Interactional Effects of Macro Scale Social Factors in the Plagiarism Phenomenon: a case of Iran

Plagiarism happens in a structure, and “other individuals” are very important in its occurance, so it can’t be a mere psychological phenomenon and must be concieved as social one, because structures have undebatable effect on act’s shape. Thus, plagiarism should be analyzed with societal variables. But we can design several models for explanation of its occurrence and order of involved variables. In this research the aim is to demonstrate and explain how the involved societal variables of plagiarism are organized to play their role in this phenomenon. For this reason, the Structural Equation Modeling method was used. Three valid models (structural, paradigmatic, systemic) and seven documented variables were adopted for examination. Needed data were gathered by means of a validated questionnaire from 540 master and PhD students in 36 largest universities in Iran selected randomly by multi-stage clustering method and then systematic choosing in each cluster. The gathered data was analyzed by Partial Least Square algorithm in PLS soft (version 3.3.3.). Three hypotheses were examined: 1. Structural model can better explain the order of occurance of variables in this phenomenon than other ones. 2. Economically observed variables are more effective than other ones. 3. Research formalism is more important mediator than other ones. Findings showed that systemic model has better fit indices than others and first hypothesis was rejected. Considering this model, the order of occurance of involved variables could be such that governmental capitalism (rental economics, erosion of specialization, commodification of knowledge) and cultural depositories (traditional discourses and ideological science) as inputs lead to process such as research formalism (mechanical research and dominance of rhethoric in research), scholastic habitus (scientific oligarchy and isolated researchers) and uncritical education (educational view to research). This process eventually lead to outputs such as indifference (immoral trade-off) and bureaucratic university (static evaluation and weakness of control). Second hypothesis was approved, and findings showed that economic observed variables are more effective than others in plagiarism phenomenon. Third hypothesis also was rejected, and findings showed that “scholastic habitus” (scientific oligarchy and isolated researchers) are more important mediators than research formalism and uncritical education.