Essays on the oil and gas industry in Brazil: institutional deviances in petrobras

Abstract

This dissertation is based on three interconnected chapters studying corruption in organisations and societies. Chapter two explores the growing body of work within the discipline of management on corruption and related issues, such as corporate misconduct and deviant behaviours. The review begins by building upon extant work in management, economics and sociology to take stock of extant work on analysing corruption, while identifying innovative ways to theorise and offer avenues for further research in the field of management. I advocate integrating rational and socio-cultural views and spanning micro and macro levels of analysis to improve our overall understanding. Ultimately, I aim to shed further light on corrupt practices and behaviours and propose a new research programme that includes a multilevel perspective on corruption. Chapter three focuses on corrupt nonmarket strategies adopted by immoral companies. I examine how different private organisations can maintain and sustain and enact corrupt nonmarket strategies over many years. Drawing on the theoretical lens of non-market strategies and institutional theory, I analyse data from the Car Wash operation; a corruption investigation that began in Brazil in 2014 regarding the oil and gas company Petrobras. I contribute to non-market strategy literature by identifying mechanisms of corrupt maintenance, identify the illegal institutional anchors of trust and by doing so, offer insights on how to fight institutionalised corruption. Chapter four focuses on the role of the context and how purposeful actors can disrupt even deeply entrenched practices. We continue to analyse the Car Wash Operation and its antecedents, the contextual enablers of change and the institutional influence of operation agents. We develop a model to explain how actors seeking institutional change are contextually empowered and their efforts yield breakthroughs, but only at certain points in time when the context is ‘ripe’ for change. Our findings contribute to both institutional theory and corruption literature