Not cricket' : a 'Nexis of silence' over the cricket match-fixing scandal

An international cricket match-fixing scandal in 2000, the biggest crisis in the game’s 250 year history, disclosed corruption by many players and officials that cricket authorities had failed to address for a decade. Analysis of the case has revealed that institutional-wide behavior, conceptualized as the phenomenon of a ‘nexus of silence’, occurs in organizations and institutions where authorities decide to hide, rather than control, unethical behavior. This paper presents a substantive theory of a ‘nexus of silence’, developing current literature on organizational silence and organizational hypocrisy. Discussion on the applicability of a ‘nexus of silence’ to management theory and directions for future research completes the paper.