Punishing crimes of the mind: Sanctions for scientific misconduct as a case for the cultural theory of punishment

Hesselmann, Felicitas

doi:10.1177/1362480618756365

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Many phrases used in this sample, such as “misrepresentation of authorship” (ZBW20), “improper authorship in its writing” (WOS64), or “inappropriate data arrangements” (WOS33), are highly unspecific and do not identify the reasons for retraction in an unequivocal way. They also contribute to blurring the line between misconduct and error (see also Hesselmann, 2018).…”

Section: Results and Conceptual Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Science Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry? Apologies for Scientific Misconduct

Hesselmann

Reinhart

2019

Science Communication

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Retractions of journal articles exclude fraudulent or erroneous research from legitimate science and perform boundary work. Analyzing retractions from different disciplines and focusing on their apologetic aspects, we find that these apologies shift between openly addressing emotional, normative, and social themes and concealing them in a more scientific style of communication. Their boundary work remains highly ambivalent: They alternate between scientific and nonscientific forms of speaking, portray unstable patterns of control and coercion, and avoid drawing a boundary between legitimate and nonlegitimate science. In line with the hypothetical nature of scientific knowledge, retractions thus leave boundary making to the future.

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Section: Results and Conceptual Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Science Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry? Apologies for Scientific Misconduct

Hesselmann

Reinhart

2019

Science Communication

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“…First, individual perpetrators are seen as morally unfit scientists ('bad apples'). Second, whole groups are seen as a threat to the moral fabric of science and are, thus, stigmatized; postmodernism or researchers from non-western countries are frequent targets for such labelling (Hesselmann, 2018b(Hesselmann, , 2018a. Third, there is a generalized notion of systemic issues that decrease the overall quality of research; not unlike the Ioannidis example above (Hesselmann et al, 2017;Reinhart, 2019, 2020).…”

Section: I M I N I S H I N G T R U S T a N X I E T Y A N D F At A L I S M A S B A C K G R O U N D E M O T I O N Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Open Science as an Engine of Anxiety: How Scientists Promote and Defend the Visibility of Their Digital Selves, while Becoming Fatalistic about Academic Careers

Reinhart¹

2021

Preprint

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Science, as a professional field, produces extreme forms of inequality.Most young and aspiring scientists who sucessfully complete their tertiaryeducation and go on to train as a PhD or doctoral student, never make it tobecoming a 'working scientist'. Most of those who do become postdocs,never make it to becoming a tenured professor. And most of those whobecome professors, never make it to becoming famous in their field,receiving prestigeous prices or even being highly cited. Careers in scienceare a trial of attrition, where only the best (or the luckiest?) prevail in thecompetition for careers. Scientists themselves tend to believe, generally, thatscience is a meritocracy, with the most productive being selected along thesecareer junctures. While there is no logical contradiction between meritocracyand competitivity and while many scientists believe that the meritocraticideal explains and justifies the high competitivity sufficiently, there is at leastsome ambivalence. Robert K. Merton (1973) noted the general ambivalencethat results from the interplay between the normative structure and thereward system in science. Since then it is not just the increased competitivityand the rising inequalities, that have changed; more importantely, it is theway visibility regimes have been changing over the last 20 years, mainly dueto digital communication, that has forced scientists to acknowledge theambivalence inherent in the meritocratic narrative. This essay is an attemptto explore this ambivalence, which, as of yet, has no ready-made description.A first way of describing this ambivalence may start from a series offirst-person accounts, empirical research results, and theoretical insights, thatcome from an emerging literature on the subject. Science as an “engine ofanxiety” (Espeland and Sauder, 2016; Fochler, Felt and Müller, 2016),“imposter syndrome” (Loveday, 2018; Grey, 2020; Keogh, 2020), “publish-or-perish” (Dalen and Henkens, 2012; Rijcke et al., 2016), or just“ambivalence” (Flink & Simon 2014) are some of the terms used to describea perceived shift in research cultures, where meritocracy and competitivityhave lost balance. This literature refers to processes of quantification(Desrosières, 1998), medialization (Weingart, 1999), projectification (Torka,2009, 2018; Franssen et al., 2018), or to significant shifts from blockfunding to temporary and third-party-funding. The result of theseoverlapping and sometimes mutually reinforcing processes is felt byindividual researchers as a source of anxiety, leading to feelings ofinadequacy, and, ultimately, to the belief that science may be more of alottery than a meritocracy (Loveday, 2018; Reinhart and Schendzielorz,2020). It is easy to dismiss these feelings as the reactions of those who havelost out in the competition for recognition. That would, however, bepremature for two reasons. First, these feelings may still be a reaction to ashift in research cultures, irrespective of whether this reaction is deemedadequate or not. Second, these feelings and beliefs have become a relevantforce in movements and policy initiatives that push for such diverse goals asmore reproducibility of research results, more gender equality and diversityin academia, or more careful use of quantitative indicators in the (self-)governance of science. To address these issues, my argument in this essay will ,first, describe the ambivalence in a current understanding of science both as competitiveand meritocratic, by relating it to changes in scientific visibility regimes.Second, I will briefly discuss the theoretical concepts that emerge from sucha description, mainly 'visibility', 'background emotions', and 'digital selves'.Third, I will lay out one strategy that highly visible individual scientistsseem to employ, to deal with the ambivalence of these new visibilityregimes. Finally, forth, I will discuss what the ensuing politics in sciencemight be, that result collectively from such individual strategies. Theargument will result in a paradox: The current visibility regime in science, resulting from digital communication and online platforms, leads toexcitement among scientists over the possibilities for attaininghypervisibility. Increasingly, however, the excitement of fashioning digitalselves is taken over by anxiety over being exposed to the possibility ofnegative, reputation threatening attention. Pardoxically, anticipating andpreventing such a possibility leads to even more vigorous fashioning ofdigital selves, for which the open science movement provides the mostsuitable policy narrative. In short: to protect themselves from the possiblenegative effects of visibility, scientists push for more visibility; whilebecoming fatalistic about their careers and about science policy.

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“…In either case, they are an important format for communicating details about investigations to a wider public and hence to contribute to, or to cloud, the transparency of those processes. As has been shown elsewhere (Hesselmann, 2018;Hesselmann and Reinhart, 2019), retraction notices are generally short on details and offer only minimal information about the scientific problem under investigation and on the investigations themselves, often creating ambiguity instead of providing clarification. Building on the struggles with institutional visibility identified in the interviews, this analysis focuses on the question of how institutional actors and their respective activities and responsibilities are made visible (or concealed) in retraction notices.…”

Section: Analysis Ii: Retractionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cycles of invisibility: The limits of transparency in dealing with scientific misconduct

Hesselmann

Reinhart

2020

Soc Stud Sci

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Sanctions for plagiarism, falsification and fabrication in research are primarily symbolic. This paper investigates sanctions for scientific misconduct and their preceding investigation processes as visible and legitimate symbols. Using three different data sources (retraction notices, expert interviews, and a survey of scientists), we show that sanctions for scientific misconduct operate within a cycle of visibility, in which sanctions are highly visible, while investigation and decision-making procedures remain mostly invisible. This corresponds to high levels of acceptance of sanctions in the scientific community, but a low acceptance of the respective authorities. Such a punitiveness in turn exacerbates confidentiality concerns, so that authorities become even more secretive. We argue that punitiveness towards scientific misconduct is driven by such a cycle of invisibility.

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Punishing crimes of the mind: Sanctions for scientific misconduct as a case for the cultural theory of punishment

Cited by 7 publications

References 59 publications

Science Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry? Apologies for Scientific Misconduct

Science Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry? Apologies for Scientific Misconduct

Open Science as an Engine of Anxiety: How Scientists Promote and Defend the Visibility of Their Digital Selves, while Becoming Fatalistic about Academic Careers

Cycles of invisibility: The limits of transparency in dealing with scientific misconduct

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