Corruption or Culture? Evaluating Elite Definitions of “Wasta” in Jordan

Abstract

Combatting corruption has been a long-standing commitment for Jordan, which had particularly heightened in light of the Arab Spring in 2011, with increasing demand for stricter measures and more transparency being voiced by Jordanian political movements. However, despite strong will for change, Jordan had done less to curb informal practices in public administration such as “Wasta,” which relies on its deeply-embedded notion of cultural legitimacy in circumventing laws and regulations. This article investigates perceptions of “Wasta” through a sociocultural lens that places emphasis on how culture and informal interactions can challenge mainstream understandings of corruption. Drawing on elite interviews with senior public officials and politicians in Jordan, it argues that conventional understandings of corruption that are typically grounded in western literature may be less useful for Jordan in tackling deeply-embedded societal practices such as Wasta. The study finds that corruption and Wasta cannot be conceptualized as one and the same due to intrinsic differences between their subjective goals. The study concludes by suggesting that new approaches in defining unethical use of social capital in public administration need to be developed in order for Jordan to improve its capacity for tackling the negative impacts of Wasta.

Keywords:

• Corruption
• elite interviewing
• Jordan
• Middle-East
• social capital

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the helpful and constructive feedback of his two supervisors; Dr. Jonathan Rose and Professor Steven Griggs when revising an earlier draft of this paper.

Ethical approval

Ethics approval was provided by the Faculty of Business and Law Research Ethics Committee at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Due to the nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data is not available.