The last chapter looked at the history of corruption as an idea, but it skirted around the vexed question of what precisely corruption is. We know that the meaning of the term has changed over time, and that traditionally this meaning had a lot to do with morals and ethics. We also know that when morals are brought into the debate – as they arguably have to be – we are faced with the tricky conundrum of right and wrong as well as the inherent challenge of subjectivity. This particular set of challenges has often made conducting empirical research difficult, which is the main reason that until the 1990s corruption remained a subject of largely secondary interest in academia.

Paradoxically, the problem of pinning down a definition of corruption led to a plethora of potential definitions developing. What you do not specifically explain will often be interpreted in ways that suit those doing the interpreting. Nevertheless, in the world of Western policy-making, at least, this has not prevented an emerging agreement on corruption’s definition from developing (see below). Be that as it may, corruption remains “a capacious, changing and contested term” (Knights 2016: 3).This chapter unpacks the most important of these definitional dimensions, identifying not just the strengths and weaknesses of the definitions used but also how useful they are for understanding real-world corruption challenges.

One part of that definitional challenge is undoubtedly linguistic. On the one hand, this comes from the way that the term corruption is used in public discourse. The term is now often utilized as a stick with which to beat political opponents, and it frequently appears to be more of a term of abuse than a statement with any basis in reality. Indeed, there are times when it appears to be fine to label virtually anything you do not like as corrupt. Whether it is Donald Trump claiming that Hillary Clinton may be the “most corrupt person ever” to run for president, or tabloid newspapers bemoaning the “corruption of the political class”, we are in danger of turning the term into an empty box, into which you can simply place things of which you do not approve (Gambino 2016; McKinstry 2010).