“A working class theory of corruption. Thematic analysis of workers’ ideas about corruption and its consequences”

PAULA BONIOLO; RODOLFO ELBERT

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Congreso; “Qualitative strategies to study people’s interpretations of social and political processes”, First International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry,; 2005

Norman Denzin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The objective of this paper is to analyze workers’ definitions of corruption and their judgments of its individual and collective effects. This analysis takes into account that people’s theories about society and corruption are interwoven with the beliefs and emotions that they relate to corrupt practices. Data come from 39 interviews with open-ended questions conducted in October 2004 among male and female workers of the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires. The paper discusses the methodological issues related to a thematic strategy of data analysis based on the systematic reading of the full verbatim transcriptions of narratives. The aim is to recover people’s voices identifying different interpretations, definitions and the theoretical concepts used by workers to explain corruption.