Integrating Integrity: The Organizational Translation of Policies on Research Integrity
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Integrating Integrity: The Organizational Translation of Policies on Research Integrity Lise Degn1 Received: 28 February 2020 / Accepted: 13 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Responsible conduct of research and research integrity has become a key concern in both research policy and public media resulting in a number of soft law documents, such as codes of conduct at national and supranational levels. This article zooms in on the institutions that are supposed to translate these overall policies and guidelines into workable and recognizable structures for researchers, that is, the mediating layer between the policy articulations and the individual researchers and research groups; a perspective which has been notably lacking in the literature on research integrity. Document analysis demonstrated how research organizations translated and integrated demands for research integrity measures differently, and interviews explored how department heads made sense of these organizational efforts. Results show that department heads did not seem to use organizational policies in their sensemaking around research integrity. To a much larger degree, they used disciplinary norms, systemic pressures and other cues to construct the meaning of integrity. The heads of department articulated integrity as a “non-problem” in their own local context, rather, it was other departments and other countries that experienced lack of research integrity. This meant that the origin of the problem of integrity is located in the system, but to a large extent the department heads describe the solution of the problem to be in the culture of research. The implications of this dis-location and externalizing of integrity are discussed. Keywords Research integrity · Translation · Management · Policy
* Lise Degn [email protected] 1
The Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy, Department of Political Science and Government, School of Business and Social Sciences, Aarhus University, Århus, Denmark
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L. Degn
Introduction As pressures on higher education sectors and institutions rise across the world, new questions have arisen about how such pressures influence ‘actual’ academic work in scientific communities. Studies investigating how changes in governance arrangements, funding schemes, and competition have the potential to influence the motivation, mobility, and publication patterns of scientific staff have been quite common in the field of higher education studies over the past decades. However, since the norms and practices that influence academic work are also under pressure, researchers’ responsibility both outwardly, towards society (Owen et al. 2012), and inwardly, towards the scientific system (Steneck 2006) is being discussed heavily across the world. The present article is concerned with the inward responsibility, namely the responsible conduct of research (RCR) and, particularly, how this is managed inside higher education institutions (HEIs). RCR and research integrity have become key con
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