Drawing on 171 in-depth interviews with physicists at universities in the United States and the UK, this study examines the narratives of 48 physicists to explain the concept of ethical ambiguity: the border where legitimate and illegitimate conduct is blurred. Researchers generally assume that scientists agree on what constitutes both egregious and more routine forms of misconduct in science. The results of this study show that scientists perceive many scenarios as ethically gray, rather than black and white. Three orientations to (...) ethical ambiguity are considered—altruism, inconsequential outcomes, and preserving the status quo—that allow possibly questionable behavior to persist unchallenged. Each discursive strategy is rationalized as promoting the collective interest of science rather than addressing what is ethically correct or incorrect. The results of this study suggest that ethics training in science should focus not only on fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism and more routine forms of misconduct, but also on strategies for resolving ethically ambiguous scenarios where appropriate action may not be clear. (shrink)

Entrepreneurs of contested commodities often face stakeholders engaged in market excluding boundary work driven by ethical considerations. For example, the conversion of academic scientific knowledge into technologies that can be owned and sold is a growing global trend and key stakeholders have different ethical responses to this contested commodity. Commercialization of science can be viewed as a good thing because people believe it bolsters economic growth and broadly benefits society. Others view it as bad because they believe it discourages basic (...) research that ought to be freely shared without concern for profit. Taking a descriptive sociological approach, we posit that the stance of a religious tradition toward capitalism will help shape individual scientists’ views on science commercialization and test whether the religious tradition of scientists correlates with their attitude toward the commercialization of science. To maximize variance on the religious tradition dimension, we analyze pooled data from a cross-national survey of university biologists and physicists encompassing France, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Taiwan, Turkey, UK and the USA. We indeed find religious tradition differences. Hindus and scientists with no religious tradition are more likely to agree that commercialization of science “harms a university’s commitment to knowledge production” than Protestants. We end with a discussion on business ethics and the moral limits of the market as well as implications for entrepreneurs of contested commodities. (shrink)

Is the market civilizing or destructive? The increased salience of science commercialization is forcing scientists to address this question. Benefiting from the sociology of morality literature’s increased attention to specific kinds of morality and engaging with economic sociology’s moral markets literature, we generate competing hypotheses about scientists’ value-driven attitudes toward patenting. The Civilizing Market thesis suggests scientists who prioritize universalism will tend to support patenting. The Destructive Market thesis, by contrast, suggests universalism will be correlated with opposition to patenting. We (...) analyze survey data from biologists and physicists nested within academic organizations, which are nested within the following regions: France, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Taiwan, Turkey, UK, and the USA. Employing multilevel analysis, we find correlational evidence to support the Destructive Market thesis. Universalism is associated with anti-patenting attitudes, suggesting scientists expect patenting to have deleterious effects on science and society. We end with a discussion of this article’s implications for the moral markets literature, sociology of morality and business ethics. (shrink)

Drawing on sixty-one in-depth interviews conducted with commercial and noncommercial scientists at four universities in the United States, this paper examines why academic scientists embrace commercially oriented career paths in higher education. A central goal of this paper is to expand our descriptive and conceptual understanding of socialization in the academic profession by examining the explanatory power of differential association theory. Differential association theory emphasizes how patterns of behavior are learned through a process of interaction with different types of individuals (...) with varying ideas about the acceptability of a particular course of action. The results demonstrate that socialization to commercialism is an interactive learning process in which scientists learn definitions that are favorable to commercial career trajectories. Such learning is often necessary because prior socialization can either lead to unfavorable views of commercialization or shelter doctoral students from techniques of and rationales for commercialization. (shrink)

Scholarship on technological change in academe suggests that the adoption of instructional technologies will erode professional control. Researchers have documented the pervasiveness of new technologies, but neither demonstrate how technological change is experienced by faculty nor collect data that permit assessment of consequences for professional control. Drawing on a sample of interviews with forty-two professors at three research-intensive universities, this research makes two contributions to existing research. First, in contrast to existing depictions of technological change in higher education, the findings (...) reveals that academics perceive instructional technologies to have limited value in enhancing education and that technology use is rarely motivated by pedagogical innovation. Second, the study suggests that a relationship between technological change and “unbundling” of the academic role may be overstated. These data indicate that technological change threatens professional autonomy through exclusion from decision-making processes, increased workloads, and delimited teaching and research roles. (shrink)