Academic Integrity Beyond Audit: A Multi-Regime Field Approach to Performance, Internalization and Agency

Abstract (Outdated version. Please use v2.0.0. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17782544):

Universities describe themselves as "learning organizations" that cultivate autonomy, ethical judgment and deep understanding [Senge, 1990]. Yet their integrity practices increasingly resemble those of audited institutions: dense regimes of rules, detectors, dashboards and sanctions [Power, 1997; Shore & Wright, 2015]. This article argues that the tension between these identities is not rhetorical but architectural—and that existing frameworks, while valuable, are insufficient to map what students and staff actually navigate.

Self-Determination Theory models how individuals internalize norms along a single motivational continuum [Deci & Ryan, 2000]. Audit-culture analyses describe what happens when formal verification becomes structurally dominant [Power, 1997; Strathern, 2000]. Neither framework is designed to model situations in which multiple normative regimes coexist, collide and produce qualitative shifts in the very state of agency of those who must live among them.

This article proposes an integrity field for academic evaluation: a conceptual architecture in which legal, bureaucratic, professional, metric, algorithmic and communal regimes jointly govern the same agent. Within this field, it develops two diagnostic tools—the Performance–Internalization Contrast (PIC) and the Audit Dependency Profile (ADP)—and introduces a taxonomy of states of agency that agents occupy and move between under different configurations of regimes and evaluation events.

The central question shifts from "how much cheating can we detect?" to a prior one: when the cameras are turned off, how much of this still holds—and which regimes are actually shaping what remains?