Measuring Academic Corruption: A Multi-dimentional Model

Corruption is one of the main subjects of organizational studies and a focus of social sciences in recent decades due to its various effects on organizational and social outcomes. Because of its importance in corruption studies, methods to evaluate the level of corruption have been developed in different disciplines. Major types of corruption that are controversial in political and social arena are economic and academic corruption. The effect of academic corruption is extremely important due to the role that universities and higher education institutions play in the overall development of societies in the modern world. This paper clears the importance of academic corruption and then provides a model for measuring this type of corruption. In this article, we first review different tools and indices of measuring corruption and then suggest a model of measuring academic corruption. The fundamental premises of this method are: 1) Every social organization has two domain of activities: internal activity domain in which interactions of personnel happen, and external activity domain in which the interaction of organization with other organizations is considered. 2) Interviewing individuals who have the most experiences and perceptions within their organization is the most important way for measuring quality of activities of an organization. Explanatory interviews with academic actors can produce valid data and useful visions about academic corruption and integrity of academic organization. In this method, six groups of academic actors are interviewed and their experiences, perceptions, and their attitudes are examined. By using this method, we can compare corruption in different academic organizations.