Nowadays, corruption has become an octopus whose tentacles reach all countries and domains. Still, as Lipset and Lenz emphasized in their article, despite this phenomenon's ubiquity across historic moments and cultural backgrounds, the issue which makes the difference consists of the degree to which this plague extends.
             Generally, when speaking about corruption, most people think of public affairs and omit the private dimension of the aspect. An eloquent example outlining the latter may be the incentive plan proposed by Sears, Roebuck, and Co., after confronting severe financial difficulties in the 1980's. The American company suggested a commission-based program which was expected to increase profits as a result of the employees' (both mechanics and sales advisors) effort to produce or sale more, in order to earn additional revenues. At a first glance, the idea seemed very efficient as it had the desired impact on revenues, but at a closer look, it led to major deficiencies because of the customers' complaints regarding payments made for unnecessary repairs. Therefore, if we were to detail Lipset's and Lenz's definition of corruption as a "misuse of public power for private benefits", we could say that in the Sears case, the company's management abused of the clients' financial resources and good will for increasing the profit through its own employees. Consequently, the main lever that facilitated the appearance of such a negative phenomena was the corporation' s personnel who, being obsessed with the poor financial resources, aimed at gaining more and consented to "steal" from clients as this was the easiest way to achieve their target.
             The employees' behavior perfectly molds over Merton's theory regarding the correlation between goals and means, on one side, and corruption, on the other side. According to his study, those social systems which are orie...