What is a bribe? Sweden has a strict legal provision in how to handle crimes of corruption in comparison to the rest of the world. In spite of the strict law companies seem to have problems understanding the differences between what is legal and what is illegal. Bribery and corruption are not only counter-acted within the law but are also a frowned upon socially and morally. The common thought is that to accept a bribe is more corrupt than to offer one. Even within the law there are differences between accepting a bribe and offering one. It has been a crime for a long time to accept a bribe but the law against offering one is relatively new. The private and the public sector of the society both have to answer to the same law, but there are different rules for prosecution. On the company Kontorsbolaget AB the purchasing department works against the private market and the selling department against the public sector. With this study I found that there are differences in how the separate departments handle and understand situations that have connections with corruption. The most interesting difference was that the purchasing department were stricter than the selling department in their conception of corruption. This difference may depend upon the fact that the selling department is the one who offers the bribe, which both in common thought and in the earlier law not is such a hard crime like accepting one, which the purchasing department is exposed to.

The dissertation is written in Swedish.