Bad apple or bad system?

A new piece in the Journal of Academic Ethics raises the important question if and why the earlier “bad apple” explanation of scientific misconduct has been largely abandoned by referencing to ‘institutional failure’ (bad barrels), and ‘structural crisis (bad system).

Dutch scientists in 2011 explained Diederik Stapel’s grand-scale data fabrication largely in systemic terms, whereas only fifteen years earlier, in the René Diekstra affair (1996) such explanations had been close to absent…