Complexity and Corruption Risk in Human Systems

This paper applies concepts from complexity science to describe corruption risk in the context of various types of uncertainty intrinsic to social interaction systems [12]. This is in contrast to typical approaches that focus on individual ethics and agency issues that are observed during human organizing (cf. [23]). More specifically, this article argues that disequilibrium conditions in organizations [15, 16] emerge as opportunity tension [7] creates value potential which perturbs the alignment of attention among the agent population related to their expectations about the benefits of participating in the organizational system.