The purpose of this article is to advance a new understanding of gender as a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction. To do so entails a critical assessment of existing perspectives on sex and gender and the introduction of important distinctions among sex, sex category, and gender. We argue that recognition of the analytical independence of these concepts is essential for understanding the interactional work involved in being a gendered person in society. The thrust of our remarks is toward theoretical (...) reconceptualization, but we consider fruitful directions for empirical research that are indicated by our formulation. (shrink)

In spite of feminist recognition that hierarchical organizations are an important location of male dominance, most feminists writing about organizations assume that organizational structure is gender neutral. This article argues that organizational structure is not gender neutral; on the contrary, assumptions about gender underlie the documents and contracts used to construct organizations and to provide the commonsense ground for theorizing about them. Their gendered nature is partly masked through obscuring the embodied nature of work.jobs and hierarchies, common concepts in organizational (...) thinking, assume a disembodies and universal worker. This worker is actually a man; men's bodies, sexuality, and relationships to procreation and paid work are subsumed in the image of the worker. Images of men's bodies and masculinity pervade organizational processes, marginalizing women and contributing to the maintenance of gender segregation in organizations. The positing of gender-neutral and disembodied organizational structures and work relations is part of the larger strategy of control in industrial capitalist societies, which, at least partly, are built upon a deeply embedded substructure of gender difference. (shrink)

The concept of hegemonic masculinity has influenced gender studies across many academic fields but has also attracted serious criticism. The authors trace the origin of the concept in a convergence of ideas in the early 1980s and map the ways it was applied when research on men and masculinities expanded. Evaluating the principal criticisms, the authors defend the underlying concept of masculinity, which in most research use is neither reified nor essentialist. However, the criticism of trait models of gender and (...) rigid typologies is sound. The treatment of the subject in research on hegemonic masculinity can be improved with the aid of recent psychological models, although limits to discursive flexibility must be recognized. The concept of hegemonic masculinity does not equate to a model of social reproduction; we need to recognize social struggles in which subordinated masculinities influence dominant forms. Finally, the authors review what has been confirmed from early formulations and what needs to be discarded. The authors suggest reformulation of the concept in four areas: a more complex model of gender hierarchy, emphasizing the agency of women; explicit recognition of the geography of masculinities, emphasizing the interplay among local, regional, and global levels; a more specific treatment of embodiment in contexts of privilege and power; and a stronger emphasis on the dynamics of hegemonic masculinity, recognizing internal contradictions and the possibilities of movement toward gender democracy. (shrink)

This paper explores possible connections between gender and the willingness to engage in unethical business behavior. Two approaches to gender and ethics are presented: the structural approach and the socialization approach. Data from a sample of 213 business school students reveal that men are more than two times as likely as women to engage in actions regarded as unethical but it is also important to note that relatively few would engage in any of these actions with the exception of buying (...) stock with inside information. Fifty percent of the males were willing to buy stock with insider information. Overall, the results support the gender socialization approach. (shrink)

In this article, the author describes sweeping changes in the gender system and offers explanations for why change has been uneven. Because the devaluation of activities done by women has changed little, women have had strong incentive to enter male jobs, but men have had little incentive to take on female activities or jobs. The gender egalitarianism that gained traction was the notion that women should have access to upward mobility and to all areas of schooling and jobs. But persistent (...) gender essentialism means that most people follow gender-typical paths except when upward mobility is impossible otherwise. Middle-class women entered managerial and professional jobs more than working-class women integrated blue-collar jobs because the latter were able to move up while choosing a “female” occupation; many mothers of middle-class women were already in the highest-status female occupations. The author also notes a number of gender-egalitarian trends that have stalled. (shrink)

This paper explores possible connections between gender and the willingness to tolerate unethical academic behavior. Data from a sample of 285 accounting majors at four public institutions reveal that females are less tolerant than males when questioned about academic misconduct. Statistically significant differences were found for 17 of 23 questionable activities. Furthermore, females were found to be less cynical and less often involved in academic dishonesty. Overall, the results support the finding of Betz et al. (1989) that the gender socialization (...) approach dominates the structural approach. (shrink)

Competition among scientists for funding, positions and prestige, among other things, is often seen as a salutary driving force in U.S. science. Its effects on scientists, their work and their relationships are seldom considered. Focus-group discussions with 51 mid- and early-career scientists, on which this study is based, reveal a dark side of competition in science. According to these scientists, competition contributes to strategic game-playing in science, a decline in free and open sharing of information and methods, sabotage of others’ (...) ability to use one’s work, interference with peer-review processes, deformation of relationships, and careless or questionable research conduct. When competition is pervasive, such effects may jeopardize the progress, efficiency and integrity of science. (shrink)

The online version of the original article can be found under doi:10.1007/s11948-007-9045-2.

This paper describes the use and analysis of the Simulator for Engineering Ethics Education to perform cross culture engineering ethics training and analysis. Details describing the first generation and second generation development of the SEEE are published in Chung and Alfred, Science and Engineering Ethics, vol. 15, 2009 and Alfred and Chung, Science and Engineering Ethics, vol. 18, 2012. In this effort, a group of far eastern educated students operated the simulator in the instructional, training, scenario, and evaluation modes. The (...) pre and post treatment performance of these students were compared to U.S. Educated students. Analysis of the performance indicated that the far eastern educated student increased their level of knowledge 23.7 percent while U.S. educated students increased their level of knowledge by 39.3 percent. (shrink)

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)

Efforts to understand gender segregation within and among science disciplines have focused on both supply- and demand-side explanations. Yet we know little about how academic scientists themselves view the sources of such segregation. Utilizing data from a survey of scientists at thirty top U.S. graduate programs in physics and biology and semistructured interviews with 150 of them, this article examines the reasons academic scientists provide for differences in the distribution of women in biology and physics. In quantitative analyses, gender is (...) more salient than discipline in determining the reasons scientists provide for gender disparities between disciplines, suggesting that gender may act as a “master status,” shaping the experiences of scientists regardless of the gender composition of the discipline. Qualitative interviews confirm this interpretation and reveal that scientists also perceive mentoring, natural differences, discrimination, and the history of the disciplines to be important factors. Results contribute to research on the relationship between emotional labor and occupational gender segregation conducted in professions such as law and nursing. (shrink)

This paper reviews the relatively small body of work in computer ethics which looks at the question of whether gender makes any difference to ethical decisions. There are two strands of writing on gender and computer ethics. The first focuses on problems of women's access to computer technology; the second concentrates on whether there are differences between men and women's ethical decision making in relation to information and computing technologies. I criticize the latter area, arguing that such studies survey student (...) audiences, that they emphasize the result of an ethical decision over the process of arriving at the decision, that they are problematic in relation to research methodology and that they are undertheorized. Given that traditional ethical theories largely ignore gender, I offer a gender based ethics in terms of feminist ethics as the best place to look for theoretical substance. The paper concludes by considering how feminist ethics can be combined with empirical studies that emphasize observation and interviewing in order to move gender and computer ethics onward from statistical studies of men's and women's ethical decisions toward more substantially theorized studies of areas in computer ethics which have gender implications, such as privacy and power. (shrink)

From a national U.S. sample of senior academic biochemists, ninety-four indicated that they personally knew of an incident of scientific wrongdoing. Among these individuals, less formal actions against an offending individual were endorsed when either actions were believed to have the potential to publicly embarrass the offending individual, or the actions might adversely affect the professional career of the whistleblower. These relationships remain significant after controlling for professional status, career age, and current level of formal departmental administrative responsibility. Study limitations (...) and implications are discussed. (shrink)

Each of the major engineering societies has its own code of ethics. Seven “common core” clauses and several code-specific clauses can be identified. The paper articulates objections to and rationales for two clauses that raise controversy: do engineers have a duty to provide pro bono services and/or speak out on major issues, and to associate only with reputable individuals and organizations? This latter “association clause” can be justified by the “proclamative principle,” an alternative to Kant’s universalizability requirement. At the heart (...) of engineering codes of ethics, and implicit in what it is to be a moral agent, the “proclamative principle” asserts that one’s life should proclaim one’s moral stances. More specifically, it directs engineers to strive to insure that their actions, thoughts, and relationships be fit to offer to their communities as part of the body of moral precedents for how to be an engineer. Understanding codes of ethics as reflections of this principle casts light both on how to apply the codes and on the distinction between private and professional morality. (shrink)

We argue that the stakeholder perspective on corporate social responsibility is in the process of being enlarged. Due to the process of institutional isomorphism, corporations are increasingly adopting organizational features designed to promote proactivity over mere reactivity in their stakeholder relationships. We identify two sources of pressure promoting the emergence of the proactive corporation -- stakeholder activism and the recognition of the social embeddedness of the economy. The final section describes four organizational design dimensions being installed by the more proactive (...) corporations today -- cooperation, participation, negotiation, and direct anticipation. (shrink)

Gender is one of the most frequently studied variables within the ethics literature. In prior studies that find gender differences, females consistently report more ethical responses than males. However, prior research also indicates that females are more prone to responding in a socially desirable fashion. Consequently, it is uncertain whether gender differences in ethical decision-making exist because females are more ethical or perhaps because females are more prone to the social desirability response bias. Using a sample of 30 scenarios from (...) prior studies that find gender differences, we examine whether these gender differences remain robust once social desirability is controlled for in the analysis. Our data suggest that the effect of gender on ethical decision-making is largely attenuated once social desirability is included in the analysis. In essence, the social desirability response bias appears to be driving a significant portion of the relationship between gender and ethical decision-making. We discuss several important research implications of this study. (shrink)

There has been relatively little empirical research into the causes of research misconduct. To begin to address this void, the authors collected data from closed case files of the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). These data were in the form of statements extracted from ORI file documents including transcripts, investigative reports, witness statements, and correspondence. Researchers assigned these statements to 44 different concepts. These concepts were then analyzed using multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis. The authors chose a solution consisting of (...) seven clusters: (1) personal and professional stressors, (2) organizational climate, (3) job insecurities, (4) rationalizations A, (5) personal inhibitions, (6) rationalizations B and, (7) personality factors. The authors discuss the implications of their findings for policy and for future research. (shrink)