An Investigation into the Underpinning Factors of Plagiarism among Universities in Iran

Abstract

We are living in a time where plagiarism is a highly critical issue in the publish-or-perish stage of academic life. There have been many efforts to address this issue by holistic socio-cognitive variables but they do not seem explanatory enough in context-specific areas. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the root causes of plagiarism in a specific context, i. e. Iranian universities, by offering a structural model to reveal the building blocks of this phenomenon. Setting the goal, we chose Corbin and Strauss's (2008) Grounded Theory (GT) approach, avoiding its paradigmatic cliché that a theoretical model emerges only from data without any pre-assumption. The research population included faculty members, PhD candidates and master's students selected from universities in Tehran, Iran. Open theoretical sampling and, then, discriminative sampling were used. Fifty-one interviews, two newspaper interviews, and three focus groups were conducted. The interviewees were accessed through universities' library and information centers. Taken together, 56 interviews were transcribed and codified. Lincoln and Guba's (2008) criteria were used to control the quality of the research process. "Indifference" to plagiarism is the central phenomenon and "cultural depositories" plus "governmental capitalism" were found to be the root factors. These two factors may lead to "Bureaucratic university" (Moodie 2006) as a context for the emergence of "research formalism", "uncritical education" and "scholastic habitus". All these factors, together with direct reflexive elements including bad exemplars, the irresponsibility of professors, immoral trade-off, unscientific evaluation, insignificant differentiation, and vindications, lead to "indifference". One of the research's implications is that plagiarism in Iran seems not to result from individual-psychological factors but from cultural, economic, legal and organizational factors. Another implication is that in the investigation of social or organizational problems we should take a look at the concept of normality. We explored the factors tending to make a problem a normal phenomenon. We also pinpointed the things making people indifferent to a problem, factors pushing abnormal phenomenon to the realm of normality, and elements constituting the origins of the current order of things which are mysteriously silenced and practically behaved.