Center for Law and Behavior
This lecture will take place online. The Teams link, as well as the research abstract, biography, and registration details, can be found below.
Meeting ID: 328 312 081 438
Passcode: Ed3c9y
Up until a few years ago, institutional engagement with cases of research misconduct followed a mostly erratic pattern. Institutions, actors and processes dealing with research misconduct operated under a logic of extremes: Cases either received a lot of public attention and outrage, leading often to harsh punishments and always to severe stigmatizing effects for the involved researchers, or they remained invisible, with little to no light shed on the involved researchers nor the investigating institutions. Currently, however, we can see a marked shift in approaches to research integrity and research misconduct, a shift that in Foucauldian terms might be described as the transition from a pre-modern, absolutist regime of rare but harsh punishment to a modern regime of routine governmentality: Institutions are increasingly adopting more governance-oriented strategies for safeguarding good research practice, among other things introducing more precise and applicable policies, formalizing and standardizing their procedures, and investing more in education and prevention. This presentation will interrogate this shift in approaches to safeguarding good research practice. It will argue that this shift was prompted by a number of different developments, such as the ongoing digital transformation bringing about new technological means for social control, pressures “from below” in the form of different academic reform movements, and an increase in formalization and bureaucratization in science governance “from above”. Subsequently, it will sketch possible consequences of this shift, such as a standardization of research norms and changes to the power structures within academia.
Felicitas Hesselmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies and a member of the Robert K Merton Center for Science Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin. With a background in Sociology, her research focuses on analyses of the academic publishing system, including investigating research misconduct as a form of deviance.
Mail to: t.t.butter@uva.nl