

(2009:145) of land transactions in the Kampong Speu province from 1979 to 2007, the vast

majority (95%) were informal. Moreover, nearly half of all transactions occurred in just the past

five years. Formal registration and state concession, on the other hand, are backed by law. They

represent the new rules as framed by the 2001 Land Law (see Table 2).

Table 2.

Mode of acquiring land Normative grounding Corruption

1. Inheritance Custom (ancient) ---

2. Acquisition by the plough Custom ---

(pre-colonial) Old
rules
3. Informal registration Custom ---
(French colonial and
People’s Republic of
Kampuchea periods)

4. Formal registration Law In the forms of

(2001 Land Law) expropriation and rent
New seeking
rules
5. State concession Law The violation of regulations
(2001 Land Law) and procedures leading to
expropriation

Corruption is associated with the new rules. The concession process is corrupted, first,

when regulations are violated; specifically, when land with public interest is conceded and when

23
Economic Land Concessions (ELCs) exceed 10,000 hectares and are not developed within

twelve months of issue. Various reports by international and Cambodian NGOs point to the

rampant awarding of forest and other public lands (Global Witness 2007, Scurrah and Hirsch

2015) and to awards exceeding even one hundred thousand hectares (Lichado 2005, UN 2007).

Oversized ELCs are created by granting adjacent concessions to the same company or to

different companies controlled by the same person. Indeed, one company, the logging firm

Pheapimex, controls 7.4% of the country’s territory. Further, ELC land is frequently

underutilized and already occupied (Diepart 2016). Second, the procedure for awarding ELCs is

not transparent or impartial and almost certainly involves bribery or some illicit revenue-sharing

arrangement. It is not incidental that Lao Mengkhin, the head of Pheapimex, is also a senator and

major donor to the ruling Cambodia People’s Party. In general, the concession process favors

foreign business interests, Cambodian political and economic elites, especially senators and

okhna,6 and high-ranking military officers (Global Witness 2009). Of all persons owning ELCs

larger than 500 hectares, nearly half are political and military officials and the rest

businesspeople and okhna (cited in Un and So 2011:307). The third problem concerns the effect

of these violations, namely, expropriation or land grabbing. Insofar as ELCs cover public lands

and encroach upon private landholdings, they expropriate these areas from their communal and

individual owners. No wonder that ELCs are a major cause of land disputes (Sokhom 2015).

Expropriation also occurs locally. Village residents collude with officials to expropriate

communal land and private property. Finally, rent seeking by tax and cadastral officials distorts

the formal process by making it prohibitively expensive for most people. The inflated cost of

6
Okhna is an honorific title bestowed by the king denoting “generous persons” who contribute
USD 100,000 or more to the state.

24
formal registration pushes people towards weaker forms of title, leaving them vulnerable to

expropriation.

In general, the problem is seen to be the corruption of formal processes. The violation of

regulations and procedures enables expropriation, which is itself a corruption of legal

appropriation. Hence civil society reports focus on compiling “a wealth of evidence of deviations

from, and violations of, procedures and legal frameworks” (Grimsditch and Henderson 2009:5).

They call out “flagrant breaches of the law” (Lichado 2009). The idea is that concession and

registration are not supposed to work in this way and should be brought into line with the rules

and procedures laid out in the 2001 Land Law.

For the purpose of understanding the behaviors at hand, this framework is too narrow. It

overestimates the normative power of the new rules. Violation is meaningful only when the rules

being violated can be taken for granted as appropriate procedures. This is not the case in

Cambodia. Upheaval and the process of economic restructuring have created a situation of

normative ambiguity. Specifically, the new rules are weak or lack legitimacy. They are

inevitably underspecified or silent on matters pertinent to implementation. They are unclear or

confusing, they require resources to follow, and they clash with the old rules. In short, lacking a

normative tradition to support them, they prove insufficient guides to action. As a result, some

people approach the new rules opportunistically while others feel oppressed by them. Relatively

powerful people are able to circumvent and exploit the rules, while relatively powerless people

are not only unable to follow them but subordinated to them. Power, or the ability to get one’s

way, takes several forms including money, political office, knowledge in the form of information

and know-how (simply being able to read, for instance), social connections, organizational and

specifically military might, and physical vigor. Broadening the aperture thus, corruption becomes

25
less about the violation of the rules than about their manipulation. The ability to do so (power)

becomes crucial, as does the predisposition to do so—a particular relation to the new rules

emerging out of institutional flux. From this perspective, we might see corruption as a response

to structural opportunities by those capable of doing so. Allow me to elaborate.

1. Circumventing the rules

In 2007, the Cambodian government granted the private developer Shukaku Inc.—headed by

none other than Lao Mengkhin—an ELC covering 133 hectares of prime real estate in the

Boeung Kak area of Phnom Penh. The grant effectively overruled the claims of the four thousand

families living there, many of which had settled in the area following the Khmer Rouge’s rout in

1979. The families were in the process of applying for legal title under the Land Management

and Administration Project when the whole area was classified as a development zone and

excluded from LMAP coverage. Political elites were able to exploit ambiguities surrounding the

law and its implementation. There is no comprehensive mapping of state land and the procedure

for classifying land is subject to interpretation. The problem is that the people charged with

resolving these ambiguities and determining the land’s status stand to profit enormously from

their determination (Bugalski and Pred 2009, Dwyer 2015). The situation presents these elites

with an opportunity, one that had not existed before restructuring.

Beyond Boeung Kak, the tactic of excising areas or simply leaving them unregistered is

commonly used to exclude high-value areas from titling. In one study (Grimsditch, Leakhana,

and Sherchan 2012:77), systematic land registration proceeded smoothly in the three provincial

sites observed, with over 90% of parcels registered. In the Phnom Penh site, however, 79% of

parcels were left unregistered. Residents were told that the status of their land was unclear or in

26
dispute, or that their land was targeted for development or concession. Many were not given a

reason at all. Notably, these tactics are not illegal so much as extra-legal. They involve

circumventing the rules. In fact, it is the casualties of this process who end up categorized as

illegal. When the state classified Boeung Kak as state private land, its residents were turned into

squatters en masse and subject to eviction.7 The issue here is not the sanctity of the law but the

state’s power to classify, which, in effect, is power over the law.

2. Exploiting the rules

Expropriation is generally distinguished from legal appropriation, which is understood to operate

through market purchase and formal registration, when in fact the line between these two modes

is quite muddy. A lot of land grabbing is not just perfectly legal but enabled by the law

Nationally and locally powerful actors use the new rules as a means of expropriation. First, they

use “hard” or formal titles against “soft” claims based on informal registration and possession

rights. They can do this because most people lack legally acceptable proof of ownership. A

nationally representative survey conducted in 2004 found that only 23% of landholders had

formal title (So 2009:145, 2010). Nearly half lacked any form of title and the rest only had

application receipts and other insufficient forms of documentation. This makes them vulnerable

to expropriation by hard title. Take the case of the Spean Ches village in Sihanoukville (Springer

2013). Despite having lived in the village since the 1980s, residents were evicted because their

claim to the land was based on mere possession rights. They had cleared the forest to make room

for the village and then one day people showed up waving certificates of title and took the land

from under them. The villagers were assigned a lawyer by a human rights organization, but she

7
See Phalthy (2007) on the growth in the number of squatters in Phnom Penh.

27
could do little for them because their claims lacked legal basis. The courts would not even hear

their case.

Second, relatively powerful people use the formal process to legalize expropriation. Here

the case of Order 01 is illustrative (Müller and Zülsdorf 2013, Diepart and Sem 2018).

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen issued Order 01 in 2012 partly in order to allay social unrest

following the killing of an environmental activist investigating illegal logging and a 14-year-old

girl in the course of an eviction. The bill postponed the granting of new ELCs in favor of a

national campaign to provide land titles to people living on existing ELCs as well as forest and

other state lands. It advanced a “leopard skin” vision of land development, where smallholders

could enjoy tenure security in pockets inside concession areas. Teams of student volunteers were

sent across the country to determine boundaries and ownership and to award title for land that

had been cleared but not necessarily cultivated. The order set off a land rush, as Work and Beban

(2016) observed in Srai Thmae (see also Milne 2013). It spurred people with means to clear and

claim land, especially forest and communal land. Individuals erected poles and other markers to

stake their claims and paid officials to bear witness to them. Village officials titled land in the

names of their relatives and supporters in order to skirt the maximum allotment of five hectares.

These people would then “sell” them the land once it had been registered, effectively laundering

it. These tactics were enabled not just by money, manpower, and office, but information. The

local elite understood the parameters of Order 01. They knew when the student volunteers would

arrive and made certain to clear coveted land beforehand. They also controlled the distribution of

this information. In short, Order 01 provided powerful people with the impetus to expropriate—it

sent the message “if you clear the land you can have it”—as well as the means to formalize their

expropriation.

28
 3. Subjection to the rules

On the supply side, expropriation was enabled by people’s inability to master the new rules. If

Order 01 led relatively powerful people to ask “how much land can I clear?,” for relatively

powerless people the question was “how can I clear my land?” (Work and Beban 2016). These

people lacked the labor power and resources to claim even the land they possessed. Aside from

lack of resources, lack of knowledge was a serious problem. Many people simply did not

understand or even know about the formal process. According to one survey covering four areas,

including Phnom Penh, a stunning 84% of respondents claimed unfamiliarity with the new rules

(Grimsditch et al. 2012:97).

Powerlessness played out in other ways as well. Sokha et al. (2008) underscore the need

to situate expropriation within a “climate of insecurity” where economic shocks force people into

debt and then “distress sales” of land, or their land, having been given as collateral for their loan,

is appropriated upon failure of repayment. Insecurity also operates more insidiously. The

category of land broker emerged in the wake of commodification. Everyone from village chiefs

and councilors to schoolteachers and enterprising family members took it upon themselves to

pressure their neighbors and relatives to sell. Sometimes pressure took the form of threats and

violence. Or people simply felt helpless and afraid in the face of the new order, and after seeing

neighbor after neighbor capitulate concluded that they too would lose their land eventually.

Might as well sell now while they still could. Reports describe a pervasive fatalism on the

ground (Sokha et al. 2008, Sokhom 2015). Within this context, the line between land purchase

and land grab begins to blur and, as Sokha at al. note (2008:22), may come down to “a matter of

29
interpretation.” What looks like a purchase from the outside feels like expropriation to the

villager beset by pressure, need, and a raw sense of their vulnerability.

It is not just that many people are unable to follow the rules but also, and just as

importantly, that they are unwilling to follow them because the old rules remain powerful or

continue to be seen as appropriate. The formal registration drive initiated under the LMAP

distributed 3.6 million titles, and the one through Order 01 641,000 (Diepart and Sem 2018). By

these measures, the titling effort was a huge success. If longtime observers (Grimsditch and

Henderson 2009, So 2009, Biddulph 2010) evaluate these programs otherwise, it is because their

beneficiaries overwhelmingly resort to the informal system when it comes to registering

subsequent transactions. This undermines the effort to achieve cadastral sustainability (and thus

improve tenure security) and leaves the new owners vulnerable to expropriation by hard title. It

threatens to undo the work of formal titling. Why do they resort to the informal system? One

reason is the inflated cost of formal registration. Officially, the land tax is 4%, and so a

transaction worth USD 1,000 should cost $40 to register. In practice, a $1,000 transaction

involves around $350 in largely under-the-table fees to tax and cadastral officials (a process I

will detail in the following section). Under the quasi-formal system, registering the same

transaction only costs $5 (So 2009:164). Going through the formal process may make sense for

large, high-value landholdings, but it is hard to justify financially for the low-value ones

comprising the majority.

There is another evidently more important reason for the popularity of the informal

system. It is that the system is widely seen as legitimate. So (2009:159) surveyed two communes

subject to systematic land registration (SLR) and found that 94% of subsequent registrations

were informal; 77% witnessed by a local official (quasi-formal) and 17% an informal agreement

30
between parties. These results were comparable to those So found in non-SLR communes. The

main reason given by respondents for going through the informal system was that it is

established practice (41%)—simply, that everyone has been doing it this way for a long time.

Other reasons had to do with the difficulty of the formal process (23%) and its cost (18%). Two

other surveys returned similar results (Grimsditch et al. 2012:92-100). It would seem that

acceptance of the informal system has precluded consideration of the formal system, including of

its cost. Many people simply did not see the need to look any further.

***

To sum up, the issue is not the violation of the rules but their manipulation. They are prone to

being manipulated because they are weakly institutionalized. The new rules are exactly that,

new, and thus unfamiliar and lacking in social force. People construct their relationship to these

rules in a context of social disorganization. Some people are able to take advantage of them, and

for them corruption is a response to structural opportunities, while others are disadvantaged by

the new rules, finding them oppressive, incomprehensible, or simply irrelevant to their lives.

Analytically, the move is to root behavior in context and in so doing take into account the

disposition behind it as shaped by social structure, or in this case a process of economic and

social restructuring—the assembly of a land market specifically and a market economy

generally. Within this context, land acquires value as a commodity and the new rules provide a

framework for realizing it. These developments orient behavior. They give it impetus and form.

To say that corruption is an emergent as opposed to universal category of behavior means that

31
the behaviors we label corrupt acquire definition within a particular context and thus cannot be

understood outside of it except superficially.

Corruption as Situated Action

In the previous section, we saw how social context shaped people’s relationship to the rules. In

this one, we look at how, given this relationship, people construct corrupt behavior in the context

of particular situations. Specifically, I examine the rent seeking activities of tax and cadastral

officials in the process of the formal registration of land. As we will see, there is more to these

activities than just self-interest (per the economic model) or people drawing upon old scripts (per

a version of the cultural model). We see people drafting new scripts in response not just to new

opportunities but new pressures and constraints. In this case, they construct a course of action

with respect to an individual situation marked by insecurity and an organizational one marked by

incapacity.

The cessation of Soviet aid in 1989 threw the Cambodian state into a fiscal crisis. Sixty

percent of the government’s budget lacked funding (Hughes 2003:40). The salaries of civil

servants were delayed and the rations of basic goods that used to come with government jobs

were no longer provided. Inflation soared, peaking in 1992 with prices nearly four times what

they were in 1988. Salaries, when paid, were increasingly worthless (Kato et al. 2000). In a

statement to donors, the Asian Development Bank and other international financial institutions

cited the stalling of bureaucratic functions and general demoralization of public sector employees

(cited in Hughes, p. 42). In government offices, absenteeism was rampant. A nationwide survey

32
found that 34% of workers in public administration and 50% of workers in education held

additional jobs on the side (Godfrey et al. 2001:9). Public school teachers, for instance, sold

cakes to their students and tutored them for a fee (Hughes 2003:52). As it happened, the financial

crisis coincided with the restructuring of the economy. For tax and cadastral officials making

USD 20 a month on average (So 2009:196), the increasing number of land transactions

represented an opportunity to make their jobs a more sustainable means of livelihood.

The other relevant situation is bureaucratic incapacity. The work of Cambodia’s cadastral

department has been hamstrung by several problems since its founding in 1989. One problem is

the lack of resources. So (2009) interviewed cadastral and other officials involved in the formal

registration process. He described cadastral offices as conspicuously lacking in surveying

equipment. The equipment they had was often old or broken. Officials lacked even the budget to

travel short distances on surveying expeditions. Another problem is the lack of education and

training. So (2009:195-96) cites a study finding that only 30% of cadastral officials in Kandal

had any formal training: 6% had college degrees and 24% technical certificates. Kandal is a

suburb of Phnom Penh. In the neighboring province of Prey Veng, only 6% of cadastral officials

had formal training, and farther out, in Svay Rieng, only one person in the whole office had been

formally educated. A lack of training means errors in measurement, bad maps, and thus the

greater likelihood of land disputes.

The most pressing problem, however, is that the relevant actors lack sufficient incentive

to do their jobs. The formal registration process is complex and requires that multiple actors

coordinate their activities. First, the seller (or buyer, depending on the arrangement) has to file a

land transfer registration form requiring the approval of the district and provincial governors.

Second, they have to have the sales agreement authenticated by cadastral officials and pay a

33
fixed cadastral service fee. Third, they have to render the 4% sales tax to the tax department.

They can only advance to the next step by completing the one before it. Without “lubrication,”

the bureaucratic machinery is liable to stall.

Corruption provides a means to solve, or at least mitigate, these problems. Cadastral

officials double as “fixers” (neak rot ka). Their job is to navigate the mess—to run the papers

through the various offices paying fees both formal and informal. They charge the seller a lump

sum. This amount depends on how much the land is worth and can be negotiated, but it never

dips below a minimum cost. According to So (2009:165), formal registration costs around USD

1,000-2,000 in Phnom Penh and $350 in provincial areas. Most of this money (60-70%) goes to

paying taxes and tax officials and the rest to cadastral officials and fees. Only around 40% of the

land’s market price is officially recorded. The exact percentage varies by area, however. In more

rural areas only around 20-30% of the market price is recorded, whereas in more urban areas it is

more likely 50-80% (Sophal and Acharya 2002:36). Underpricing the land lowers the amount of

tax to be paid and allows the seller to allot that expense to the informal costs of the operation. Of

course, with the addition of informal fees, the seller ends up paying as much or more than they

would have if the process were clean. They typically pay around 4-6% of the land’s real price,

but again this depends on its value. For smallholders, the cost of formal registration can run as

high as 30% of the land’s value (So 2009:165).

This set of activities may be informal and illicit, but it is well organized with clearly

defined roles and procedures. We might call the organization of illicit activity a racket. This

racket is institutionalized in the sense that it is how official business is conducted—standard

operating procedure, as it were. The parties actively collude in this organization. They negotiate

right there in the cadastral office or in a nearby café. They come to an agreement on the cost of

34
registration and then work backwards to fix the official cost. This amount has to be approved by

the fixer’s supervisor, and then a receipt is issued. An accountant keeps track of all revenue

formal and informal. The “rent” money goes into a common pool and is divided into three

portions at the end of every month. One portion is distributed within the office, with a greater

share going to higher-ranked officials. Another portion is sent upwards to senior officials in the

land ministry. The third portion is kept for general expenditures. Some of this money goes to the

electoral slush fund of the ruling Cambodia People’s Party (CPP).

The racket is coercive in the sense that the people who submit to formal registration have

little choice but to go about it in this way. They are forced to be corrupt, so to speak. Tax and

cadastral officials too are corrupt but not so much by choice as by virtue of being part of a

corrupt organization. So (2009:204) tells the story of an inexperienced cadastral official who

underestimated the amount needed to ply the process successfully. He pulled through by the skin

of his teeth but with nothing left over for himself. The story may serve as a cautionary tale for

initiates into the organization. It shows that a structure is in place to which they must conform or

suffer the consequences.

This organization is obviously far from ideal. It diverts money away from public coffers

and into private pockets. (Transactions incur a tax leakage of 60%!) It favors the rich twice over:

Officials prioritize high-value transactions and charge a smaller percentage on these transactions

than they do on low value transactions. Finally, corruption makes formal registration more

expensive, putting it out of reach for most Cambodians. While these costs are important to bear

in mind, an assessment of how the registration process diverges from the ideal should not

preclude an understanding of how it actually works and why it developed this way. By

embedding corrupt behaviors in the situations that inform them—economic insecurity and

35
bureaucratic incapacity—we are better able to understand why they take the shape they do. We

recognize the resulting racket as a way to solve, or at least mitigate, organizational problems.

Corruption generates the resources necessary for bureaucratic functioning. It provides the various

actors involved in the registration process with incentive to coordinate their activities both

“horizontally” (between tax and cadastral officials) and “vertically” (between rank-and-file

bureaucrats and their patrons in the land ministry and CPP). Moreover, by navigating a

complicated and delicate process, the fixer provides a real service. One of them told So

(2009:203-4): “[People] only know that we are taking a lot from them, but they do not know who

we have to pay to process their documents. When we ask them to pay tax by themselves, they

say they don’t know how.”

Once more, we see embedding complicate the clean distinctions underlying the

conventional view of corruption. The distinction between corrupt and mission-directed or

“Weberian” bureaucrats is blurred. As we saw above, tax and cadastral officials possess a sense

of bureaucratic mandate. They too aim to get the job done, and rent seeking helps them do that.

The distinction between the civil service and civil society is likewise unsettled. In Cambodia, the

two spheres are taken as normatively opposite; the one stigmatized as being prone to corruption

and the other valorized for, among other good works, calling out corruption. But might we not

apply the notion of racket to both? Adopting an organizational perspective, we might see the

activities associated with each sector as being organized around and designed to exploit new

revenue streams. The massive inflow of development aid in the 1990s created the NGO sector

almost instantaneously. In 1996, there were 164 NGOs in Phnom Penh. Just three years later, the

number approached 900 (cited in Hughes 2003:142). NGO work represents an opportunity for

middle- and upper-class Cambodians specifically; those who are well educated, can speak

36
English, and live in Phnom Penh, where most NGOs are located. In this respect, civil society is

an elite racket. NGO work is better than a government job in many ways, and many NGO

workers defect from government. One set of actors engage in corruption for a living, while the

other set denounces corruption, in Un’s assessment (2004:270), also for a living. The positions

they take have less to do with the kind of people they are than with the different organizational

roles they occupy.

Institutionalization through Imbrication

The account given in the previous section speaks to the institutionalization of corruption within

an organizational setting. Insofar as corrupt practices mitigate certain organizational problems,

people turn to them repeatedly and then reflexively. These practices become routine or “official”

despite being illegal. As we saw, initiates into the organization had to learn how to be corrupt

correctly. Corruption is not just an organizational phenomenon, however, but a systemic one. In

this section, my aim is to embed corrupt practices in the Cambodian political system. I will argue

that such practices become institutionalized as a result of their imbrication. The idea is that

corrupt practices at the executive and bureaucratic levels of government are not just connected to

but dependent on each other. Their linkages create a kind of accountability between corrupt

parties—clients answer to patrons and patrons to clients—that works to lock in these practices

and protect them from efforts at reform. I will begin, as usual, by putting the matter in context.

The development of a land market went hand-in-hand with the establishment of a

political order. The concession economy generated enormous revenue for a small group of

37
people. In the 1990s, 39% of the country’s territory was allocated to forest concessions and

another 5% to fisheries and agricultural concessions (McKenney and Tola 2002). At least 10

million cubic meters of timber worth USD 2.4 billion was exported between 1998 and 2001. The

national treasury saw only $120 million of this amount (Le Billion 2002), with much of the rest

captured by people in a position to do so, particularly high-ranking political and military

officials. Economic restructuring enabled the massive accumulation of wealth, land, and

followers and led to the consolidation of a political elite.

The power of this elite rested on their ability to disburse funds, licenses, and government

posts. Politics came to be organized around such patronage. Heder (1995:425) describes the

structure of the Cambodian state as an “interlocking of pyramids of patron-client networks.”

People were loyal to network ties or ksae, not institutions. These ties regularly overruled formal

hierarchies. As Un (2004:168) notes, lower ranking government officials could control their

official superiors if they had more powerful patrons. Supra-networks comprised many smaller

ones, and different networks competed with one another for influence. In the 1990s and 2000s,

the networks of Hun Sen and Chea Sim jostled for supremacy. These networks represented

different factions within the Cambodia People’s Party (CPP). Un (2004:116-17) describes the

Ministry of Interior being divided by the rivalry. Chea Sim’s protégé Sar Kheng served as

minister, controlling one network within the ministry, while Hun Sen’s man Hok Longdy was

National Chief of Police and controlled another. Sutton (2018) claims that Hun Sen was not able

to fully consolidate his power until Chea Sim’s passing in 2015.

Cambodian scholars describe this political order as neopatrimonial (Un 2004, So 2009).

Neopatrimonialism is a combination of two ideal types of domination, patrimonialism or

personal rule and legal-rational domination (Erdmann and Engel 2007). Neopatrimonial rule

38
operates within the framework of a modern bureaucracy but distorts it. While the public/private

distinction is stipulated formally, it is routinely transgressed as informal, patronage politics

penetrate and reconfigure formal institutions. I would point to three important “distortions” in the

Cambodian case.

One, the political system is held together by strongmen. These figures are more than just

patrons; they possess powers of coercion and act to impose social order. The biggest strongman

is, of course, Hun Sen. He does not just sit above political institutions but fancies himself the

very thing that holds them together (Hughes 2000). There are a number of local strongmen. Sok

(2014) writes of fishery concessionaires ruling their lots like fiefdoms. They employ armed

guards to police the boundaries and even to expand them by expropriating public waters. Inside

these lots, they take the law into their own hands, punishing “poachers” by levying fines,

detaining them, and confiscating their equipment.

Two, accountability within this system is not a function of political representation or

institutional checks (vertical and horizontal accountability in the literature) but lies between

patrons and clients. Clients answer to patrons but patrons to clients also. Clients have power in

their ability to exit networks and switch allegiances. To some extent, patrons are “prisoners” of

their clients, as Un (2004:168-69) writes. When Hun Sen declared a logging ban in 1995, his

own envoy, a powerful general, openly defied the order, enjoining provincial authorities not to

comply. Un’s point is that even if Hun Sen really wanted to stop logging, it is not clear that he

could given his obligations to clients.

Three, political legitimacy is based on patronage. This is true for political clients as well

as the people at large, who stand in relation to their leaders as clients. The CPP has pursued

popular legitimacy through a strategy of mass patronage. It distributes gifts during election

39
season and builds infrastructure in client villages. In 2003, Hun Sen famously claimed to have

constructed 2,232 schools costing $20,000 a piece using private funds provided by party donors.

His and his wife’s names are emblazoned on every one of them. Notably, the schools were

presented as coming from Hun Sen, not the Cambodian state (Un 2004:152). The CPP has

achieved political domination as a result of this strategy. Its use of violence has subsided and

Cambodian politics approached something like stability. When local elections were finally held

in 2002, the party controlled 68% of commune council seats and 99% of commune chiefs. Its

share of council seats actually increased with elections (So 2009:222).

Corruption is integral to the political order. Money from illicit transactions flow from

patrons to clients who are the patrons of other clients and so on, filtering down the various

“pyramids.” It flows downwards in the form of mass patronage: schools, roads, irrigation

systems and election-time handouts. Money flows upwards too. Clients “buy” appointments to

government positions. The more lucrative the post, the more expensive. Once installed, clients

seek to recoup their “investment.” They are also expected to make money for their political

bosses. These system requirements underlie the need to engage in rent seeking activities. In the

Ministry of Interior, 15% of rents is pocketed and 85% passed up to senior officials (Un

2004:135). These flows are binding. They tie together state agents big and small and cannot

simply be cut off in one domain without the repercussions being felt in another. In short,

corruption is so bound up in the political order that it is hard to “operate on” by targeting

practices in just one area. The imbrication of these practices helps keep them locked in place.

One reason why the quasi-formal registration system has proven so durable is because the

local officials who oversee these transfers, receiving kickbacks in the process, are protected from

above (So 2009:209-12). In 2005, the municipality of Phnom Penh issued Circular 09 banning

40
commune chiefs from approving land transfers. The circular was rescinded barely three months

later, So claims, because of political pressure from CPP officials. Commune and village chiefs

get paid to officiate informal transactions. Party politicians cannot afford to alienate them given

the crucial role they play in mobilizing turnout for local elections. The fact is, these chiefs are

not just agents of the state but clients of the CPP. As such, their corrupt activities are protected.

Anti-corruption rhetoric has become as much a part of the political landscape as

corruption. However, much of it is empty, performative, or used to cover for an ulterior agenda.

For example, in 2007 Hun Sen declared “a war against land grabbers” while condoning the

eviction of 107 families in Sihanoukville at the behest of a CPP donor (So 2009:192, 229). He

prosecuted political enemies in the name of this “war” while letting off political allies with a slap

on the wrist. Indeed, the Cambodian state has pursued a number of anti-corruption initiatives

(Ear 2016:164-66). It established the National Audit Authority in 2000, endorsed the Anti-

Corruption Action Plan for Asia in 2004, ratified the United Nations Convention against

Corruption in 2007, and finally passed the Anti-Corruption Law in 2010. The law created an

investigative Anti-Corruption Unit. The question to ask is whether these efforts are meaningful

given a political system that is organized around patronage and sustained by corruption. It is hard

to imagine the Anti-Corruption Unit being effective, for instance, when it is headed by one of

Hun Sen’s senior advisors. The distance between formal and informal politics in Cambodia has

been institutionalized. It is a feature not a bug, as it were. Hence we might adopt a view of the

state as structurally duplicitous. As with corrupt practices, so with anti-corruption rhetoric; it is

incumbent to ground these things in the structure of politics—how the Cambodian political

system actually works as opposed to some ideal of how it should work.

41
Implications for Social Change

I put corruption in three nested contexts: a process, privatization; an organization, Cambodia’s

land bureaucracy; and a neopatrimonial political system. Each act of embedding revealed a new

aspect of the phenomenon. We saw corruption as emergent, behavior acquiring meaning with

respect to structural changes. We saw it as situated action, behavior developed in response to

individual and organizational pressures. We saw how the imbrication of corrupt practices at the

executive and bureaucratic levels of government helps lock these practices in place. Embedding

widened the parameters by which we conventionally understand corruption. We saw beyond

rule-breaking behavior to the contingency of the rules and people’s differential capabilities to

follow them. We looked at people’s relation to the rules and how this relation took shape.

Embedding unsettled the conventional view, blurring the boundaries between legal and illegal,

formal and informal, appropriation through the market and expropriation, corrupt and properly

bureaucratic behavior, civil service and civil society, and corruption and anti-corruption efforts.

This expanded view of corruption is certainly messier, but it is also more adequate to reality in

the Weberian sense.

Fine, but what can we do with it? Corruption is not just another social object after all but,

in many countries, a social problem of the highest priority. It is not just analytically of interest

but normatively, and thus, understandably, people want more from a framework than adequacy.

They want a vision of social change. Here I would emphasize two “utilities” of a socially

embedded approach. First, it helps us avoid the pitfalls surrounding inadequate

42
conceptualizations of corruption, and second, it helps us imagine the problem of corruption more

expansively.

Avoiding Pitfalls

Better understanding corrupt behaviors does not mean excusing them.8 It does not preclude

criticizing or trying to correct them. However, it does make us skeptical of interventions based

on a shallow grasp of the actual behaviors at stake. Taking a broader, more complex view of

corruption may make it harder to solve, but it helps us avoid the pitfalls surrounding an

inadequate conceptualization of the problem, namely, utopian prescriptions, ineffective or

perverse interventions, and disillusion.

The World Bank published a report (2000) on corruption in Cambodia recommending

that the government pay civil servants a living wage, promote them on the basis of performance,

allow for greater public oversight of their duties, and require them to declare their assets. These

recommendations are inadequate for a couple of reasons. First, they are premised on an

undersocialized model of behavior. They focus on reforming individual behavior through a

combination of incentives and disincentives. As we saw, the problem of corruption is larger than

the individual; it is organizational and systemic. People are enmeshed in social networks

organized around patronage and rent seeking. Higher pay may make them less desperate, but it

will not be enough to extricate them from these networks. Second, the recommendations are

disconnected from actually existing politics in Cambodia. They assume that the Cambodian state

has the resources and capacity to implement them and, more importantly, that it will pursue them

8
Arendt (1994) made a similar point about totalitarianism. She wrote that “to understand
totalitarianism is not to condone anything, but to reconcile ourselves to a world in which such
things are possible at all” (p. 308).

43
in good faith (i.e., that they will not be disfigured by the logic of patronage). This disconnection

is highlighted by the fact that none other than Hun Sen delivered the keynote address to the good

governance conference cited in the report. The report opened with an excerpt from his speech!

In some cases, the issue is not a lack of understanding the situation on the ground but the

need to provide an actionable solution to an intractable problem. It is a convention of the “NGO

report” genre to conclude with a set of policy prescriptions, however facile or perfunctory. Not

surprisingly, the recommendations proffered by many a report are strikingly disconnected from

their analyses. A Worldvision report (Grimsditch et al. 2012) points to the systematic exclusion

of high-value areas from the LMAP program. The analysis is rich and exhibits an exceptional

sensitivity to dynamics of power. Thus it is all the more jarring when the report concludes by

exhorting the Cambodian government to “avoid further exclusions”—a recommendation that the

preceding analysis has made clear is both obvious and impossible. It is as if the authors switched

to a fantastical register in writing this section and felt at liberty to pretend that power did not

matter.

A second pitfall—. Interventions based on thin descriptions of reality are bound to be

ineffective or, worse, coopted by elites and used to advance particularistic interests. In this way,

they may end up compounding problems of inequality and elite domination. The systemic land

titling program implemented through LMAP was supposed to improve tenure security and

prevent land grabbing. Nearly a decade on, Biddulph (2010) concluded that it did not make much

of a difference. It did not make people more secure, increase their productivity, or improve their

access to credit. It led to more conflict, making people keen to title their land and claim

communal land, and pitting formal title holders against those with only informal titles. He argued

that the intervention served primarily as cover for powerful interests. Private titling distracted

44
from the selling off of public land on a massive scale. In addition to three million titles of

questionable value, LMAP produced political capital; it served to appease international donors

and could be touted domestically as a pro-poor measure.

The gap between the ideal and reality of the titling effort was the result of systematic

“misrepresentation,” Biddulph (2010:215-19) contended. LMAP was based on a “caricature” of

rural life and an insensibility to the schemes of powerful interests. Part of this had to do with the

intervention being conceived with the donor community in mind—an audience that was more

interested in solving a problem framed in generic terms (tenure insecurity) than in coming to

terms with the difficulties of the situation at hand. The need to be effective led to “policy

simplifications” discounting the local context and bracketing power relations. The result was a

kind of structural blindness.

This blindness was shared even by development workers on the ground. Biddulph tells

the story of Oxfam field workers tasked with protecting Cambodia’s forests. They had to

confront the fact that ordinary villagers routinely plundered the forests for their livelihoods,

collecting timber and non-timber forest products. When asked about it, they responded by saying

that they would have to teach the villagers to value their environment. “If the ideas and behavior

of the people did not fit the project document,” Biddulph (2010:218) observed wryly, “then the

ideas and behavior should be changed.” This recalls Weber’s caution (1904:94) against forcing

reality into the “procrustean bed” of theory.

A third pitfall—. The persistent gap between the aims and outcomes of development

interventions leads to disillusion. It did for Biddulph, who fled to graduate school in order to

contemplate his “disappointment” as a development worker. He opens his dissertation with a

remarkable confession:

45
 Fourteen years after my first arrival in the country, and despite the very best of intentions,
the tangible differences that I could see from my work in the development industry were
shelves of reports that I had authored or co-authored and a dramatic increase in my own
earning power. My work had (for the most part) been well-received: many of my
analyses had been accepted and many of the recommendations I had made had been
implemented. Yet reviewing my working life, there was not a single rural person or rural
place that I could confidently say had benefited significantly from my intervention
(2010:2).

He closes the dissertation by resigning himself to the exigencies of power in Cambodia. He

suggests working directly with powerful figures, for instance, by asking them to accommodate

smallholders on the land they control. He suggests crafting interventions that the political elite

would feel comfortable implementing. He wants to make a real difference in people’s lives but

has come to feel that this can only be done by capitulating to powerful interests. I would propose

a different tack.

Seeing the Big Picture

A socially embedded approach helps us reimagine the problem of corruption more expansively.

We might note the contingency of the predominant conception of corruption as an economic

problem. We might embed this conception historically, as promulgated only in the 1990s, and in

the institutional and epistemic regime supporting it. The work of the World Bank, Transparency

International, and other exponents has led to the standardization of both the object and an

approach to corruption in terms of anti-corruption. This is a story that has been told elsewhere

(Brown and Cloke 2004; Johnston 2005; Sampson 2010; de Souza, Hindness, and Larmour, eds.

2010). I bring it up in order to make the point that it is possible to construct the problem in

different way.

46
 A socially embedded approach leads us to view corruption as a structural problem, much

as the old sociologists of corruption did, and to conceive its resolution (as opposed to solution) in

terms of structural transformations occurring over the longue durée. By extending the time

horizon by which we assess the problematic nature of corruption, we gain perspective and a kind

of freedom of maneuver that we do not have when trying to solve corruption in the moment.

Here the problem is that we cannot see past the limits of the present configuration, and so we

indulge in counterfactual or reductive thinking, pinning our hopes on technology, technocrats,

strong leaders, and a political will that does not exist. These are not dependable sources of social

change, and thus we end up, like Biddulph, disappointed time and again. By recovering a view of

corruption as bound up in a big, long-term process—what used to be called modernization—new

possibilities come to light; specifically, the possibility of contingencies redirecting the current

trajectory and the accumulation of dynamics such as popular frustration with politics-as-usual

bringing about a kind of turning point and release from vicious cycles.

Take Rothstein’s account (2011:111-19) of the transformation of Sweden’s civil service

over the course of the nineteenth century. It used to be corrupt in ways that look familiar to us

today: bribes were common, appointments purchased, patronage ruled, etc. But then the old

feudal order was swept away by war, the nation plunged into an existential crisis, and Swedish

elites were forced to change. The midcentury saw a cascade of reforms, most of which had little

to do with corruption. They concerned education, taxes, political representation, individual

liberties, and the abolition of old privileges. It all happened rather quickly, in less than fifty

years, but taken cumulatively, effectively transformed the relation between state and society. To

be sure, nothing guarantees that the trajectory will be the same for Cambodia. That is not the

point. It is not the outcome of the transformation that is instructive but how it came about. We

47
find hope in a vision of social change that is contingent, cumulative, long term yet non-

incremental (punctuated, as it were), and fundamentally structural, that is, involving the

reconfiguration of social relations. This hope is not entirely pinned on the long run either. An

expanded view can make a difference in the short term as well by leavening interventions;

grounding them, moderating the expectations surrounding them, and inoculating us against

disillusion. These utilities make a socially embedded approach to corruption indispensable.

48
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