Outsourcing an assignment happens. To deter it from happening, institutions must consider whether some contexts for study make it more likely. Let’s call these ‘contexts for study’ the students’ ‘study-world’. The form a study-world takes will be partially determined by a student’s educational institution – i.e., through the spaces, communities and practices that it constructs. But a study-world will be shaped in other ways. It will also reflect the overarching culture in which the student otherwise lives.
Accordingly, when tackling lapses of academic integrity, institutions will usually attend more to the local study-world of teaching and learning – simply because they have the authority to orchestrate its agenda. Institutions will feel they can do less about influences from the student’s wider cultural context. However they should endeavour to notice and understand it. Doing so may provide insights regarding how cultural trends may be shaping attitudes and actions that define student integrity. The present section concerns those conditions of cultural context that deserve such attention.
This section is therefore addressing supposed causes of academic offences. However, research exploring causal forces has tended to adopt two rather narrow perspectives – neither proving very fruitful for efforts at cultivating academic integrity. First, there is a preference for ‘trait’ explanations of misdemeanours; psychological and demographic characteristics of individuals are identified as being predictive of student offending. Second, a favoured methodology has been multi-factor analyses, whereby measures of these traits or contextual conditions are correlated with self-reported or recorded instances of cheating (e.g., Yu et al 2018).
Such studies can help. But they rarely clarify how particular conditions of the student’s study-world can foster a readiness to violate proscribed norms. The approach favoured in the present section is one of identifying various ‘themes’ active in the wider cultural context: themes that may be indirectly shaping how students will orient towards academic integrity issues. To do this, we draw on our illustrations from our own research along with that of others. .
Our perspective is that ‘studying’ is a set of practices (including the completion of assignments) that is embedded in a substrate of culture. That culture comprises, first, something constructed and maintained by the institution in which studying takes place. But, second, it is also a matter of the prevailing cultural conditions within which that institution is itself located. For example, Rettinger and Kramer (2009) provide evidence that “witnessing cheating increases the likelihood of cheating”. In their study this applied to life within the local institutional culture. However, we suppose that it can apply more widely. Normalising dishonesty in the wider culture may also serve to stimulate it in the study-world.
The perspective is best illustrated with example themes – in fact those that will be taken up in the following pages are listed below:
- Cultural practices of ownership. Considering how students may bring culturally-distinct understandings of intellectual property that are in tension with those prevailing in their current study-world
- Student as consumer. Considering how the values in the wider societal context might be imported to influence responses to integrity proscriptions
- Ghostwriting as normal. Considering the ubiquity of practices in the surrounding culture, whereby authorship responsibilities are shared – with apparent approval
- Communication 2.0. Changing patters of communication that afford new practices around intellectual property
- Knowing: mediated and social. The hidden influence of changing theoretical perspectives on what it is to know something
- Neutralising a loss of agency. Institutional culture practices that risk depriving students of a sense of agency and, then, the possible ways in which illicit responses to that are neutralised
