- Department: History
- Credit value: 20 credits
- Credit level: H
- Academic year of delivery: 2024-25
Today, it is commonplace amongst politicians, journalists, policy wonks and scholars to regard corruption as a major problem that undermines trust in government, financial institutions and the rule of law. It promotes economic inefficiency, damages the environment and erodes wellbeing, directly and indirectly. From such a perspective, corruption is an obstacle to countries the world over achieving a supposed Nordic nirvana and therefore something to be struggled against. This module places contemporary concern about the supposedly cross-temporal, cross-systemic and cross-cultural phenomenon of corruption in its historical contexts. Along the way we’ll meet kleptocrats, ancient and modern, dodgy entrepreneurs, shady financiers and professional criminals a plenty. You’ll also learn how to calculate and offer a bribe appropriate to whatever past societies your time machine takes you to.
Organised around three questions, we first consider what past societies understood corruption to mean and what they thought were its causes. We compare these to one another and a universalist definition of corrupt practices as involving three agents (the truster, the fiduciary who acts on behalf of the former, and the corrupter). In the second part of the module, we look at the consequences of corruption, understood variously, for political, economic and social life, and ask the troubling question: has corruption always been a problem? The final part of the module looks at past anti-corruption movements, their efforts to combat corruption and the prospects for contemporary corruption and anti-corruption.
Occurrence | Teaching period |
---|---|
A | Semester 1 2024-25 |
The aims of this module are:
Students who complete this module successfully will:
Students will attend a 1-hour briefing in week 1, then a 1-hour plenary/lecture and a 2-hour seminar in each of weeks 2-4, 6-8 and 10-11 of the semester. Weeks 5 & 9 are Reading and Writing Weeks (RAW). Students prepare for and participate in eight 1-hour plenaries/lectures and eight 2-hour seminars in all.
Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:
What is corruption?
Is corruption a problem?
Can corruption be stopped?
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Open Examination: Multiple choice questions online | 100 |
None
For formative assessment work, students will produce an essay plan relating to the themes and issues of the module.
For summative assessment students will complete an Open Exam in the assessment period.
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Open Examination: Multiple choice questions online | 100 |
Following their formative assessment task, students will receive written feedback, which may be supplemented by the tutor giving some oral feedback to the whole group. All students are encouraged, if they wish, to discuss their feedback during their tutor’s student hours. For more information, see the Statement on Feedback.
For the summative assessment task, students will receive their provisional mark and written feedback within 25 working days of the submission. For semester 1 assessments, the tutor will be available during student hours of the following semester for follow-up guidance if required. For more information, see the Statement of Assessment.
For semester time reading, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading: