Observing Corruption. an Indispensable Requirement for Its Combat.

Within Social Systems Theory (SST), any statement about corruption can be examined through second-order observation, as with other forms of social communication. However, in understanding corruption as a concept and not as an object, it is crucial to refer to what is contrasted, which highlights the asymmetry and highlights certain aspects of the conceptual relationship. This asymmetry grounds the distinctions in the evolutionary process, suggesting a reflection on dualities such as Figure/Ground, System/Environment, among others. This paper focuses on the distinction between Transparency/Opacity to analyze how opacity is frequently interpreted as a sign of corruption, which, in our opinion, deserves a deeper examination. Beyond the academic field, this understanding is essential to develop mechanisms and policies that confront corruption as a real and unwanted social phenomenon. The creation of these policies needs to be supported by a second-order perspective that adequately supports these initiatives within a first-order framework, given that from the Theory of Social Systems, it could be thought that corruption as a social phenomenon is reproduced through communication, but it must be described in order to design devices and policies with an actionalist logic. In its empirical part, the work exploits a sample of documents and news with an inductive logic, trying to reveal how semantic distinctions about corruption are related to the social structure and how these distinctions affect communication and self-observation of political and social systems, ready to combat it.