Professor Mike Koehler
http://fcpaprofessor.blogspot.com/

Kind Regards,

Professor Mike Koehler

One happy result of your question is that we can finally jump from legal-moral-political thinking to anthropological-psychological thinking, and hopefully this will help us reapply our conclusions back into the public realm of corruption. Anthropological studies of private-public corruption have been published since the 1960′s and 70′s, involving reciprocity and gift-giving behavior. CORRUPTION AND THE SECRET OF LAW: A Legal Anthropological Pespective. Eds. Monique Nuitjen and Gerhard Anders © 2007, Ashgate Publishing Limited, Farnham, Surrey, England.

It is easier to accept non-value-judgment anthropological concepts and conclusions as we think about inviting potential B2B client representatives or colleagues to lunch, than when the client representative or colleague is a government functionary. Even though both business and government decisions are supposedly based on absolute rationality, we still recognize that B2B representative relationships can and should improve goodwill and create friendly, neighborly relationships. On the other hand, we are deeply, and often correctly, concerned that such relationships between business and government representative will lead, through bribery or undue influence, to government actions that are harmful to the public and to honest competitors. The purpose of the movement to ban (B2B) gifts and hospitality has some benefits, but it also clearly violates some basic psychological needs, which are easier to recognize in the private sector than when dealing with bureaucrats whom we prefer (also for psychological reasons) to be emotionless.

My point is that in business, not everything is business, and creating goodwill, friendship and reciprocal relations, in part though the ancient and apparently hardwired tendencies of gifts and hospitality, serve our basic human needs for recognition of status, self-respect and group membership. So we should fulfill those needs. Understanding those needs in business people, we have to also recognize that government functionaries are not mindless grasping bureaucrats, and that they also need human interaction with us as their clients, and, yes, that means that their basic needs are not satisfied solely by the appropriate application of regulations and internal memoranda. They need trusting relationships with the humans on the other side of the little window or the in-box. They need our recognition of them as neighbors and, yes, even as friends, if we expect them to buck the enormous pressures on them, from their hierarchical peers, superiors, and even their families, to demand bribes. If we want them to stop being mindless extorters, we must show them that we are not the faceless grasping public.

So, in response to the question, “Should companies have a single standard for both the private and public sectors, or can companies engage in a different type of relationship building with their private sector customers? – I would answer that there should be a different standard, but only because of the monopoly control held by government functionaries. On the other hand, we should close the gap between how we presently treat B2B representative and how we treat government representatives when it comes to respect, recognition and goodwill.