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Communication dans un congrès Année : 2023

The Implementation of Scientific Integrity Policies in French Universities

Résumé

Due to their growing mediatization and role in political decision making, especially during the covid-19 crisis, scientists and scientific knowledge are increasingly subjected to scrutiny. This scrutiny is accompanied by normative discourses, some of which are negative, marked by doubts and suspicion about the value of scientific knowledge and the integrity of researchers. Some researchers, research groups, or scientific studies are accused of being fraudulent, dishonest, biased, or contributing to mis- or disinformation, by a range of diverse actors (scientists, interest groups, political organizations, pundits, etc.). In reaction to this situation, research integrity (RI) has increasingly become as an object of public policy in western democracies, from the 1980s in the United States (Guston 2000), and from the 2000s in Europe (Godecharle et al. 2013, Piccio 2016). While policies vary from one national context to the next (Douglas-Jones & Wright 2017), many countries have created legal frames for regulating RI, set up public agencies tasked with monitoring the honesty of scientists, and appointed RI officers charged with enforcing this norm in their respective local, institutional context – by building a research culture conducive of integrity, and handling alleged misconduct locally, through ad hoc procedures (Larrègue 2022). This paper studies RI officers the case of France, where RI has only recently been the subject of regulations. These officers have been appointed since 2017, in the context of a series of science policy reforms, in every university and scientific institution. As scientists themselves, they are given the mission of overseeing and judging their peers’ professional practices. This paper studies the way in which officers endorse this role and become de facto street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky 1980). How do these scientists implement and adapt the norm of RI? How do they deal with research frauds and other perceived forms of dishonesty and misconduct? What intellectual and material resources do they rely upon? Given the relatively late character of RI regulation in France, are officers aware of existing international norms, and how do they use them? To what extent is the norm of RI distorted by its local translation? How do these processes impact scientific knowledge production? To answer these questions, this paper relies upon qualitative data gathered through in-depth interviews with scientific integrity officers in France. The analysis focuses on the trajectories, representations, and practices of officers. In line with other studies (Jacob 2019, Degn 2020, Hesselmann & Reinhart 2021), it suggests that the norm of RI takes different forms and assumes different levels of leniency in different local contexts, as officers articulate it to their own experience, their disciplinary background, and their professional position and environment. These local adaptations blur the definition of “honest” science, and ultimately change the politics of scientific knowledge production in French society. References Degn, L. 2020. “Integrating integrity: the organizational translation of policies on research integrity”. Science and Engineering Ethics 26 (6): 3167-82. Godecharle, S., B. Nemery, and K. Dierickx. 2013. “Guidance on research integrity: no union in Europe”. The Lancet 381 (9872): 1097-98. Guston, D. H. 2000. Between politics and science: assuring the integrity and productivity of research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hesselmann, F. and M. Reinhart. 2021. "Cycles of invisibility: The limits of transparency in dealing with scientific misconduct." Social Studies of Science 51(3): 414-438. Jacob, M.-A. 2019. "Under repair: A publication ethics and research record in the making." Social Studies of Science 49(1): 77-101. Larregue, J. 2022. “Sentencing social psychology: Scientific deviance and the diffusion of statistical rules”. Current Sociology, 1(18). https://doi.org/10.1177/00113921221117604 Lipsky, M. 1980. Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Piccio, D. R. 2016. “ ‘United in diversity’: research ethics in European political science”. PS: Political Science & Politics 49 (4): 839-44.
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halshs-04332432, version 1 (08-12-2023)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-04332432 , version 1

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Thibaud Boncourt, Yves Mirman, Jérôme Michalon. The Implementation of Scientific Integrity Policies in French Universities. 27th IPSA World Congress of Political Science, International Political Science Association, Jul 2023, Buenos Aires (Argentina), Argentina. ⟨halshs-04332432⟩
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