A Systematic Review of Articles Related to Administrative Corruption during 1380-1398 in Iran

Introduction :

It is about two decades that corruptions, especially administrative corruption, in different developed and underdeveloped societies have been the focus of researchers. In Iran, this issue has been criticized and explored thoroughly; however, a comprehensive review of the relevant articles and summarization of their results have not been undertaken in an organized manner. The purpose of this study was to summarize the results of these researches and provide a new understanding of this phenomenon in Iran. Administrative corruption is often defined as using administrative facilities for the benefits of individuals or groups, including employees and managers. Political corruption is also considered as a branch of administrative corruption, including any illegal, immoral, or unauthorized abuse of a public official for personal or temporary benefits. The present study first examined administrative corruption as one of the main types of corruptions and next analyzed political corruption since these two types of corruptions were closely related and most of the political corruptions were implemented and applied through the channel of the administrative system. The main questions of this article were as follows: 1) What results and findings have been reported in the scientific-research articles related to the mentioned topic in Iran? 2) How many studies related to the issues of administrative and political corruptions have been done in Iran? 3) Which groups are the target populations in the studies? 4) What research designs and sampling methods have been used in the studies? 5) What are the fields, backgrounds, and hypotheses of the research literature? 6) What are the research results and what reviews have been done in a general and comprehensive way?

All the scientific research articles, which had addressed administrative corruptions and had been published between 2001 and 2019 and indexed in the 3 databases of Normags, Magiran, and SID as the important scientific databases of domestic publications in Iran were included in this research. In the first stage, the total number of articles (N=410) published in this field in different journals were identified. In this step, some of the pure professional scientific articles and extended ones were removed. In the second stage, based on the criterion of being scientific articles, 310 articles were excluded from the review process and 100 scientific-research articles were retained. In the third stage, after reviewing the articles and matching their topics with the topic of this research, i.e. having the names of administrative and political corruptions in their titles, 21 articles were discarded and 79 articles were left for final screening. The method of this research was based on a systematic review and to this end, a checklist tool was used to collect the data.

Most of the articles on administrative corruption were written in the field of management and organization and those published in the field of sociology were scant. Thus, sociologists should present more articles and studies in this field; otherwise, we will suffer from reductionism in such a way that its social and cultural roots are ignored because attention has been paid only to its managerial and organizational issues. The lack of a theoretical field and structuring of the framework were evident in the articles on administrative and political corruptions. The spatial distributions of the studies conducted in the subject area of this research showed inappropriate distributions of the studies in different provinces. Considering the administrative, political, and economic concentrations of Tehran as the capital of Iran, greater numbers of universities and monitoring centers in it, as well as occurrence of most of the media corruptions in Tehran, it seemed that Tehran Province was a more suitable research field for researchers compared to other provinces. A systematic review of the current articles clearly showed inadequacy of the methods used in relation to the issue of corruption. On the one hand, the natures of corruptions were hidden. It was necessary to investigate this issue more in its natural environment with a qualitative research method, which had been used in only 5% of the total researches and thus, quantitative methods prevailed. In relation to political corruption, a small number of field works had been done. In terms of both the causes and methods of corruptions, most of the articles had emphasized economic factors (salary and wages) and cultural factors (ethics) and thus, the economic consequences of corruption had been emphasized. Most of the proposals were about social, educational, cultural, and economic issues.In total, the statistics showed the upward trend of the studies related to corruptions in Iran. The growing trend of examining these issues could be related to the growing number of corruption cases and their media coverage in the society. The levels of international sanctions had become more serious after 2013 and due to the need for secrecy to meet the needs of the country, the unfavorable economic conditions that had led to the widespread issuing of banknotes, reductions in the levels of domestic productions, sharp increase in the level of inflation, and as a result, disruption in the banking system in the country had become the basis for the emergence of a larger volume of corruption cases. In this situation, it seemed logical that the society had become more sensitive to this issue. Thus, the academic community should investigate this issue with more sensitivity.The results revealed that both agent-oriented and structural views in these articles, but the structural views were stronger in relation to the causes of corruption. They could appropriately explain why corruption had occurred in Iran. By referring to all the findings of the reviewed researches, it could be concluded that corruption in Iran was not an individual issue lacking moral qualities, but a structural inefficiency that exposed people to corruption.