Episode 6: Alison Taylor: Culture and Corruption

Alison Taylor is, amongst many other things, an expert in anti-corruption.  Alison is a Director at an organisation called Business for Social Responsibility (www.bsr.org) and has several years of experience doing consulting work and investigations in this area.  She brings a unique perspective to corruption by bringing both analytical and practical lenses to it – and emphasises the important role that organisational culture (i.e. “how things are done around here”) plays. She not only knows her stuff, but explains things clearly and with plenty of interesting stories and examples. I thought it was an excellent conversation and I’m certain you’ll enjoy it.

We covered many areas including:

• What corruption is;
• How and why organisations become “corrupted”;
• Why many currently popular “compliance-led” approaches to corruption are falling short;
• Whistleblowers and why there are so few of them out there;
• Tell-tale signs of corruption (i.e. how to tell if you might be working for, or with, a corrupt organisation);
• Cross-cultural (i.e. non-Western) attitudes towards corruption

Show notes:

• You can find some of Alison’s articles on this topic here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/riskmap/2014/12/11/lighting-up-the-battle-against-corruption/#7e0783416ea5, here:  http://globalanticorruptionblog.com/tag/alison-taylor/and here:http://www.fcpablog.com/blog/2015/6/22/alison-taylor-does-competition-cause-corruption.html
• Follow Alison on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FollowAlisonTand Linkedin:http://bit.ly/1UGu8hL
• The book “Beautiful Souls”: http://amzn.to/1o6Lkij
• Article in Rolling Stone, “A Whistleblower’s Horror Story”: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/a-whistleblowers-horror-story-20150218
• The article “The Nature of Corruption”: https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/ifwedp/201359.html
• The site www.ipaidabribe.com