In this article several perspectives on studying taboos within social sciences are described. Originally, taboo, a concept that was already used within Polynesian societies early 1800, referred to food that was not allowed to eat. Anthropologists analyzed taboos especially in a functionalistic manner, as contributing to the maintenance of existing power balances within societies. These and other studies on taboos all illustrate the fact that taboos are very much a social construction and are very much time and place dependent. In contemporary western societies taboos are associated with ‘open secrets’ and ‘silencing’. Within criminology certain topics are considered taboo as a research object (e.g. explaining crime through ethnic, cultural or religious characteristics), while others claim that there are no criminological research taboos left.

A taboo serves the social order for it facilitates social control. This article will focus on taboos related to sexual contact by youngsters. The way authorities guard sexual taboos is indicative of the way authorities envision the organization of society. It is this organization through the control of youth and sex which will receive attention. In the classic study by Mary Douglas on pollution and taboo dirt is understood as ‘matter out of place’. The sexual teenager is an illustration of this ‘matter out of place’ because it is difficult to categorize sexual teenagers on the basis of asexual children and sexual adults as an organizing principle for society. In criminal law lewd conduct by youngsters refers to wrong sex at the wrong age. By criminalizing these sexual transgressions the proper place of youth and sex is once again restored. This is necessary for it will be argued that the interests of society are somewhat under pressure because of transgressions when it comes to children as asexual and when it comes to sex as something for within a relationship. The perpetrator of lewd conduct should be understood as a scapegoat reestablishing when and how sex should take place. By restoring the asexual child and the sexual relationship it is hoped sex and youngsters can once again offer some guidance in a social order lacking these clear markers.

In this interview, Lode Walgrave talks to John Braithwaite, one of the most cited white collar crime scholars and best known for his ‘reintegrative shaming’, which added the crucial moral-emotional and ethical dimensions to the body of work on crime and crime control. John Braithwaite tells about his major publications and developments in his intellectual endeavour: the role of shaming and its importance in restorative justice, dominion, responsive regulation, and also his recent project on peacebuilding. Braithwaite’s career and political involvement are discussed throughout the interview, as well as his critical view with regards to the fragmentation of social sciences (including criminology).

In this article I focus on the academic environment in which social psychologist Diederik Stapel worked and developed his career as a con academic. He published over 50 articles with fabricated data in top tier journals. This article is based on interviews with Stapel himself and document analysis. Especially, I pay attention to his socialization as an academic in his years at the University of Amsterdam, where he did his PhD (1986-2000). In my description of how social psychology developed in the nineties in Amsterdam it becomes clear that there was a strong emphasis on competition and publishing articles in top tier journals. Stapel conformed to this culture of competition and published almost as much as the two leading full professors of his department during the period 1995-2000. In the early nineties Stapel discovered that the use of questionable research procedures (QRPs) was common in social psychology. He realized that without using these procedures it was hardly possible to get good results and publish frequently in top tier journals. Though Stapel resented this partly and was disenchanted by this experience, he did integrate QRPs in his daily academic practice. He actually raised the issue of QRPs in a lecture in Oxford when he received the Jos Jaspars Early Career Award of the EAESP, but there was hardly any substantive response to his presentation. The academic culture in which Stapel developed his career can be described as ‘indifferent tolerant’. Though Stapel does refer to the circumstances which influenced his academic fraud, he does state that he himself is responsible for his massive scientific misconduct.

Scientific misconduct takes place at the heart of higher education organizations. Organizational culture (meso level) shapes scholars’ behaviors and perceptions (micro level) about what should be problematized while conducting research and teaching. In this paper it is argued that there are organizational mechanisms at place by which organizational goals (funding) and professional goals (recognition) become indistinguishable. The mechanisms are: pressure, loose social control, scarce resources and lack of alternatives. Scholars may strategically react to these mechanisms by accepting, fitting in, resisting or giving up. It is at the heart of these mechanisms and strategies that problematic behaviors may emerge.

In this article the authors focus upon the measures taken as a reaction against scientific fraud against the background of the contemporary science policy that turns the practice of science into a knowledge economy. In the light of the availability but obvious underuse of reactive legal means, they question the recourse to proactive ethical control and regulation of the scientific activities. They contend that such science policy is not so much the expression of a reaction against exceptional cases of scientific fraud, than of an endeavour to discipline and control scientist to the constraints of the knowledge economy. For the authors, however, the latter is the problem to be solved: another science policy is needed.