Fire safety in urban China

A rapidly rising percentage of the Chinese population is living in high-rise apartment buildings in hundreds of cities around the country. There is concern, however, about the quality and effectiveness of fire-safety regulation and enforcement for these buildings (as well as factories, warehouses, ports, and other structures). This means that high-rise fires represent a growing risk in urban China. Here is a news commentary from CGTN (link) in 2010 describing a particularly tragic high-rise fire that engulfed a 28-story building in Shanghai, killing 58 people. This piece serves to identify the parameters of the problem of fire safety more generally.

It is of course true that high-rise fires have occurred in many cities around the world, including the notorious Grenfell Tower disaster in 2017. And many of those fires also reflect underlying problems of safety regulation in the jurisdictions in which they occurred. But the problems underlying infrastructure safety seem to converge with particular seriousness in urban China. And, crucially, major fire disasters in other countries are carefully scrutinized in public reports, providing accurate and detailed information about the causes of the disaster. This scrutiny creates the political incentive to improve building codes, inspection regimes, and enforcement mechanisms of safety regulations. This open and public scrutiny is not permitted in China today, leaving the public largely ignorant of the background causes of fires, railway crashes, and other large accidents.

It is axiomatic that modern buildings require effective and professionally grounded building codes and construction requirements, adequate fire safety system requirements, and rigorous inspection and enforcement regimes that ensure a high level of compliance with fire safety regulations. Regrettably, it appears that no part of this prescription for fire safety is well developed in China.

The CGTN article mentioned above refers to the "effective" high-level fire safety legislation that the central government adopted in 1998, the Fire Control Law of the People's Republic of China (link), and this legislation warrants close study. However, close examination suggests that this guiding legislation lacks crucial elements that are needed in order to ensure compliance with safety regulations -- especially when compliance is highly costly for the owners/managers of buildings and other facilities. Previous disasters in China suggest a pattern: poor inspection and enforcement prior to an accident or fire, followed by prosecution and punishment of individuals involved in the occurrence of the disaster in the aftermath. But this is not an effective mechanism for ensuring safety. Owners, managers, and officials are more than ready to run the small risk of future prosecution for the sake of gains in the costs of present operations of various facilities.

The systemic factors that act against fire safety in China include at least these pervasive social and political conditions: ineffective and corrupt inspection offices, powerful property managers who are able to ignore safety violations, pressure from the central government to avoid interfering with rapid economic growth, government secrecy about disasters when they occur, and lack of independent journalism capable of freely gathering and publishing information about disasters.

In particular, the fact that the news media (and now social media as well) are tightly controlled in China is a very serious obstacle to improving safety when it comes to accidents, explosions, train wrecks, and fires. The Chinese news media do not publish detailed accounts of disasters as they occur, and they usually are unable to carry out the investigative journalism needed to uncover background conditions that have created the circumstances in which these catastrophes arise (ineffective or corrupt inspection regimes; enforcement agencies that are hampered in their work by the political requirements of the state; corrupt practices by private owners/managers of high-rise properties, factories, and ports; and so on). It is only when the public can become aware of the deficiencies in government and business that have led to a disaster, that reforms can be designed and implemented that make those disasters less likely in the future. But the lack of independent journalism means leaving the public in the dark about these important details of their contemporary lives.

The story quoted above is from CGTN, a Chinese news agency, and this story is unusual for its honesty in addressing some of the deficiencies of safety management and regulation in Shanghai. CGTN is an English-language Chinese news service, owned and operated by Chinese state-owned media organization China Central Television (CCTV). As such it is under full editorial control by offices of the Chinese central government. And the government is rarely willing to have open and honest reporting of major disasters, and the organizational, governmental, and private dysfunctions that led to them. It is noteworthy, therefore, that the story is somewhat explicit about the dysfunctions and corruption that led to the Shanghai disaster. The article quotes an article in China Daily (owned by the publicity department of the CCP) that refers to poor enforcement and corruption:

However, a 2015 article by China Daily called for the Fire Control Law to be more strictly enforced, saying that the Chinese public now “gradually takes it for granted that when a big fire happens there must be a heavy loss of life.”

While saying “China has a good fire protection law,” the newspaper warned that it was frequently violated, with fire engine access blocked by private cars, escape routes often blocked and flammable materials still being “widely used in high buildings.”

The article also pointed at corruption within fire departments, saying inspections have “become a cash cow,” with businesses and construction companies paying bribes in return for lax safety standards being ignored.

So -- weak inspections, poor compliance with regulations, and corruption. Both the CCTV report and the China Daily story it quotes are reasonably explicit about unpalatable truths. But note -- the CGTN story was prepared for an English-speaking audience, and is not available to ordinary Chinese readers in China. And this appears to be the case for the China Daily article that was quoted as well. And most importantly -- the political climate surrounding the journalistic practices of China Daily has tightened very significantly since 2015.

Another major institutional obstacle to safety in China is the lack of genuinely independent regulatory safety agencies. The 1998 Fire Control Law of the People's Republic of China is indicative. The legislation refers to the responsibility of local authorities (provincial, municipal) to establish fire safety organizations; but it is silent about the nature, resources, and independence of inspection authorities. Here is the language of the first several articles of the Fire Control Law:

Article 2 Fire control work shall follow the policy of devoting major efforts into prevention and combining fire prevention with fire fighting, and shall adhere to the principle of combining the efforts of both specialized organizations and the masses and carry out responsibility system on fire prevention and safety.

Note that this article immediately creates a confusion of responsibility concerning the detailed tasks of establishing fire safety: "specialized organizations" and "the masses" carry out responsibility.

Article 3 The State Council shall lead and the people's governments at all levels be responsible for fire control work. The people's government at all levels shall bring fire control work in line with the national economy and social development plan, and ensure that fire control work fit in with the economic construction and social development.

Here too is a harmful diffusion of responsibility: "the people's governments at all levels [shall] be responsible ...". In addition a new priority is introduced: consistency with the "national economy and social development plan". This implies that fire safety regulations and agencies at the provincial and municipal level must balance economic needs with the needs of ensuring safety -- a potentially fatal division of priorities. If substituting a non-flammable cladding to an 80-story residential building will add one billion yuan to the total cost of the building -- does this requirement impede the "national economy and development plan"? Can the owner/managers resist the new regulation on the grounds that it is too costly?

Article 4 The public security department of the State Council shall monitor and administer the nationwide fire control work; the public security organs of local people's governments above county level shall monitor and administer the fire control work within their administrative region and the fire control institutions of public security organs of the people's government at the same level shall be responsible for the implementation. Fire control work for military facilities, underground parts of mines and nuclear power plant shall be monitored and administered by their competent units. For fire control work on forest and grassland, in case there are separate regulations, the separate regulations shall be followed.

Here we find specific institutional details about oversight of "nationwide fire control work": it is the public security organs that are tasked to "monitor and administer" fire control institutions. Plainly, the public security organs have no independence from the political authorities at provincial and national levels; so their conduct is suspect when it comes to the task of "independent, rigorous enforcement of safety regulations".

Article 5 Any unit and individual shall have the obligation of keeping fire control safety, protecting fire control facilities, preventing fire disaster and reporting fire alarm. Any unit and adult shall have the obligation to take part in organized fire fighting work.

Here we are back to the theme of diffusion of responsibility. "Any unit and individual shall have the obligation of keeping fire control safety" -- this statement implies that there should not be free-standing, independent, and well-resourced agencies dedicated to ensuring compliance with fire codes, conducting inspections, and enforcing compliance by reluctant owners.

It seems, then, that the 1998 Fire Control Law is largely lacking in what should have been its primary purpose: specification of the priority of fire safety, establishment of independent safety agencies at various levels of government with independent power of enforcement, and with adequate resources to carry out their fire safety missions, and a clear statement that there should be no interference with the proper inspection and enforcement activities of these agencies -- whether by other organs of government or by large owner/operators.

The 1998 Fire Control Law was extended in 2009, and a chapter was added entitled "Supervision and Inspection". Clauses in this chapter offer somewhat greater specificity about inspections and enforcement of fire-safety regulation. Departments of local and regional government are charged to "conduct targeted fire safety inspections" and "promptly urge the rectification of hidden fire hazards" (Article 52). (Notice that the verb "urge" is used rather than "require".) Article 53 specifies that the police station (public security) is responsible for "supervising and inspecting the compliance of fire protection laws and regulations". Article 54 addresses the issue of possible discovery of "hidden fire hazards" during fire inspection; this requires notification of the responsible unit of the necessity of eliminating the hazard. Article 55 specifies that if a fire safety agency discovers that fire protection facilities do not meet safety requirements, it must report to the emergency management department of higher-level government in writing. Article 56 provides specifications aimed at preventing corrupt collaboration between fire departments and units: "Fire rescue agencies ... shall not charge fees, shall not use their positions to seek benefits". And, finally, Article 57 specifies that "all units and individuals have the right to report and sue the illegal activities of the authorities" if necessary. Notice, however, that, first, all of this inspection and enforcement activity occurs within a network of offices and departments dependent ultimately on central government; and second, the legislation remains very unspecific about how this set of expectations about regulation, inspection, and enforcement is to be implemented at the local and provincial levels. There is nothing in this chapter that gives the observer confidence that effective regulations will be written; effective inspection processes will be carried out; and failed inspections will lead to prompt remediation of hazardous conditions.

The Tianjin port explosion in 2015 is a case in point (link, link). Poor regulations, inadequate and ineffective inspections, corruption, and bad behavior by large private and governmental actors culminated in a gigantic pair of explosions of 800 tons of ammonium nitrate. This was one of the worst industrial and environmental disasters in China's recent history, and resulted in the loss of 173 lives, including 104 poorly equipped fire fighters. Prosecutions ensued after the disaster, including the conviction and suspended death sentence of Ruihai International Logistics Chairman Yu Xuewei for bribery, and the conviction of 48 other individuals for a variety of crimes (link). But punishment after the fact is no substitute for effective, prompt inspection and enforcement of safety requirements.

It is not difficult to identify the organizational dysfunctions in China that make fire safety, railway safety, food safety, and perhaps nuclear safety difficult to attain. What is genuinely difficult is to see how these dysfunctions can be corrected in a single-party state. Censorship, subordination of all agencies to central control, the omnipresence of temptations to corrupt cooperation -- all of these factors seem to be systemic within a one-party state. The party state wants to control public opinion; therefore censorship. The party state wants to control all political units; therefore a lack of independence for safety agencies. And positions of decision-making that create lucrative "rent-seeking" opportunities for office holders -- therefore corruption, from small payments to local inspectors to massive gifts of wealth to senior officials. A pluralistic, liberal society embodying multiple centers of power and freedom of press and association is almost surely a safer society. Ironically, this was essentially Amartya Sen's argument in Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, his classic analysis of famine and malnutrition: a society embodying a free press and reasonably free political institutions is much more likely to respond quickly to conditions of famine. His comparison was between India in the Bengal famine (1943) and China in the Great Leap Forward famine (1959-61).

Here is a Google translation of Chapter V of the 2009 revision of the Fire Protection Law of the People's Republic of China mentioned above.

Chapter V Supervision and Inspection

Article 52 Local people's governments at all levels shall implement a fire protection responsibility system and supervise and inspect the performance of fire safety duties by relevant departments of the people's government at the same level.

The relevant departments of the local people's government at or above the county level shall, based on the characteristics of the system, conduct targeted fire safety inspections, and promptly urge the rectification of hidden fire hazards.

Article 53 Fire and rescue agencies shall supervise and inspect the compliance of fire protection laws and regulations by agencies, organizations, enterprises, institutions and other entities in accordance with the law. The police station may be responsible for daily fire control supervision and inspection, and conduct fire protection publicity and education. The specific measures shall be formulated by the public security department of the State Council.

The staff of fire rescue agencies and public security police stations shall present their certificates when conducting fire supervision and inspection.

Article 54: Fire rescue agencies that discover hidden fire hazards during fire supervision and inspection shall notify relevant units or individuals to take immediate measures to eliminate the hidden hazards; if the hidden hazards are not eliminated in time and may seriously threaten public safety, the fire rescue agency shall deal with the dangerous parts in accordance with regulations. Or the place adopts temporary sealing measures.

Article 55: If the fire rescue agency discovers that the urban and rural fire safety layout and public fire protection facilities do not meet the fire safety requirements during the fire supervision and inspection, or finds that there is a major fire hazard affecting public safety in the area, it shall report to the emergency management department in writing. Level People’s Government.

The people's government that receives the report shall verify the situation in a timely manner, organize or instruct relevant departments and units to take measures to make corrections.

Article 56 The competent department of housing and urban-rural construction, fire rescue agencies and their staff shall conduct fire protection design review, fire protection acceptance, random inspections and fire safety inspections in accordance with statutory powers and procedures, so as to be fair, strict, civilized and efficient.

Housing and urban-rural construction authorities, fire rescue agencies and their staff shall conduct fire protection design review, fire inspection and acceptance, record and spot checks and fire safety inspections, etc., shall not charge fees, shall not use their positions to seek benefits; they shall not use their positions to designate or appoint users, construction units, or Disguisedly designate the brand, sales unit or fire-fighting technical service organization or construction unit of fire-fighting equipment for fire-fighting products.

Article 57 The competent housing and urban-rural construction departments, fire and rescue agencies and their staff perform their duties, should consciously accept the supervision of society and citizens.

All units and individuals have the right to report and sue the illegal activities of the housing and urban-rural construction authorities, fire and rescue agencies and their staff in law enforcement. The agency that receives the report or accusation shall investigate and deal with it in a timely manner in accordance with its duties.

*    *    *    *    *

(Here is a detailed technical fire code for China from 2014 (link).)

Personalized power at the local level

How does government work? We often understand this question as one involving the institutions and actors within the Federal government. But there is a different zone of government and politics that is also very important in public life in the United States, the practical politics and exercise of power at the state and local levels.

Here is an earlier post that addresses some of these issues as well; link. There I present three scenarios for how our democracy works: the ideal case, the "not-so-ideal" case, and the "nightmare" case.

The Nightmare Scenario Elected officials have no sincere adherence to the public good; they pursue their own private and political interests through all the powers available to them. Elected officials are sometimes overtly corruptible, accepting significant gifts in exchange for official performance. Elected officials are intimidated by the power of private interests (corporations) to fund electoral opposition to their re-election. Regulatory agencies are dominated by the industries they regulate; independent commissioners are forced out of office; and regulations are toothless when it comes to environmental protection, wilderness protection, health and safety in the workplace, and food safety. Lobbyists for special interests and corporations have almost unrestricted access to legislators and regulators, and are generally able to achieve their goals.

This is the nightmare scenario if one cares about democracy, because it implies that the apparatus of government is essentially controlled by private interests rather than the common good and the broad interests of society as a whole. It isn't "pluralism", because there are many important social interests not represented in this system in any meaningful way: poor people, non-unionized workers, people without health insurance, inner-city youth, the environment, people exposed to toxic waste, ...

 If anything, personal networks of power and influence appear to be of even greater importance at this level of government than at the Federal level.

So how does personal power work at the local level? Power within a democracy is gained and wielded through a variety of means: holding office within an important institution, marshaling support from a political party, possessing a network of powerful supporters in business, labor, and advocacy groups; securing access to significant sources of political funding; and other mechanisms we can think of. Mayors, governors, and county executives have powers of appointment to reward or punish their supporters and competitors; they have the ability to influence purchasing and other economic levers of the municipality; and they have favors to trade with legislators.

Essentially the question to consider here is how power is acquired, exercised, and maintained by a few powerful leaders in state, county, and city, and what are the barely-visible lines through which these power relations are implemented and maintained. This used to be called "machine politics," but as Jessica Trounstine demonstrates in Political Monopolies in American Cities: The Rise and Fall of Bosses and Reformers, the phenomenon is broader than Tammany Hall and the mayor-boss politics of the nineteenth century through Mayor Daly's reign in Chicago. The term Trounstine prefers is "political monopolies":

I argue that it is not whether a government is machine or reform that determines its propensity to represent the people, but rather its success at stacking the deck in its favor. When political coalitions successfully limit the probability that they will be defeated over the long term -- when they eliminate effective competition -- they achieve a political monopoly. In these circumstances the governing coalition gains the freedom to be responsive to a narrow segment of the electorate at the expense of the broader community. (KL 140)

What are the levers of influence available to a politician in state and local government that permit some executives to achieve monopoly power? How do mayors, county executives, and political party leaders exercise power over the decisions that are to be made? Once they have executive power they are able to reward friends and punish enemies through appointments to desirable jobs, through favorable access to government contracts (corrupt behavior!), through the power of their Rolodexes (their networks of relationships with other powerful people), through their influence on political party decision-making, through the power of some of their allies (labor unions, business associations, corporations), and through their ability to influence the flow of campaign funding. They have favors to dispense and they have punishments they can dole out.

Consider Southeast Michigan as an interesting example. Michigan's largest counties have a history of longterm "monopoly" leadership. Wayne County was led for 15 years by Ed McNamara and Oakland County was led by L. Brooks Patterson, and both men wielded a great deal of power in their offices during their tenure. Neither was seriously challenged by strong competing candidates, and Patterson died in office at the age of 80. Some of the levers of power in Wayne County came to light during a corruption investigation in 2011. Below are links to several 2011 stories in MLive on the details of this controversy involving the Wayne County Executive and the Airport Authority Board.

Labor unions have a great deal of influence on the internal politics of the Democratic Party in Michigan. Dudley Buffa's Union Power and American Democracy: The UAW and the Democratic Party, 1972-83 describes this set of political realities through the 1980s. Buffa shows that the UAW had extraordinary influence in the Democratic Party into the 1980s, and even with the decline of the size and influence of organized labor, it still has virtually veto power on important Democratic Party decisions today.

As noted in many places in Understanding Society, corporations have a great deal of power in political decision-making in the United States. Corporate influence is wielded through effective lobbying, political and political action contributions, and the "social capital" of networks of powerful individuals. (Just consider the influence of Boeing on the actions of the FAA or the influence of the nuclear industry on the actions of the NRC.) G. William Domhoff (Who Rules America? Challenges to Corporate and Class Dominance) provided a classic treatment of the influence of corporate and business elites in the sphere of political power in the United States. He has also created a very useful website dedicated to helping other researchers discover the networks of power in other settings (link). Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Melanie Wachtell Stinnett provide a more contemporary overview of the power that businesses have in American politics in Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy.

When I speak of corporate power in politics, let me be very clear: I do not mean just the activities of the incorporated entities themselves. The billionaire owners of corporations are often actively engaged in battle to expand the influence of the corporations that give them their power and their wealth. Front groups and lobbying groups are often the ground troops when corporate powers don’t want to get their own hands dirty or when they want to institutionalize their influence. So-called philanthropic foundations are often the proxies for billionaire families who want influence and who launch these tools. (kl 214)

Contributors to Corporations and American Democracy provide extensive understanding of the legal and political history through which corporations came to have such extensive legal rights in the United States.

Business executives too have a great deal of influence on the Michigan legislature. Here is a Crain's Detroit Business assessment of the top influencers in Lansing, "Michigan's top power players as Lansing insiders see them — and how they wield that influence" (link). Top influencers in the business community, according to the Crain's article, include Dan Gilbert, chairman of Quicken Loans Inc., Daniel Loepp, president and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Rich Studley, CEO of Michigan Chamber of Commerce, Patti Poppe, CEO of Consumers Energy Co., and Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors Co. Most of these individuals are members of the state's leading business organization, Business Leaders for Michigan (link). Collectively and individually these business leaders have a great deal of influence on the elected officials of the state.

Finally, elected officials themselves sometimes act in direct self-interest, either electoral or financial, and corruption is a recurring issue in local and state government in many states. Detroit's mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, a string of Illinois governors, and other elected officials throughout the country were all convicted of corrupt actions leading to personal gain (link).

These kinds of influence and actions underline the extensive and anti-democratic role that a range of political actors play within the decision-making and rule-setting of local government: monopoly-holding political executives, political party officials, big business and propertied interests, labor unions, and special advocacy groups. It would be interesting to put together a scorecard of issues of interest to business, labor, unions, and environmental groups, and see how often each constituency prevails. It is suggestive about the relative power of these various actors that the two issues of the greatest interest to the business community in Michigan in recent years, repeal of the Michigan Business Tax and passage of "Freedom to Work" legislation, were both successful. (Here is an earlier post on the business tax reform issue in Michigan; link.)

Data for case study about networks of influence in SE Michigan

Jeff Wattrick, November 2, 2011. "This didn't start with Turkia Mullin: The inter-connected web of Wayne County politics from Ed McNamara to Renee Axt", MLive (link)
___________, November 4, 2011: "Wayne County Executive Bob Ficano replaces top officials, vows to end 'business as usual'", MLive (link)
___________, November 7, 2011: "Renee Axt resigns as Chair of Wayne County Airport Authority", MLive (link)
___________, November 8, 2011: "Almost half of Wayne County voters say Executive Bob Ficano should resign", MLive (link)
Jim Schaefer and John Wisely. November 15, 2011. "Wayne Co. lawyer who quit is back". Detroit Free Press. (link)
David Sands. November 15, 2011. "Wayne County Corruption Probe Gathers Speed, Turkia Mullin To Testify", Huffington Post (link)

Detroit had its own nationally visible political corruption scandal when Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was charged with multiple counts of racketeering and corruption, for which he was eventually convicted. Stephen Yaccino, October 10, 2013. "Kwame M. Kilpatrick, Former Detroit Mayor, Sentenced to 28 Years in Corruption Case", New York Times (link).

The internal machinations of Michigan's political parties with respect to choosing candidates for office reflect the power of major "influencers". Here is a piece about the choice of candidate for the office of secretary of state in the Democratic Party in 2002: Jack Lessenberry. March 30, 2002. "Austin has uphill fight in Michigan secretary of state race", Toledo Blade (link).

Auditing FEMA

Crucial to improving an organization's performance is being able to obtain honest and detailed assessments of its functioning, in normal times and in emergencies. FEMA has had a troubled reputation for faulty performance since the Katrina disaster in 2005, and its performance in response to Hurricane Maria in Louisiana and Puerto Rico was also criticized by observers and victims. So how can FEMA get better? The best avenue is careful, honest review of past performance, identifying specific areas of organizational failure and taking steps to improve in these areas.

It is therefore enormously disturbing to read an investigative report in the Washington Post ((Lisa Rein and Kimberly Kindy, Washington Post, June 6, 2019); link) documenting that investigation and audits by the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security were watered down and sanitized at the direction of the audit bureau's acting director, John V. Kelly.

Auditors in the Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office confirmed problems with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s performance in Louisiana — and in 11 other states hit over five years by hurricanes, mudslides and other disasters. 

But the auditors’ boss, John V. Kelly, instead directed them to produce what they called “feel-good reports” that airbrushed most problems and portrayed emergency responders as heroes overcoming vast challenges, according to interviews and a new internal review.

...

Investigators determined that Kelly didn’t just direct his staff to remove negative findings. He potentially compromised their objectivity by praising FEMA’s work ethic to the auditors, telling them they would see “FEMA at her best” and instructing supervisors to emphasize what the agency had done right in its disaster response. (Washington Post, June 6, 2019)

"Feel-good" reports are not what quality improvement requires, and they are not what legislators and other public officials need as they consider the adequacy of some of our most important governmental institutions. It is absolutely crucial for the public and for government oversight that we should be able to rely on the honest, professional, and rigorous work of auditors and investigators without political interference in their findings. These are the mechanisms through which the integrity of regulatory agencies and other crucial governmental agencies is maintained.

Legislators and the public are already concerned about the effectiveness of the Federal Aviation Agency's oversight in the certification process of the Boeing 737 MAX. The evidence brought forward by the Washington Post concerning interference with the work of the staff of the Inspector General of DHS simply amplifies that concern. The article correctly observes that independent and rigorous oversight is crucial for improving the functioning of government agencies, including DHS and FEMA:

Across the federal government, agencies depend on inspectors general to provide them with independent, fact-driven analysis of their performance, conducting audits and investigations to ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent wisely. 

Emergency management experts said that oversight, particularly from auditors on the ground as a disaster is unfolding, is crucial to improving the response, especially in ensuring that contracts are properly administered. (Washington Post, June 6, 2019)

Honest government simply requires independent and effective oversight processes. Every agency, public and private, has an incentive to conceal perceived areas of poor performance. Hospitals prefer to keep secret outbreaks of infection and other medical misadventures (link), the Department of Interior has shown an extensive pattern of conflict of interest by some of its senior officials (link), and the Pentagon Papers showed how the Department of Defense sought to conceal evidence of military failure in Vietnam (link). The only protection we have from these efforts at concealment, lies, and spin is vigorous governmental review and oversight, embodied by offices like the Inspectors General of various agencies, and an independent and vigorous press able to seek out these kinds of deception.

Conflicts of interest

The possibility or likelihood of conflict of interest is present in virtually all professions and occupations. We expect a researcher, a physician, or a legislator to perform her work according to the highest values and norms of their work (searching for objective knowledge, providing the best care possible for the patient, drafting and supporting legislation in order to enhance the public good). But there is always the possibility that the individual may have private financial interests that distort or bias the work she does, and there may be large companies that have a financial interest in one set of actions rather than another.

Marc Rodwin's Conflicts of Interest and the Future of Medicine: The United States, France, and Japan is a rigorous and fair treatment of this issue with respect to conflicts of interest in the field of medicine. Rodwin has published extensively on this topic, and the current book is an important exploration of how professional ethics, individual interest, and business and professional institutions intersect to influence practitioner behavior in this field. The institutional actors in this story include the pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers, insurers, hospitals and physician partnerships, and legislators and regulators. Rodwin shows in detail how differences in insurance policies, physician reimbursement policies, and gifts and benefits from health-related businesses to physicians contribute to an institutional environment where the physician's choices are all too easily influenced by considerations other than the best health outcomes of the patient. Rodwin finds that the institutional setting for health economics is different in the US, France, and Japan, and that these differences lead to differences in physician behavior.

Here is Rodwin's clear statement of the material situation that creates the possibility or likelihood of conflicts of interest in medicine.

Physicians earn their living through their medical work and so may practice in ways that enhance their income rather than the interests of patients. Moreover, when physicians prescribe drugs, devices, and treatments and choose who supplies these or refer patients to other providers, they affect the fortunes of third parties. As a result, providers, suppliers, and insurers try to influence physicians' clinical decisions for their own benefit. Thus, at the core of doctoring lies tension between self-interest and faithful service to patients and the public. The prevailing powerful medical ethos does influence physicians. Still, there is conflict between professional ethics and financial incentives. (kl 251)

Jerome Kassirer is a former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, and an expert observer of the field, and he provided a foreword to the book. Kassirer describes the current situation in the medical economy in these terms, drawing on his own synthesis of recent research and journalism:

Professionalism had been steadily eroded by complex financial ties between practicing physicians and academic physicians on the one hand and the pharmaceutical, medical device, and biotechnology industries on the other. These financial ties were deep and wide: they threatened to bias the clinical research on which physicians relied to care for the sick, and they permeated nearly every aspect of medical care. Physicians were accepting gifts, taking free trips, serving on companies' speakers' bureaus, signing their names to articles written for them by industry-paid ghostwriters, and engaging in research that endangered patient care. (kl 73)

The fundamental problem posed by Rodwin's book is this set of questions:

In what context can physicians be trusted to act in their patients' interests? How can medical practice be organized to minimize physicians' conflicts of interest? How can society promote what is best in medical professionalism? What roles should physicians and organized medicine play in the medical economy? What roles should insurers, the state, and markets play in medical care? (kl 267)

The book sheds light on dozens of institutional arrangements that create the likelihood of conflicted choices, or that reduce that likelihood. One of those arrangements is the question for a non-profit hospital of whether the physicians are employed with a fixed salary or work on a fee-for-service basis. The latter system gives the physician a very different set of financial interests, including the possibility of making clinical choices that increase revenues to the physician or his or her group practice.

Consider physicians employed as public servants in public hospitals. Typically, they receive a fixed salary set by rank, enjoy tenure, and have clinical discretion. As a result, they lack financial incentives that bias their choices and have clinical freedom. Such arrangements preclude employment conflicts of interest. But relax some of these conditions and employers can compromise medical practice.... Furthermore, emplloyers can manage physicians to promote the organization's goals. As a result, employed physicians might practice in ways that promote their employer's over their patients' interests. (kl 445)

And the disadvantages for the patient of the self-employed physician are also important:

Payment can encourage physicians to supply more, less, or different kinds of services, or to refer to particular providers. Each form of payment has some bias, but some compromise clinical decisions more than others do. (kl 445) 

Plainly, the circumstances and economic institutions described here are relevant to many other occupations as well. Scientists, policymakers, regulators, professors, and accountants all face similar circumstances -- though the financial stakes in medicine are particularly high. (Here is an earlier post on corporate efforts to influence scientific research; link.)

This field of research makes an important contribution to a particular challenging topic in contemporary healthcare. But Rodwin's study also provides an important contribution to the new institutionalism, since it serves as a micro-level case study of the differences in behavior created by differences in institutional rules and practices.

Each country's laws, insurance, and medical institutions shape medical practice; and within each country, different forms of practice affect clinical choices. (kl 218)

This feature of the book allows it to contribute to the kinds of arguments on the causal and historical importance of specific configurations of institutions offered by Kathleen Thelen (link) and Frank Dobbin (link).

Is corruption a social thing?

When we discuss the ontology of various aspects of the social world, we are often thinking of such things as institutions, organizations, social networks, value systems, and the like. These examples pick out features of the world that are relatively stable and functional. Where does an imperfection or dysfunction of social life like corruption fit into our social ontology?

We might say that “corruption” is a descriptive category that is aimed at capturing a particular range of behavior, like stealing, gossiping, or asceticism. This makes corruption a kind of individual behavior, or even a characteristic of some individuals. “Mayor X is corrupt.”

This initial effort does not seem satisfactory, however. The idea of corruption is tied to institutions, roles, and rules in a very direct way, and therefore we cannot really present the concept accurately without articulating these institutional features of the concept of corruption. Corruption might be paraphrased in these terms:

• Individual X plays a role Y in institution Z; role Y prescribes honest and impersonal performance of duties; individual X accepts private benefits to take actions that are contrary to the prescriptions of Y. In virtue of these facts X behaves corruptly.

Corruption, then, involves actions taken by officials that deviate from the rules governing their role, in order to receive private benefits from the subjects of those actions. Absent the rules and role, corruption cannot exist. So corruption is a feature that presupposes certain social facts about institutions. (Perhaps there is a link to Searle’s social ontology here; link.)

We might consider that corruption is analogous to friction in physical systems. Friction is a factor that affects the performance of virtually all mechanical systems, but that is a second-order factor within classical mechanics. And it is possible to give mechanical explanations of the ubiquity of friction, in terms of the geometry of adjoining physical surfaces, the strength of inter-molecular attractions, and the like. Analogously, we can offer theories of the frequency with which corruption occurs in organizations, public and private, in terms of the interests and decision-making frameworks of variously situated actors (e.g. real estate developers, land value assessors, tax assessors, zoning authorities …). Developers have a business interest in favorable rulings from assessors and zoning authorities; some officials have an interest in accepting gifts and favors to increase personal income and wealth; each makes an estimate of the likelihood of detection and punishment; and a certain rate of corrupt exchanges is the result.

This line of thought once again makes corruption a feature of the actors and their calculations. But it is important to note that organizations themselves have features that make corrupt exchanges either more likely or less likely (link, link). Some organizations are corruption-resistant in ways in which others are corruption-neutral or corruption-enhancing. These features include internal accounting and auditing procedures; whistle-blowing practices; executive and supervisor vigilance; and other organizational features. Further, governments and systems of law can make arrangements that discourage corruption; the incidence of corruption is influenced by public policy. For example, legal requirements on transparency in financial practices by firms, investment in investigatory resources in oversight agencies, and weighty penalties to companies found guilty of corrupt practices can affect the incidence of corruption. (Robert Klitgaard’s treatment of corruption is relevant here; he provides careful analysis of some of the institutional and governmental measures that can be taken that discourage corrupt practices; link, link. And there are cross-country indices of corruption (e.g. Transparency International) that demonstrate the causal effectiveness of anti-corruption measures at the state level. Finland, Norway, and Switzerland rank well on the Transparency International index.)

So -- is corruption a thing? Does corruption need to be included in a social ontology? Does a realist ontology of government and business organization have a place for corruption? Yes, yes, and yes. Corruption is a real property of individual actors’ behavior, observable in social life. It is a consequence of strategic rationality by various actors. Corruption is a social practice with its own supporting or inhibiting culture. Some organizations effectively espouse a core set of values of honesty and correct performance that make corruption less frequent. And corruption is a feature of the design of an organization or bureau, analogous to “mean-time-between-failure” as a feature of a mechanical design. Organizations can adopt institutional protections and cultural commitments that minimize corrupt behavior, while other organizations fail to do so and thereby encourage corrupt behavior. So “corruption-vulnerability” is a real feature of organizations and corruption has a social reality.

Exercising government's will

Since the beginning of the industrial age the topic of regulation of private activity for the public good has been essential for the health and safety of the public. The economics of externalities and public harms are too powerful to permit private actors to conduct their affairs purely according to the dictates of profit and private interest. The desolation of the River Irk described in Engels' The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 was powerful evidence of this dynamic in the nineteenth century, and need for the protection of health and safety in the food industry, the protection of air and water quality, and establishment of regulations ensuring safe operation of industrial, chemical, and nuclear plants became evident in the middle of the twentieth century. (Of course it goes without saying that our current administration no longer concedes this point.)

A fundamental problem for understanding the mechanics of government is the question of how the will and intentions of government (policies and regulatory regimes) are conveyed from the sites of decision-making to the behavior of the actors whom these policies are meant to influence.

The familiar principal-agent problem designates precisely this complex of issues. Applying a government policy or regulation requires a chain of behaviors by multiple agents within an extended network of governmental and non-governmental offices. It is all too evident that actors at various levels have interests and intentions that are important to their choices; and blind obedience to commands from above is not a common practice within any organization. Instead, actors within an office or bureau have some degree of freedom to act strategically with regard to their own preferences and interests. What, then, are the arrangements that the principal can put in place that makes conformance by the agent more complete?

Further, there are commonly a range of non-governmental entities and actors who are affected by governmental policies and regulations. They too have the ability to act strategically in consideration of their preferences and interests. And some of the actions that are available to non-governmental actors have the capacity to significantly influence the impact and form of various governmental policies and regulations. The corporations that own nuclear power plants, for example, have an ability to constrain and deflect the inspection schedules to which their properties are subject through influence on legislators, and the regulatory agency may be seriously hampered in its ability to apply existing safety regulations.

This is a problem of social ontology: what kind of thing is a governmental agency, how does it work internally, and through what kinds of mechanisms does it influence the world around it (firms, criminals, citizens, local government, …)?

Two related ideas about the nature of organizations are relevant in this context. The idea of organizations as “strategic action fields” that is developed by Fligstein and McAdam (A Theory of Fields) fits the situation of a governmental agency. And the earlier work by Michel Crozier and Erhard Friedberg offer a similar account of the strategic action that jointly determines the workings of an organization. Here is a representative passage from Crozier and Friedberg:

The reader should not misconstrue the significance of this theoretical bet. We have not sought to formulate a set of general laws concerning the substance, the properties and the stages of development of organizations and systems. We do not have the advantage of being able to furnish normative precepts like those offered by management specialists who always believe they can elaborate a model of “good organization” and present a guide to the means and measures necessary to realize it. We present of series of simple propositions on the problems raised by the existence of these complex but integrated ensembles that we call organizations, and on the means and instruments that people have invented to surmount these problems; that is to say, to assure and develop their cooperation in view of the common goals.” L’acteur et le système, p. 11

(Here are some earlier discussions of these theories; link, link, link.  And here is a related discussion of Mayer Zald's treatment of organizations; link.)

Also relevant from the point of view of the ontology of government organization is the new theory of institutional logics. Patricia Thornton, William Ocasio, and Michael Lounsbury describe new theoretical developments within the general framework of new institutionalism in The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure and Process. Here is how they define their understanding of "institutional logic":

... as the socially constructed, historical patterns of cultural symbols and material practices, including assumptions, values, and beliefs, by which individuals and organizations provide meaning to their daily activity, organize time and space, and reproduce their lives and experiences. (2)

The institutional logics perspective is a metatheoretical framework for analyzing the interrelationships among institutions, individuals, and organizations in social systems. It aids researchers in questions of how individual and organizational actors are influenced by their situation in multiple social locations in an interinstitutional system, for example the institutional orders of the family, religion, state, market, professions, and corporations. Conceptualized as a theoretical model, each institutional order of the interinstitutional system distinguishes unique organizing principles, practices, and symbols that influence individual and organizational behavior. Institutional logics represent frames of reference that condition actors' choices for sensemaking, the vocabulary they use to motivate action, and their sense of self and identity. The principles, practices, and symbols of each institutional order differentially shape how reasoning takes place and how rationality is perceived and experienced. (2)

Here is a discussion of institutional logics; link.

So what can we say about the ontology of policy implementation, compliance, and executive decisions? We can say that --

• it proceeds through individual actors in particular circumstances guided by particular interests and preferences; 
• implementation is likely to be imperfect in the best of circumstances and entirely ineffectual in other circumstances; 
• implementation is affected by the strategic non-governmental actors and organizations it is designed to influence, leading to further distortion and incompleteness. 

We can also, more positively, identify specific mechanisms that governments and executives introduce to increase the effectiveness of implementation of their policies. These include --

• internal audit and discipline functions, 
• communications and training strategies designed at enhancing conformance by intermediate actors, 
• periodic purges of non-conformant sub-officials and powerful non-governmental actors, 
• and dozens of other strategies and mechanisms of conformance.

Most fundamentally we can say that any model of government that postulates frictionless application and implementation of policy is flawed at its core. Such a model overlooks an ontological fundamental about government and other organizations, large and small: that organizational action is never automatic, algorithmic, or exact; that it is always conveyed by intermediate actors who have their own understandings and preferences about policy; and that it works in an environment where powerful non-governmental actors are almost always in positions to blunt the effectiveness of “the will of government”.

This topic unavoidably introduces the idea of corruption into the discussion (link, link). Sometimes the contrarian behavior of internal actors derives from private benefits offered them by outsiders influenced by the actions of government. (Hotels in Moscow?) More generally, however, it raises the question of conflicts of commitment, mission, role obligations, and organizational ethics.

What the boss wants to hear ...

According to David Halberstam in his outstanding history of the war in Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, a prime cause of disastrous decision-making by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson was an institutional imperative in the Defense Department to come up with a set of facts that conformed to what the President wanted to hear. Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy were among the highest-level miscreants in Halberstam's account; they were determined to craft an assessment of the situation on the ground in Vietnam that conformed best with their strategic advice to the President.

Ironically, a very similar dynamic led to one of modern China's greatest disasters, the Great Leap Forward famine in 1959. The Great Helmsman was certain that collective agriculture would be vastly more productive than private agriculture; and following the collectivization of agriculture, party officials in many provinces obliged this assumption by reporting inflated grain statistics throughout 1958 and 1959. The result was a famine that led to at least twenty million excess deaths during a two-year period as the central state shifted resources away from agriculture (Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62).

More mundane examples are available as well. When information about possible sexual harassment in a given department is suppressed because "it won't look good for the organization" and "the boss will be unhappy", the organization is on a collision course with serious problems. When concerns about product safety or reliability are suppressed within the organization for similar reasons, the results can be equally damaging, to consumers and to the corporation itself. General Motors, Volkswagen, and Michigan State University all seem to have suffered from these deficiencies of organizational behavior. This is a serious cause of organizational mistakes and failures. It is impossible to make wise decisions -- individual or collective -- without accurate and truthful information from the field. And yet the knowledge of higher-level executives depends upon the truthful and full reporting of subordinates, who sometimes have career incentives that work against honesty.

So how can this unhappy situation be avoided? Part of the answer has to do with the behavior of the leaders themselves. It is important for leaders to explicitly and implicitly invite the truth -- whether it is good news or bad news. Subordinates must be encouraged to be forthcoming and truthful; and bearers of bad news must not be subject to retaliation. Boards of directors, both private and public, need to make clear their own expectations on this score as well: that they expect leading executives to invite and welcome truthful reporting, and that they expect individuals throughout the organization to provide truthful reporting. A culture of honesty and transparency is a powerful antidote to the disease of fabrications to please the boss.

Anonymous hotlines and formal protection of whistle-blowers are other institutional arrangements that lead to greater honesty and transparency within an organization. These avenues have the advantage of being largely outside the control of the upper executives, and therefore can serve as a somewhat independent check on dishonest reporting.

A reliable practice of accountability is also a deterrent to dishonest or partial reporting within an organization. The truth eventually comes out -- whether about sexual harassment, about hidden defects in a product, or about workplace safety failures. When boards of directors and organizational policies make it clear that there will be negative consequences for dishonest behavior, this gives an ongoing incentive of prudence for individuals to honor their duties of honesty within the organization.

This topic falls within the broader question of how individual behavior throughout an organization has the potential for giving rise to important failures that harm the public and harm the organization itself.

Gaining compliance

Organizations always involve numerous staff members whose behavior has the potential for creating significant risk for individuals and the organization but who are only loosely supervised. This situation unavoidably raises principal-agent problems. Let's assume that the great majority of staff members are motivated by good intentions and ethical standards. That means that there are a small number of individuals whose behavior is not ethical and well intentioned. What arrangements can an organization put in place to prevent bad behavior and protect individuals and the integrity of the organization?

For certain kinds of bad behavior there are well understood institutional arrangements that work well to detect and deter the wrong actions. This is especially true for business transactions, purchasing, control of cash, expense reporting and reimbursement, and other financial processes within the organization. The audit and accounting functions within almost every sophisticated organization permit a reasonably high level of confidence in the likelihood of detection of fraud, theft, and misreporting. This doesn't mean that corrupt financial behavior does not occur; but audits make it much more difficult to succeed in persistent dishonest behavior. So an organization with an effective audit function is likely to have a reasonably high level of compliance in the areas where standard audits can be effectively conducted.

A second kind of compliance effort has to do with the culture and practice of observer reporting of misbehavior. Compliance hotlines allow individuals who have observed (or suspected) bad behavior to report that behavior to responsible agents who are obligated to investigate these allegations. Policies that require reporting of certain kinds of bad behavior to responsible officers of the organization -- sexual harassment, racial discrimination, or fraudulent actions, for example -- should have the effect of revealing some kinds of misbehavior, and deterring others from engaging in bad behavior. So a culture and expectation of reporting is helpful in controlling bad behavior.

A third approach that some organizations take to compliance is to place a great deal of emphasis the moral culture of the organization -- shared values, professional duty, and role responsibilities. Leaders can support and facilitate a culture of voluntary adherence to the values and policies of the organization, so that virtually all members of the organization fall in the "well-intentioned" category. The thrust off this approach is to make large efforts at eliciting voluntary good behavior. Business professor David Hess has done a substantial amount of research on these final two topics (link, link).

Each of these organizational mechanisms has some efficacy. But unfortunately they do not suffice to create an environment where we can be highly confident that serious forms of misconduct do not occur. In particular, reporting and culture are only partially efficacious when it comes to private and covert behavior like sexual assault, bullying, and discriminatory speech and behavior in the workplace. This leads to an important question: are there more intrusive mechanisms of supervision and observation that would permit organizations to discover patterns of misconduct even if they remain unreported by observers and victims? Are there better ways for an organization to ensure that no one is subject to the harmful actions of a predator or harasser?

A more active strategy for an organization committed to eliminating sexual assault is to attempt to predict the environments where inappropriate interpersonal behavior is possible and to redesign the setting so the behavior is substantially less likely. For example, a hospital may require that any physical examinations of minors must be conducted in the presence of a chaperone or other health professional. A school of music or art may require that after-hours private lessons are conducted in semi-public locations. These rules would deprive a potential predator of the seclusion needed for the bad behavior. And the practitioner who is observed violating the rule would then be suspect and subject to further investigation and disciplinary action.

Here is perhaps a farfetched idea: a "behavior audit" that is periodically performed in settings where inappropriate covert behavior is possible. Here we might imagine a process in which a random set of people are periodically selected for interview who might have been in a position to have been subject to inappropriate behavior. These individuals would then be interviewed with an eye to helping to surface possible negative or harmful experiences that they have had. This process might be carried out for groups of patients, students, athletes, performers, or auditioners in the entertainment industry. And the goal would be to uncover traces of the kinds of behavior involving sexual harassment and assault that are at the heart of recent revelations in a myriad of industries and organizations. The results of such an audit would occasionally reveal a pattern of previously unknown behavior requiring additional investigation, while the more frequent results would be negative. This process would lead to a higher level of confidence that the organization has reasonably good knowledge of the frequency and scope of bad behavior and a better system for putting in place a plan of remediation.

All of these organizational strategies serve fundamentally as attempts to solve principal-agent problems within the organization. The principals of the organization have expectations about the norms that ought to govern behavior within the organization. These mechanisms are intended to increase the likelihood that there is conformance between the principal's expectations and the agent's behavior. And, when they fail, several of these mechanisms are intended to make it more likely that bad behavior is identified and corrected.

(Here is an earlier post treating scientific misconduct as a principal-agent problem; link.)

Corruption and institutional design

Robert Klitgaard is an insightful expert on the institutional causes of corruption in various social arrangements. His 1988 book, Controlling Corruption, laid out several case studies in detail, demonstrating specific features of institutional design that either encouraged or discouraged corrupt behavior by social and political actors.

More recently Klitgaard prepared a major report for the OECD on the topic of corruption and development assistance (2015; link). This working paper is worth reading in detail for anyone interested in understanding the dysfunctional origins of corruption as an institutional fact. Here is an early statement of the kinds of institutional facts that lead to higher levels of corruption:

Corruption is a crime of calculation. Information and incentives alter patterns of corruption. Processes with strong monopoly power, wide discretion for officials and weak accountability are prone to corruption. (7)

Corruption can go beyond bribery to include nepotism, neglect of duty and favouritism. Corrupt acts can involve third parties outside the organisation (in transactions with clients and citizens, such as extortion and bribery) or be internal to an organisation (theft, embezzlement, some types of fraud). Corruption can occur in government, business, civil society organisations and international agencies. Each of these varieties has the dimension of scale, from episodic to systemic. (18)

Here is an early definition of corruption that Klitgaard offers:

Corruption is a term of many meanings, but at the broadest level, corruption is the misuse of office for unofficial ends. Office is a position of duty, or should be; the office-holder is supposed to put the interests of the institution and the people first. In its most pernicious forms, systemic corruption creates the shells of modern institutions, full of official ranks and rules but “institutions” in inverted commas only. V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidad-born Nobel Prize winner, once noted that underdevelopment is characterised by a duplicitous emphasis on honorific titles and simultaneously the abuse of those titles: judges who love to be called “your honour” even as they accept bribes, civil servants who are uncivil and serve themselves. (18)

The bulk of Klitgaard's report is devoted to outlining mechanisms through which governments, international agencies, and donor agencies can attempt to initiate effective reform processes leading to lower levels of corruption. There are two theoretical foundations underlying the recommendations, one having to do with the internal factors that enhance or reduce corruption and the other having to do with a theory of effective institutional change. The internal theory is couched as a piece of algebra: corruption is the result of monopoly power plus official discretion minus accountability (37). So effective interventions should be designed around reducing monopoly power and official discretion while increasing accountability.

The premise about reform process that Klitgaard favors involves what he refers to as "convening" -- assembling working groups of influential and knowledgeable stakeholders in a given country and setting them the task of addressing corruption in the country. Examples and case studies include the Philippines, Columbia, Georgia, and Indonesia. Here is a high-level description of what he has in mind:

The recommended process – referred to in this paper as convening – invites development assistance providers to share international data, case studies and theory, and invites national leaders from recipient countries to provide local knowledge and creative problem-solving skills. (5)

Klitgaard spends a fair amount of time on the problem of measuring corruption at the national level. He refers to several international indices that are relevant: Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index, the Global Integrity index, and the International Finance Corporation's ranking of nations in terms of "ease of doing business" (11).

What this report does not attempt to do is to address specific institutional arrangements in order to discover the propensities for corrupt behavior that they create. This is the strength of Klitgaard's earlier book, where he looks at alternative forms of social or political arrangements for policing or collecting taxes. In this report there is none of that micro detail. What specific institutional arrangements can be designed that have the effect of reducing official monopoly power and discretion, or the effect of increasing official accountability? Implicitly Klitgaard suggests that these are questions best posed to the experts who participate in the national convening on corruption, because they have the best local knowledge of government and business practices. But here are a few mechanisms that Klitgaard specifically highlights: punish major offenders, pick visible, low-hanging fruit, bring in new leaders and reformers, coordinate government institutions, involve officials, and mobilize citizens and the business community (chapter 5).

A more micro perspective on international corruption is provided by a recent study by David Hess, "Combating Corruption in International Business: The Big Questions" (link). Hess focuses on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the United States, and he asks the question, why do large corporations pay bribes when this is clearly illegal under the FCPA? Moreover, given that FCPA has the power to assess very large fines against corporations that violate its strictures, how can violation be a rational strategy? Hess considers the case of Siemens, which was fined over $1.5 billion in 2008 for repeated acts of bribery in the pursuit of contracts (3). He considers two theories of corporate bribing: a cost-benefit analysis showing that the practice of bribing leads to higher returns, and the "rogue employee" view, according to which the corporation is unable to control the actions of its occasionally unscrupulous employees. On the latter view, bribery is essentially a principal-agent problem.

Hess takes the position that bribery often has to do with organizational culture and individual behavior, and that effective steps to reduce the incidence of bribery must proceed on the basis of an adequate analysis of both culture and behavior. And he links this issue to fundamental problems in the area of corporate social responsibility.

Corporations must combat corruption. By allowing their employees to pay bribes they are contributing to a system that prevents the realization of basic human rights in many countries. Ensuring that employees do not pay bribes is not accomplished by simply adopting a compliance and ethics program, however. This essay provided a brief overview of why otherwise good employees pay bribes in the wrong organizational environment, and what corporations must focus on to prevent those situations from arising. In short, preventing bribe payments must be treated as an ethical issue, not just a legal compliance issue, and the corporation must actively manage its corporate culture to ensure it supports the ethical behavior of employees.

As this passage emphasizes, Hess believes that controlling corrupt practices requires changing incentives within the corporation while equally changing the ethical culture of the corporation; he believes that the ethical culture of a company can have effects on the degree to which employees engage in bribery and other corrupt practices.

The study of corruption is an ideal case for the general topic of institutional dysfunction. And, as many countries have demonstrated, it is remarkably difficult to alter the pattern of corrupt behavior in a large, complex society.

A localist approach to Chinese politics

How do the domestic politics of China work, from 1949 to the present?

This question covers many issues: Why does the Chinese state act as it does? Why does it choose the policies it has pursued over time? How does the Chinese Communist Party work? What are the mechanisms of policy formulation and adoption in China? How do ordinary people and groups express their needs and wishes? What kinds of issues lead to mobilization and protest? How does the state respond?

One thing apparent in these questions is the polarity they presuppose: state and civil society, central government and the people. But in fact, of course, this polarity obscures a crucial stratification of levels of political power and authority. There is an extensive central government, of course, with substantial power. But there are also units of government at lower levels -- province, county, city, town, and village. Officials at each of these levels have powers, authority, and responsibility; and there are powerful stakeholders at each level who have the ability to pressure and influence their actions. Moreover, central government often wants to control and lead the actions of lower-level units of government. But this is a loosely connected system, and actors at various levels have significant freedom of action with respect to the mandates of higher levels. So there are deep principal-agent problems that are manifest throughout the Chinese political system.

This limited ability of the central state to enforce its will throughout the system of political action is what Vivienne Shue refers to as the "limited reach of the state" in The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic. Philip Kuhn documented similar weakness during the late Imperial period in Rebellion and its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864. He demonstrates the importance of local militias led by local elites in the response to the Taiping rebellion. And Elizabeth Perry describes the local politics of mobilization, unrest, and repression in the late Imperial period in Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845-1945. So it is apparent that political power exercised at lower levels of Chinese society has been important for several centuries. (I discuss most of these authors in Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science.)

Given this segmentation of political power in China, both historically and in the current time, it is important to understand the dynamics of government at lower levels as well if we are to understand the overall behavior of the system.

This is the task that Juan Wang sets for herself in her excellent recent book, The Sinews of State Power: The Rise and Demise of the Cohesive Local State in Rural China. She has chosen the title deliberately; she wants to demonstrate that China's overall political behavior is the result of a complex interplay among multiple levels of political organization. In particular, she finds that the particulars of the relationships that exist between three levels of local government have important consequences for the actions of the central government.

There are numerous strengths of Wang's treatment. One is her emphasis on disaggregation: don't consider political power as an undifferentiated whole, but instead as an interlocking system including both central authority and local political institutions and actors. Second, Wang's approach is admirably actor-centered. She attempts to understand the political situation of local officials and cadres from their own points of view, identifying the risks they are eager to avoid, the motivations they are pursuing, and sometimes the individual rewards that lie behind their decisions and actions. As she points out, their behaviors often look quite different from the idealized expectations of officials and cadres in specific roles.

This book focuses on intergovernmental relations among the county, township, and village levels of administration for the following reasons. First, in terms of central-local relations, these three levels, which constitute the CCP's local and grassroots reach, are the most remote from the national power center. Their actions reflect the capacity of the regime for agency control. Second, in terms of state-society relations, governments at the county level and below have the most immediate interaction with rural residents. Everyday interactions between farmers and government officials can reach the county level but rarely farther up. Third, historically the CCP's unprecedented success in bringing the party-state to the countryside was realized by building the county-township-village state apparatus and a cadre corps to staff them. This study is an account of how that came to be and, more recently, how it then unraveled. (5)

Wang believes that one of the greatest concerns of the central state is the frequency of occurrences of popular unrest -- demonstrations, appeals against corrupt officials, protests against land seizures and environmental problems. Local officials have an interest in containing these kinds of protests. But significantly, Wang finds that sometimes local cadres align themselves with protesters rather than officials, and even serve as instigators and leaders of local protests.

One of her central theoretical tools is the idea of "elite coherence"; her core thesis is that the coherence of interests and identity among officials and cadres at the local level is showing signs of breaking down. And this, she believes, has important consequences for social stability.

The formation and maintenance of intrastate alliances therefore require certain conditions to be present. Inspired by the literature on collective action and contentious politics ..., I focus on the following causes that facilitate the formation of collective action: common interests, selective interests (such as distributive benefits), networks (i.e., interpersonal interactions), and emotions among state agents across the three types of actors. (9)

The switching of allegiance of the village cadres is a factor that Wang believes to be of great importance for China's future stability.

Based on my fieldwork, an increasing percentage of collective action in the countryside after 2000 was mobilized, supported, or joined by village cadres.... The decline in administrative functions for brigade and commune cadres led to an excess of government personnel. Later, administrative reforms aimed at streamlining the communes and village brigades took place. Losing their power, grassroots cadres increased their loyalty toward the local community. Together with the revival of kinship groups, grassroots cadres spearheaded numerous illegal actions and riots. (31)

Key to changes in the alignment of the governmental system from central state to township or village is the issue of revenue extraction. If a given level of government lacks the ability to extract revenues from its area of jurisdiction, it will be unable to carry out policies and projects whether locally conceived or centrally mandated. Wang finds that there were crucial changes in revenue policies that fundamentally altered the political relations among levels of local government.

Important structural changes in the tripartite relationship occurred after 2000, which ultimately disrupted local state alliances. On the one hand, the central policy changes in the early 2000s recentralized fiscal and political autonomy and authority to the county level. The creation of a county leviathan reduced previous mutual reliance between counties and townships. On the other hand, sources of government revenue and personal benefits at township and village levels began to subside. The competitiveness of collectively owned TVEs against state-owned enterprises (SOEs) helped facilitate central policy toward further liberalization. The privatization of small and medium SOEs and TVEs finally bypassed collectively owned TVEs in market competition. (91)

One important topic that Wang does not consider in depth is the means through which the central state attempts to solve its problems of limited control over local officials. Contrary to Tip O'Neill, it is not the case that "all politics is local." What Wang describes in the book is a series of principal-agent problems that impede the effective control of the central government over local officials; but the central state has exercised itself to gain more complete compliance by its local agents through a variety of means (accommodation, threat and intimidation, anti-corruption campaigns, ...). The central state is by no means powerless in the face of contrarian local officials and cadres. The example of the village of Wukan is instructive (link). At the time of its organized resistance to corruption and bad officials, it appeared that villagers had won important victories. Now, six years later, it is apparent that the central state was able to prevail, and the protest movement was crushed. More generally, the central state has prevailed in the implementation of numerous large policies over the opposition of local people, including the dislocations created by the Three Gorges Dam project.

Wang's study is a good example of the dynamics of social power arrangements theorized by Fligstein and McAdam in their theory of strategic action fields (link). The interplay among different levels of officials and cadres that Wang describes appears to be precisely the kind of fluid, network- and relationship-based set of alliances through which power and influence are wielded within organizations, according to Fligstein and McAdam.

The Sinews of State Power is an excellent contribution to our understanding of how political decisions and compromises are reached in China in the current period. It will be very interesting to see whether the current efforts by Xi Jinping will succeed in resetting the balance of power between the center and provincial and local authorities, as appears to be his goal.

(Readers may also be interested in Guobin Yang's analysis of Internet activism in China in The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online. Yang's book is an excellent exploration of several important causes of popular dissent in contemporary China -- exactly the kinds of issues that lead to protest and petition in Wang's account as well; link. Also of interest is a recent collection edited by Kevin O'Brien and Rachel Stern, Popular Protest in China; link.)