Sara R. Jordan

Research integrity, image manipulation, and anonymizing photographs in visual social science research

Undocumented alterations to research images, defined in this piece as image manipulation, may represent a case of research misconduct. What constitutes image manipulation, particularly when images of human participants used in research need to be adjusted for protection of participant confidentiality? In this article, conceptual clarifications of the definition of image manipulation, image management, and research integrity are developed and adapted to the context of visual social research. Using these definitions, a series of recommendations for notifying human participants of image management techniques via the informed consent processes and a set of guidelines for managing images of identifiable human participants in research in visual studies research are developed.

Reporting ethics committee approval in public administration research.

While public administration research is thriving because of increased attention to social scientific rigor, lingering problems of methods and ethics remain. This article investigates the reporting of ethics approval within public administration publications. Beginning with an overview of ethics requirements regarding research with human participants, I turn to an examination of human participants protections for public administration research. Next, I present the findings of my analysis of articles published in the top five public administration journals over the period from 2000 to 2012, noting the incidences of ethics approval reporting as well as funding reporting. In explicating the importance of ethics reporting for public administration research, as it relates to replication, reputation, and vulnerable populations, I conclude with recommendations for increasing ethics approval reporting in public administration research.

The Study of Administration and the Persistence of the Legitimacy Question: An Essay on a Concept

Concepts, such as legitimacy, continue to be critical parts of the normative and empirical study of public administration. Yet, they are often under-defined either with respect to present scholarship or the scholarship of the past. In this brief essay, I offer an analysis of the importance of conceptual clarity for this generation of public administration scholars, as well as an analysis of the components of conceptual inquiry, using the concept of legitimacy as an example.

Methodological Balkanization, Language Games and The Persistence of The Identity Crisis in Public Administration: A Student's Perspective

This paper offers the perspective of a student on the problems addressed within this symposium. Topics of import in this paper include methodology, language, the composition of graduate education programs, and the challenges of student life in public administration.

Solidarity, Political Theory, and the Place of Social Benefits in Administrative Ethics

Solidarity is a value that rarely grips the minds of students and scholars of public administration, despite growing interest in the role of solidarity in creating conditions for the success of cosmopolitan democracy and global governance (see Pogge, 1992, 2014). Historically, the term conjures up historical memories of groups coming together to resist physical occupation by morally corrupt forces. The term also connotes individual choices to affiliate with groups far from one’s own identity position, whether distance is measured by a scale of race, gender, or political affiliation, in order to defend a moral cause. Outside of ethical theory, however, the term is only infrequently used to represent an explicitly ethical commitment. Yet, in this brief contribution to the minuet, I propose that scholars of administrative ethics ought to reexamine solidarity as a central ethical value. I contend that solidarity ought to be framed as an ethical commitment to govern the distribution of community benefits from publicly funded exercises that rely heavily on the participation of a few, such as clinical or social scientific research. What is the meaning of solidarity? According to Derpmann, solidarity is “an obligation originating in the membership to communities” (2009, p. 303). Solidarity is a principle to guide behavior that expresses, at its base, an agent-relative commitment of one person to another. Persons who value solidarity orient their behavior toward a specific community purposively and to the exclusion of other, more general commitments. Principled adherents to solidarity would disavow agent-neutrality and espouse the wish to devote their behavior to the good of their chosen particular community. This commitment contrasts with those drawn from an agent-neutral ethic, such as strict utilitarianism, which requires that the individual espousing utilitarianism be willing to calculate the utility of acts and consequences for all persons equally, counting each as one and no one as more than one. As a term, solidarity evokes agent-relative commitments that are different from the universalist commitments of utilitarianism, but the varieties of solidarity, and this may be why the term is so decidedly slippery, grow out of both foundationalist and antifoundationalist soil. A foundationalist ethicist holds that there are immutable intrinsic values that can be known with a high degree of certainty by any actor willing to investigate ethics as such. While arguing the epistemic origins of foundationalist ethics is beyond the remit of this article, that the foundationalist holds that there is an intersubjectively

Speaking Like Statesmen or Scientists: Differentiating Congressional and Administrative Views on Data

ABSTRACT Do legislators and executives speak of data the same way when speaking about public sector data? Public management scholarship and public performance policies often emphasize data-driven decision making as the path to making government efficient and effective. Whether the public policy makers mean the same thing when they speak about data in discussions of data-driven performance and decision making is unknown. In this article, the authors present an analysis of the language of data in conversations about government performance. Two frameworks are identified for the role of data in public performance—the statesman’s and the scientist’s. A corpus-level analysis of over 30 years of government documents is used to demonstrate the differences between these two approaches. This research builds consciously on the work of previous scholars seeking to map the nuances of data-driven performance management policies in the U.S. federal government.

Playing it safe: toy safety and conformity assessment in Europe and the United States

Do similar standards of product safety lead to similar levels of consumer safety? In 2007, more than 19 million toys worldwide were recalled for violations of applicable safety standards. Following these recalls, both the EU and the US instituted new policies governing children’s products: the US Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA) and EU 2009 Toy Safety Directive. The relevant toy safety standards that emerged from this legislation, such as ISO (ISO 8124), US (ASTM F963), and EU (EN 71) standards are comparable in terms of their language but not their results. Using a data set profiling implementation of EU and US conformity assessment systems for determination of product safety for toys manufactured in China, we find that weighted recall totals for violative products are between 10 and 20 times higher in the EU than the US. This suggests that differences in the implementation of global standards result in more unsafe products initially reaching consumers in some locations. Points for practitioners Government officials should avoid assuming that safety begins and ends with international standards. The process for verifying that products meet established standards is as important as the standards themselves, and it can have significant economic and safety impacts The choice of conformity assessment system for a given product or market is driven by many considerations, including appetite for risk, political institutions and practice, and variations in national-level administrative capacity. Discussions on the merits of any conformity assessment system for a given market, or product, should incorporate all of these factors.

Clarifying the concept of the “Social” in risk assessments for human subjects research

ABSTRACT International guidelines for the conduct of research with human participants, such as those put forth by the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS, 2002), recommend that research review committees account for social risk and benefits to society in their review of proposed research. What do the concepts of the “social” and “society” mean in the context of the review of human participants research? Here we analyze concepts of social and society to define the terms: social harm, social risk, social benefit, and benefits to society. We argue that use of these terms invite more questions than answers and beg for difficult empirical research to determine the nature, likelihood, and magnitude of this category of risk and benefit. Until more research is done and these questions are answered, we advise reviewers to adopt an attitude of provisionalism and caution in their review of specifically “social” risks and benefits and “benefits to society.”

Responsible Conduct of Research Training for Engineers: Adopting Research Ethics Training for Engineering Graduate Students

Two key challenges haunt ethics teaching: relevance and universalism. Demands for relevance, whether relevance is judged based upon association to a local standard (e.g., national professional association code) or to the specific demands of a professional workplace, pull the teaching and study of ethics towards the particular. Calls for a global standard pull ethics teaching and scholarship toward high level principles that can be difficult to justify at a level students and grants funding agencies find applicable. Particularity and specificity complicate demands for global standards or universal norms, while exposition at a universalized level frustrate application in a relevant context. This chapter investigates the structure of research ethics as exemplified in the Singapore Statement, then turns to a case study of RCR students in Hong Kong to provide an example of RCR receptivity among students in engineering and other fields.

The ethics of my counterpart: public service ethics in Chinese philosophy

China is rising. As China ascends in power, it is likely that ‘Western’ administrators – American and European, in particular – will find that they must interact with Chinese administrators more and more. In this article, I offer readers a brief glimpse into Chinese administrative ethics through an investigation of two forms of Chinese philosophy – Confucianism and Taoism. In addition to reviewing these philosophies, I derive some consequences for a public service ethic that lies between the East and the West. In particular, this article includes some recommendations for the managerial implications of these two philosophies in the context of increased political and administrative connections between the West and China.