The serious economic and social consequences of
the prevailing bribery practices in the global pharmaceutical industry
have put bribery practices under the spotlight of both researchers and
practitioners. This study seeks an answer to the question of how bribery
practices emerge and transform in an interactive sales environment.
Drawing on the Industrial Network Approach and qualitative narrative
methodology, the study describes the evolution of bribery in the Pakistan
pharmaceutical industry. A multitude of micro stories grounded on the
personal experience of 29 informants were combined into a macro story at
the industry level, and complemented with the secondary data. The findings
reveal that bribery practices in an interactive sales environment evolve
in a sequential and partly overlapping process of four identifiable stages:
early development, chain reaction, legitimization, and revision. Each
stage features a set of triggering events, factors of inertia, changes in
bribery practices, and actors involved in their implementation. The study
extends the existing research knowledge on bribery in business and
particularly in the B2B sales context by approaching bribery as a
socially constructed and evolving phenomenon. The findings provide
actionable knowledge for companies as well as policy makers to understand and
subsequently control bribery.