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This introductory paper aims to serve a dual purpose. First, it seeks to trace some of the key elements of this emerging agenda in critical corruption studies and the major directions in which the field has moved since 2006, exploring some of the connections between dominant discourses of corruption and anti‐corruption and the upheavals which have occurred in the global economy during this period along the way. Second, this discussion also aims to serve as a contextual introduction to this special issue by embracing some of the common themes elaborated in the other papers collected here.

The paper presents a brief personal reflection on developments in the field of critical corruption studies.

The paper reveals some of the limitations of the mainstream approach towards corruption.

The paper summarises recent developments in the field and provides a context‐setting narrative within which the other papers that comprise this special issue can be situated.

This article presents a history of the visual merchandising of American firearms from the mid-19th century until the present day. Although the scholarly literature has investigated visual representations of guns in advertising and popular media, it has paid far less attention to how sellers have displayed these objects at or near the point of purchase.

Primary sources include frescoes, engravings and photographs, plus papers, advertising and illustrations in popular newspapers and trade magazines. These and other period visual data are supplemented by secondary sources from a variety of fields, especially retailing and firearms history.

Evidence shows that American firearms were merchandised visually by Samuel Colt at three world expositions in the 1850s, by gunmakers and retailers in the latter 19th century, by Winchester and Remington dealers in the 1920s and 1930s, by high- and low-end retailers in New York in the first half of the 20th century and by gun stores, auctions and shows up to the present day.

The history of visual merchandising generally has focused upon major department stores, their alluring street-front windows and their fancy interior displays. This research explores past and present visual merchandising of firearms by manufacturers and smaller retailers. To the best of the author’s knowledge, it is the first such history of the subject.

This chapter addresses the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s ethical principle of “First Do No Harm” from the perspective of racial equity issues that seemingly are not obvious to educators or often overlooked in the education of Black children. Two complementary points are made. First, many educators tend to view discrimination in terms of intentional and overt actions, but may not realize how they can and do inadvertently harm children during everyday classroom routines, instructional practices, policies, and curriculum that position African American culture invisible or abnormal. Second, even though teachers might not be cognizant or aware of institutional racism that is endemic in policies, instruction, curriculum, practices, and routines, their involvement in these practices represents an ethical problem and violates the “do no harm” principle. While most P-12 teachers and teacher educators agree in theory with the idea of valuing cultural and linguistic diversity, changing actions, and deeply-seated teaching practices and dispositions can only be accomplished by challenging and disrupting normalizing discourses in the policies that inform instructional practices, curriculum, and the pedagogies used in teacher education programs and in P-12 schools. This chapter suggests that teacher education programs use decolonizing frameworks for addressing equity academic and social issues for African American students. A discussion of institutional levels of oppression and praxis are included. Examples of barriers and promising practices are shared. An overarching theme is that early childhood teacher educators must unapologetically, thoughtfully, intentionally, and comprehensively advance issues concerning educational equity for African American students.

The concept of corruption is frequently represented as relating to social practices that violate established rules and norms. This paper, however, seeks to demonstrate that corrupt practices are often only possible because they in fact draw on existing institutional mechanisms and cultural dispositions that grant them a certain social approval and legitimacy. The paper aims to explore these issues through a detailed exploration of corruption in Nicaragua, which outlines how competing élite groups have been able to use different discourses to appropriate resources from the state in quite different ways, reflecting the use of contrasting mechanisms for justifying and legitimizing corruption.

The paper focuses on two key periods of recent Nicaraguan political history: that which occurred during the administration of ex‐President Arnoldo Alemán and the events that unfurled in the aftermath of a chain of bank bankruptcies that occurred in Nicaragua during 2001. These events are explored in the context of David Harvey's ideas of “accumulation by dispossession.”

In contrast with more classic practices of corruption in Nicaragua that have openly violated existing formal rules and norms but appealed to an ethos of redistribution and a historically‐specific concept of “the public” in order to imbue their actions with legitimacy, the corrupt practices related to recent banking bankruptcies engaged in an extensive instrumentalization of formal state institutions in order to protect élite parochial interests and to achieve “accumulation by dispossession” through appealing to the legitimating support granted by multilateral financial institutions.

The paper illustrates sharply the inadvisability of perspectives that narrowly define corruption in legalistic terms. Such perspectives focus exclusively on the state as the location of corruption, whereas clearly, in Nicaragua as elsewhere, corruption is a far more complicated phenomenon which crosses the artificial boundaries between private and public sectors. It also evolves and takes a myriad different forms which are intimately connected with the ongoing struggles for control of accumulation processes, suggesting a much more integral role for corruption within accumulation strategies than often allowed for in both orthodox economic and Marxist literatures on capital accumulation.

The Feldberg (business studies) Library at Dartmouth College has, since January 1986, been subscribing to Datext, a CD‐ROM database containing bibliographic, textual, and numeric information on over 10,000 American public companies. The data is derived from six commercial online databases and held on four optical discs, new versions of which arrive monthly. The ‘ondisc’ database is searched using software supplied by Datext, Inc. and running on an IBM PC. Searching is menu‐based and designed with end‐users in mind. Datext menus, screen displays, and facilities for further processing of retrieved data (e.g. on spreadsheets) are described and illustrated. CD‐ROM ondisc searching is compared with traditional online searching, and the currency of information on Datext is discussed. It is concluded that while straightforward repackaging onto CD‐ROM of single online databases may not be attractive, ‘value‐added’ products such as Datext, which collate information from several sources and provide facilities for manipulation of the retrieved data, will be greatly valued in particular library situations.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the international NGO Transparency International's (TI) role in combating corruption, focusing particularly on TI's response to the global financial crisis of 2008.

The paper is based on a review of scholarly articles, newspaper reports, and TI publications.

The paper concludes that TI's uncritical approach to the functioning of international capitalism limits its ability to understand and challenge the systemic causes of corruption. Further, TI's attention to the manifestations rather than causes of corruption leads it to unfairly identify corruption as a failing of the global South rather than an inherent feature of international capitalism.

The paper demonstrates how TI's failure to address the widespread unethical conduct which was at the root of the global financial crisis derives from the organization's partial, legalistic and superficial definition of corruption.

To provide a concise briefing on the potential advantages of executive coaching.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds his own impartial comments and places the argument in context.

Axmith's article focuses on the circumstances that prompt organizations to use executive coaching as a form of intervention to support the chief executive, and highlights the effectiveness of that intervention with a series of situations and how they are resolved. Brown and Wilkes promote the idea that coaching is the most cost‐effective way to learn – little and often. Johnson reviews the rise in awareness among US companies of achievements that can result from executive coaching and balances the benefits and drawbacks for a company of outsourcing or recruiting coaches internally, or even using a mixture of the two. Parsloe and Rolph use the findings of the 2004 training and development survey, from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, to explore the growing popularity of coaching, how its value is perceived and how it fits in with other methods of corporate performance and development activity.

Illustrates the situations in which coaching has proved its worth. Contains plenty of practical advice for any organization considering the implementation of a coaching program.

Provides some useful information about executive coaching.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the activities of tax havens in the global financial markets and explore their role in providing a supply‐side stimulant for corrupt practices. It aims to argue that the corruption debate needs to shift to a second phase in which the role of tax havens as supply‐side stimulants features more prominently.

Based on the author's original research into the practices and activities of tax havens, the paper explores the operational features of tax havens, with particular focus on their role in providing opaque and complex offshore structures through which illicit financial flows can be routed to disguise their origins, method of transfer and true beneficial ownership. The paper explores how bankers, lawyers and accountants create complex and opaque offshore structures to facilitate economic crime and impede investigation.

Despite severe limitations imposed by the absence of rigorously researched statistical data on capital flows into and out of tax havens, the paper argues that the available data support the view that tax havens have become prominent features of the globalised capital markets, and their activities create a criminogenic environment in which illicit financial flows are easily disguised and hidden amongst legitimate commercial transactions. The paper notes that effective remedies are available to reduce financial market opacity, but political will is lacking to take effective action.

This paper tackles a new and under‐researched subject. Drawing on the author's experiences of working on a prominent tax haven for a total of 14 years, the paper brings attention to the impact of tax havens on international development.

International business is under increasing legal pressure to ensure compliance with legal and other standards on corruption, and thus needs to undertake due diligence on corruption. This paper aims to emphasise that existing sources of information on corruption in specific countries are often limited for interpretative purposes.

Using a number of country studies that look at the causes and legal and institutional responses, as well as other data sources from international agencies, the paper suggests that no one indicator can substantively alert business to the levels and types of corruption in a specific country.

As a preliminary conclusion, the paper proposes that business must undertake more substantive work to understand corruption in a particular country. It also indicates that qualitative sources may be more productive than quantitative sources in providing information that is of use to business in undertaking such work.

The paper highlights the need to stress the need to study corruption in a country context.