Paper Number
ICIS2026-2941
Paper Type
Completed
Abstract
Information systems scholarship has produced sophisticated theory for how corruption persists within deployed digital systems — workarounds, co-optation, opportunity displacement, design-reality gaps — but has thin apparatus for the corruption that shapes systems before deployment: procurement scope, configuration choices, evaluation criteria, and replacement timing. We distinguish operational corruption, enacted by users at the point of system use, from constitutional corruption, enacted by procurement officers, vendors, officials, and donors across a system's lifecycle. Drawing on Ghana customs' three-decade digitalisation record (ASYCUDA, TradeNet, ICUMS), we show constitutional corruption reproducing as a stable rent-generation cycle masked as sequential anti-corruption reform. We argue this blind spot is structural, not incidental — produced by access asymmetries, methodological repertoires, and theoretical inheritances that bias IS research toward what is observable at the operational layer. The paper offers a consolidating typology, arranged across multiple dimensions, and a research agenda for studying constitutional corruption, with implications for research design, evaluation methodology, and theory development.
Recommended Citation
Addo, Atta, "Theorising Constitutional Corruption: A Typology and Research Agenda for IS Scholarship on Anti-Corruption Technology" (2026). ICIS 2026 Proceedings. 12.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2026/society/society/12
Theorising Constitutional Corruption: A Typology and Research Agenda for IS Scholarship on Anti-Corruption Technology
Information systems scholarship has produced sophisticated theory for how corruption persists within deployed digital systems — workarounds, co-optation, opportunity displacement, design-reality gaps — but has thin apparatus for the corruption that shapes systems before deployment: procurement scope, configuration choices, evaluation criteria, and replacement timing. We distinguish operational corruption, enacted by users at the point of system use, from constitutional corruption, enacted by procurement officers, vendors, officials, and donors across a system's lifecycle. Drawing on Ghana customs' three-decade digitalisation record (ASYCUDA, TradeNet, ICUMS), we show constitutional corruption reproducing as a stable rent-generation cycle masked as sequential anti-corruption reform. We argue this blind spot is structural, not incidental — produced by access asymmetries, methodological repertoires, and theoretical inheritances that bias IS research toward what is observable at the operational layer. The paper offers a consolidating typology, arranged across multiple dimensions, and a research agenda for studying constitutional corruption, with implications for research design, evaluation methodology, and theory development.
Comments
06_Societal_impacts