There is a wide range and interdisciplinary of academic literature surrounding the question of why people working in the public sector become corrupt. Various explanatory approaches provide long lists of variables that potentially explain the (non-)occurrence of public sector corruption. However, different disciplines tend to focus on different sub-phenomena at micro, meso, or macro level, without speaking much to each other. Moreover, beyond long lists of variables, there is little theory that seeks to model the mechanisms and processes underlying corruption. This paper advances the literature by merging insights form different disciplines to propose a mechanism-based model of corruption: the Corruption Hexagon. Criminology offers a mechanism-based perspective on corruption: the Fraud Diamond by Wolfe & Hermanson (2004), which models corruption as the result of a combination of four factors: the pressure to act, the opportunity to benefit from corrupt behaviour, the capacity to exploit the opportunity, and the process of self-justifying one’s corrupt behaviour (‘rationalization’). This paper refines and improves this approach, by complementing it with two further dimensions and theorizing the interplay of the dimensions. From economists and lawyers, we can learn that the context which pre-exists provides the starting point of any corruption. Moreover, corruption has a supply side, in terms of actor constellations of actions that constitute an offer of corruption. In order to understand how these factors work together, we can distinguish the circumstances of corruption from the actors involved in it, and the possibility of corruption occurring (passive factors) from the actual pursuing of corruption (active factors). This paper shows that the Corruption Hexagon is arguably better suited to explain corruption from a comparative perspective, as it better accounts for the (non-)occurrence of corruption, unites overarching frameworks of several interdisciplinary streams and provides a mechanism perspective that goes beyond listing explanatory variables. For empirical illustration, we show the extent to which active and passive factors interact at different actor and circumstance levels developing country profiles for corruption cases in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Policy and politics are founded in unique juridical contexts and include varied types of agencies. However, in addition to the more obvious contexts, each branch of governance holds within itself unique epistemic contexts or epistemic cultures. As is widely understood, we operate in a space of limited rationality – meaning that we understand that there are limits to human understanding. Thus, the epistemic space where decision-makers and officials operate is naturally limited. This article utilizes the framework of epistemic governance by Pertti Alasuutari and Ali Qadir. The theoretical base of epistemic governance stems from a constructionist and neo-institutionalist perspective and suggests that power in the 21st century operates especially through ontological, moral, capacity-based authority. They maintain that governance, as the ability to influence change, operates in the realm of epistemic conceptions.

In this article I will focus on a new level of political and administrative power in Finland established by a new reform of the social and health sector during the prime minister Sanna Marin’s cabinet (2019-2023) that established “wellbeing services counties” (WSC for short) in between the national and the local levels of government. The context of WSC’s presents a unique situation where the elected political representatives of the WSC’s are caught between political representation and public service provision. In addition, approximately third of all candidates were employed by the health and social care sector, which leads us to question whose interest will these delegates represent?

Variety of interests are at play at the new administrative level in Finland, which leads us right to question, how will the elected bodies represent the interests of the citizens in the cross-draught of various interests. We cannot demand for the epistemic cultures of our politicians, government officials and experts to not be at all limited, however, as ideas tend affect much of what happens within the field of politics, it is worth asking; what type of action or change is influenced by the representatives of the WSC’s and how does this position the WSC and its representatives in relation to ethical, political and democratic agency?

Professional expertise is based on claims to specialist knowledge; the professions organise and regulate areas of social life in answer to those claims and they have long held themselves out as a ‘scarce resource’ both in serving and governing their clients (Stehr, 1994; Karseth and Nerland, 2007; Buch and Jensen, 2018). The practices they devise to put knowledge into practice have always been bound up in technological innovation.

In this paper I examine the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques in a specific professional context: that of legal practice. Technological innovation in law opens up new interfaces between scientific method, legal knowledge, and law’s objects (Masson and Robinson, 2021; Kerrigan, 2022). Vast datasets in civil cases have required new organisational forms whereby lawyers work in multidisciplinary teams with data scientists and others. Supervised machine learning techniques are for instances applied to large datasets for purposes of disclosure.

Such practices match styles of probabilistic ‘knowing’ with rules and norms of legal integrity, specifically around proportionality and reasonableness. Data, obscured by scale, can only be apprehended through an entanglement with the techniques used to manage and explore them (following Bohr, 1987 [1958]). This entanglement configures lawyers in turn as “methods of inquiry” (Knorr Cetina, 1999, p.29) alongside data science tools; civil procedure rules and case management processes.

Having described this entanglement of technology and professional practice in law, I ask how knowledge interacts with professional practice in the AI era and I discuss broader ethical implications raised by the administration of knowledge. How are ideas, facts and things represented and transformed within institutions and practice? How does professional accountability shift and how is the administration of justice understood as knowledge landscapes evolve?