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.
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The Danish higher education system is a binary system, comprising universities providing academic educations (at bachelor and master level) and university colleges providing profession- and vocational-oriented educations. Since 2014, the university colleges are required to perform “practice-related” and applied research and development, and are therefore now a more integrated part of the research system in Denmark.
The University Colleges were not included in this part of the study. However, further interviews are planned to explore the variation between these institutions.
The policy mapping is also presented in the following working paper: Degn (2017).
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This work was supported by the Ministry of Higher Education and Science, Denmark [Grant ID: 6183-00003B].
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Degn, L. Integrating Integrity: The Organizational Translation of Policies on Research Integrity. Sci Eng Ethics 26, 3167–3182 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-020-00262-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-020-00262-w