Staging Professional Ethics in Student Affairs: A Dramaturgical Analysis of “Doing the Right Thing”

• In Event: Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Diversity, Ethics, and Organizational Change

Abstract

This study describes the social and institutional aspects of ethics across student affairs at a public university in the Southwest. Taking the sociological perspective of dramaturgy, we analyze the concept of “being ethical” as performance, one that is determined and understood in a complex arena in which ethics are staged and enacted for an audience. Based on interviews with 18 staff participants, we applied the theatrical metaphor to the enactment of ethics in terms of scripting (loyalty to national codes versus local regulations), staging (aligning horizontally versus going off script), performing (rehearsing versus playing to an audience), and interpreting (theirs, ours, and the literature). Discussion explores the influence of national codes and the dialectic between professional and personal decision making.

Authors

• Earle Reybold, George Mason University

• Mark D. Halx, Halx Consulting Group