Fashions change: the hula hoop, the lava lamp and the Rubik's Cube were once the height of coolness. No longer. Some things, however, never seem to go out of fashion. They have an appeal that keeps them relevant. This can be the enduring attraction of popular brands or it can centre on the deeper drivers of human behaviour. Amidst all the ups and downs of life there is still plenty of continuity.

Corruption is a perfect example of that sort of continuity. Types of corrupt practice change, the mechanisms that individuals use when engaging in corruption evolve (at times breathtakingly quickly) and the challenge of working out how to counteract corruption becomes ever more complex. Yet even if the nature, extent, scope and opportunity to be corrupt inevitably wax and wane over time, the corrupt temptation remains an underlying constant.

The extent and scope of academic analysis of corruption has not always been quite so constant. Ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle may well have recognized corruption and indeed condemned it, but for significant periods of time corruption did not really feature on the radars of too many social scientists (Buchan & Hill 2014). It was acknowledged to exist, but a variety of factors prompted scholars to generally look elsewhere for their objects of study. There are plenty of understandable reasons for that. Corruption remains a classic “contested concept”; we know it when we see it, but pinning down its key attributes remains tricky (Philp 1997; Gardiner 2002). Corruption is virtually impossible to meaningfully measure (Heywood 2015). Corruption is generally a clandestine process that subsequently makes both quantitative and qualitative analysis tricky; what data should we use and how do we ask questions of those who are potentially involved in the process?

All that having been said, the last half century has seen academia wake up to the corruption challenge and indeed start to confront those issues. Corruption may well be hard to define, but so are concepts such as democracy, freedom, justice and a range of other ideas that occupy social scientists’ thinking. Grey areas notwithstanding, corruption remains in essence the deliberate abuse of entrusted power for private gain (Nye 1967). No definition ever incorporates every potentially corrupt act, but this one is still a perfectly acceptable place to start.