Collective Action Against Corruption Through a Sensemaking Lens: A Temporal Comparison of Public and Private Sector Perspectives
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2025-06-27
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en
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Whereas historically corruption has often been investigated and understood through a principal agency perspective, Collective action has now become a widely used strategy for tackling corruption, especially in global governance settings where public and private actors must work together across institutional boundaries. While the literature on anti-corruption efforts has often focused on structural barriers or incentive misalignments, there has been less attention to how actors themselves make sense of collective action—how they interpret its purpose, justify their involvement, and navigate its tensions over time. This study seeks to address that gap by exploring the evolving sensemaking mechanisms of public and private sector actors engaged in collective anti-corruption efforts at two major conferences held in 2022 and 2024. Using a qualitative design, the study identifies four overarching ways in which actors made sense of collective action: as a moral imperative, as strategic risk management, as capacity building, and as a way to shape markets. These meaning-making processes were not fixed—they shifted across years and between sectors, shaped by experience, context. By analyzing these evolving interpretations, this study sheds light on the logics that underpin collective efforts to fight corruption, offering novel insights into how collective action is made sense of.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen