1. Introduction

This book is primarily a conceptual endeavor, aiming to develop and refine a theoretical framework for an understudied topic: family corruption. It aims to shed light on an overlooked but fundamental social aspect of corruption. Although I use several cases from the academic literature and news media to support my argument, their selection was guided by the logic of theoretical sampling. This means they were chosen not for statistical representativeness but for their potential to illuminate the theoretical arguments being developed.

I use examples from many different countries; however, since they are not the result of representative data collection, it is challenging to evaluate the strength of cultural factors and determine how widespread these types are in a particular social context. Testing this model in different societies would be part of future research that is more empirically driven.

Family corruption happens when family members are involved in corrupt deals. In most of these cases, family bonds are not just incidental—they’re a crucial part of the corruption itself. Rather than treating family involvement as a trivial anecdote, this concept recognizes kinship as a core mechanism that can organize, sustain, and legitimize corruption within broader social systems. In other cases, corruption itself becomes a way of integrating family members. Challenging the assumption that family and formal institutions operate in separate moral spheres, family corruption shows how kinship-based loyalties can penetrate bureaucratic and market settings.

Both family and corruption can be analyzed as distinct forms of social organization. Family—the oldest organized unit of human cooperation—is the elementary form of a domestic, multi-purpose corporate entity. It is present in all human societies, with some common functions (Ahrne, 1990, pp. 57–58; Oberg, 1938; Wolf, 1956; Yanagisako, 1979). Given the potential risks and costs associated with corruption, the involved parties also organize their activities to enhance predictability and reduce the likelihood of detection and punishment (Jancsics, 2024b; Lambsdorff, 2002).

Organization generally can be conceptualized as both an entity and a process (Schoeneborn & Vásquez, 2017). As an entity (noun), organization refers to collective social structures—comprising individuals, objects, rules, roles, and organizational forms—that are established by people to facilitate the collaborative pursuit of specific goals (Scott, 1981, p. 11). There is a scale ranging from more fluidly structured social arrangements, such as hacker collectives (Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015), biker commuters (Wilhoit & Kisselburgh, 2015), and BMX riders (Smith, 2022), to formal bureaucratic organizations, including firms and governments. Organization as a process (verb) is a collective activity, that is, getting things organized. Individuals generally tend to arrange their activities to create social order and enhance predictability within social life (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2019). The interplay between these concepts is significant, as any organizing activity (process) inherently fosters a degree of structured social order (entity).

When the social organization of family and corruption overlap, family corruption happens. In that case, individuals who are involved in the organized process and entity of corruption are also members of the organized process and entity of a family. Of course, this is just a partial overlap, so non-family members can also be involved in the same corrupt transaction, while not all family members participate in it. Based on the members’ positions in the corrupt transaction, the actors’ motivations, and the coordination mechanisms, this book differentiates between five types of family corruption. Table 1.1 shows the types and the main dimensions, along with how they can be understood. Each family corruption configuration presented relies on a distinctive social arrangement and thus can be explained by different theories borrowed from multiple social science disciplines. In this book, I draw on theories from sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, organization studies, and public administration to conceptualize each type and its constituent elements.

I refer to the first type as family for corruption, where pre-existing family ties are leveraged to obtain illicit financial benefits, as family provides a trust-based social infrastructure that can facilitate corruption with reduced risk on the agent side. Here, the family bond is essentially a tool for corruption, enabling collusion that would be harder among strangers. While in this case, family serves the corrupt members’ self-interest, the second type, corruption for family, has an essential but often latent function in contributing to social cohesion within the family. Here, the family provides sites for many informal activities and gift-type exchanges on a regular basis, with the primary function of further integrating members and subgroups. However, some of these exchanges cross the line into corruption when formal organizational resources, not just private ones, are involved in such exchanges. Here, we can find family members of both the agent and the client side of the transaction. The third type, corruption for survival through family, is embedded in macro-level informal institutions, serving as a survival or coping mechanism within a defective formal system. In these cases, family norms facilitate society-wide social norms, and family members can be found on both the agent and client sides of the transaction. In the case of corruption for the family firm, relatives are affiliated with the same family-owned company that is on the client side of a corrupt transaction. Here, the formal organization is the primary beneficiary of a corrupt transaction, yet the family also benefits from the firm’s success. Finally, in the case of dynastic state capture, a family becomes so powerful that it can control political institutions, manipulate the law-making process, and channel vast amounts of resources to companies owned by members or quasi-members of the same family.

These family corruption types are also more effectively studied at a particular level of analysis due to their nature and their embeddedness in social life. Family for corruption and corruption for family are micro-level phenomena involving members of a particular family and their corrupt “business” partners. Corruption for survival through family is also a family-level occurrence, but to fully understand it, we also need to study the macro-level informal institutions facilitated by the family unit. Corruption for the family firm is a mezzo-level phenomenon, where the internal dynamics of a family-owned company are the most relevant factors for analysis. In dynastic state capture, families infiltrate the highest levels of government bureaucracies and private companies within a country, making it a phenomenon best analyzed from a macro-level perspective.

It is crucial to understand that family corruption can be seen as part of a larger category of social bribe, social-bond-based corruption, because it shares structural similarities with other illegal transactions rooted in social networks of loyalty and reciprocity—such as those formed by friends, classmates, neighbors, or community members (Jancsics, 2019). In each case, actors depend on trust and personal obligation to bypass formal rules, reward those who are socially close to them, and secure mutual, sometimes non-material, benefits. This overlap helps explain why patterns of nepotism often resemble other forms of favoritism, patronage, clientelism, cronyism, or particularism. However, corruption involving family remains distinct in several important ways. Family ties tend to be the most durable and all-encompassing: unlike friendships or neighborhood ties, kinship is lifelong, often inescapable, and reinforced through shared identity, daily interactions, and cultural expectations. Families also concentrate resources and opportunities intergenerationally, enabling the capture of wealth, power, and positions across decades in ways that looser networks cannot easily replicate. The moral imperative to protect and advance one’s kin is often framed not only as a choice but as a duty, making family corruption harder to stigmatize socially and more challenging to regulate legally. Unlike friendships, family relationships are formally recognized and protected by law (e.g., marriage, inheritance, guardianship). The same logic extends to family firms, which often enjoy legitimacy as private enterprises but function as extensions of the family unit. All of these grant family members additional institutionalized mechanisms to hide corruption behind formal frameworks and reproduce influence beyond the lifespan of individual actors. Thus, while corruption through family resembles other trust-based networks in form, it is uniquely resilient and consequential because of the depth, permanence, and normative as well as legal force of kinship bonds.