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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.

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.

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 purpose of this paper is to set out an agenda for promoting collaboration between researchers in critical geography and critical management studies.

The paper is divided into two main sections. In the first, a detailed discussion of the nature of critical perspectives in the two traditions is advanced which focuses upon the nature of the two disciplines, the contested meaning of “critical” approaches and our relationship with the wider political world. The opportunities for collaboration are explored in more specific detail through consideration of the ongoing attempts to develop a new perspective on the current international pre‐occupation with corruption and anti‐corruption initiatives, which is both critical and multi‐disciplinary.

In trawling through the political economy of the development of an idea, corruption, the paper demonstrates, not just the part that a critical geographical narrative has to play in informing policy, but also the vital links that geography has to develop with the critical appraisal of business, business management and economics. The paper calls for the combining of insights from both traditions to better assess what is signified by corruption, how the concept is used in the business world and how to convince policymakers that, in this area at least, there is no such thing as a consequence‐free policy.

This paper's originality lies in: its bringing together of two distinct research traditions in geography and management studies; and the novel approach it espouses in relation to refining our understanding of the meaning of corruption and its place in broader debates about economic policy and broad patterns of development.

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.

This paper aims to address the relationship between critical and mainstream international business (IB) research and discuss the ways forward for the former.

The paper empirically maps critical IB scholarship by analysing more than 250 academic articles published in critical perspectives on international business (cpoib) from 2005 to 2017. The paper also includes a citation analysis that uncovers how critical IB research is recognized and discussed in mainstream IB studies.

The extant critical IB research can be broken into five main topical clusters: positioning critical IB research, postcolonial IB studies, effects of international business activities, financialization and the global financial crisis and “Black IB” and corporate social responsibility. The citation analysis demonstrates that critical IB research is rarely recognized in mainstream IB academic outlets.

This paper is the first to empirically map critical IB research and to measure its impact on mainstream IB research. Based on these insights, as well as discussions of the more critical voices within mainstream IB studies and the debate over critical performativity in critical management studies, ways of developing critical IB research are examined.

This article looks at the often complex and enduring relationships between wayfarers (itinerant homeless men) and religious and therapeutic communities, with an eye to examining some of the ways in which such ‘outsider’ organisations embody forms of support and care that in many important respects deviate from traditional night‐shelters and mainstream day‐centres. It aims to achieve this task in four steps. First, the defining characteristics (endurance, mobility, rurality, work) of wayfaring are described. Then I consider how vow‐based communities enable wayfarers, seeking a rest on their journey's way, to experience (albeit temporarily) feelings of acceptance and expressions of hospitality. Next, I illustrate some of these themes with a discussion that draws on ethnographic research undertaken at Pilsdon Manor, a Christian community in rural West Dorset that offers a refuge to people in crisis, and which has been materially and spiritually sustained by 50 years of close engagement with wayfarers. Fourth and last, the article points to topics that might be elaborated upon in future research on the culture of wayfaring and alternative homeless service providers.

After reviewing the literature upon the subject, the author observes :—It is apparent that the determination of sulphur dioxide in most foods, in the amounts in which it is usually present as a preservative, does not present any special difficulties. When simple titration methods, either direct or after distillation, cannot be applied, distillation into bromine, iodine, or hydrogen peroxide solution, followed by gravimetric determination as barium sulphate, will always give accurate results, provided that certain precautions are taken. The most important points are (i) to ensure that the whole of the sulphur dioxide has been separated from combination with aldehydes, sugars, etc., and has been driven over into the distillate, (ii) to prevent oxidation of sulphur dioxide during distillation, and (iii) to correct the results for volatile sulphur compounds oxidized to sulphuric acid in the distillate.