This paper investigates the meaning of an institutional understanding of corruption and aims to provide a better conceptual map of it. I will attempt to achieve two main tasks. First, I will try to shed some light on four features of the concept of institutional corruption and some of its advantages. Second, I argue that such institutional conception of corruption faces three main problems, which I label as the scope , false-diagnosis and essentialist problems. While being sympathetic to the institutional approach, I will try to show how the proponents of it risk using the concept of corruption in a normatively over-inclusive way.