Situated responsibility in interdisciplinary research ethics: Comparative perspectives from Moldova,Japan and France

Abstract

This paper designs and explores the concept of situated ethical responsibility (SER) within interdisciplinary research ethics, drawing on comparative perspectives from Moldova, Japan, and France. The study highlights the limitations of universalised ethical codes, particularly in the context of cross-border collaborations and diverse disciplinary norms. By analysing 29 semi-structured interviews and participant observation conducted as part of the 101086224-HESPRI-HORIZON-MSCA-2021-SE-01 Project (HESPRI), the paper illustrates how ethical practices are negotiated within specific socio-cultural, historical, and institutional contexts. The findings reveal that ethical responsibility is not merely a matter of adhering to formal procedures but is a dynamic, relational practice embedded in everyday research activities. The concept of SER is proposed as a framework that valorises the richness of researchers’ backgrounds and experiences while addressing the complexities of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaborations. This approach underscores the need for governance models that transcend disciplinary silos and apply context-sensitive judgement to adequately reflect the realities of contemporary research environments.

Introduction

Cross-border collaborations and competitive funding regimes increasingly shape the ethical governance of interdisciplinary research. Within EU frameworks such as Horizon Europe, ethics is embedded throughout the project lifecycle via self-assessment, review, and possible audits (European Commission, 2021, 2025a), and explicitly linked to research integrity (European Commission, 2025b) and the ALLEA Code of Conduct (ALLEA, 2023). Yet universalised ethical codes, historically shaped by biomedical paradigms (Caeymaex et al., 2023), often fail to capture disciplinary pluralism, field-specific norms, and culturally diverse research contexts, particularly in SSHs. Over the past two decades, both STEM and SSH scholarship have highlighted how rigid disciplinary and organisational frameworks constrain engagement with participants, especially vulnerable groups (Felt et al., 2009; Guillemin and Gillam, 2004; Hunt and Godard, 2013; Pollock, 2012). Ethics is increasingly understood as a “co-produced, materially situated praxis attuned to the entangled realities of research relations” (Page, 2025: 102), a concern heightened in AI and cross-sector collaborations under Horizon Europe (European Commission, 2025c; Resnik and Hosseini, 2025). Organisational and economic pressures like deliverables, performance metrics, and audits further shape researchers’ responsibility (Hesse et al., 2019; Scott, 2022). While alignment with funders’ formal requirements is necessary, governance must also apply culturally and nationally sensitive judgement to capture interdisciplinary and cross-cultural realities (Field et al., 2024; Morrison et al., 2020).

In this context, some questions arise: How do researchers in interdisciplinary and internationalised contexts narrate and enact ethical responsibility? How do national and organisational formal arrangements shape researchers’ conduct? And in what ways culturally embedded ethical traditions and disciplinary informal norms enable or constrain researchers’ ethical conduct? To address these questions, we draw on the concept of situated ethical responsibility (SER), which posits that ethics is a relational, dynamic, and embedded within disciplinary traditions, governance structures, and socio-economic contexts. SER is informed by our fieldwork in Moldova, Japan, and France, and by anthropological and sociological scholarship. The diversity of national and cultural contexts highlights the value of this framework for interdisciplinary collaboration, acknowledging researchers’ backgrounds, field-specific constraints, and the ways ethical reasoning is negotiated within cultural norms, governmental policies, and organisational or funder expectations. Thus, the paper has a dual purpose. On the one hand, it develops SER as an analytical tool for interdisciplinary research in international collaborations. On the other hand, it uses comparative evidence from Moldova, Japan and France to show how SER is enacted empirically.

On the one hand, ethnographic insights– Lambek’s (2010) ordinary ethics and Haraway’s (1988) situated knowledges – foreground the everyday, relational, and socio-cultural dimensions of ethical research, including gendered positionality, and support our argument for fluid, reflexive ethical practice in fieldwork contexts. On the other hand, socio-economic theories of embeddedness (Granovetter, 1985; Sayer, 2011) emphasise that ethical conduct is shaped by formal rules and informal social networks. Scientific practice is embedded within broader political and organisational contexts (Polanyi, 1957 [1944]), influencing what counts as responsible conduct. Ethical responsibility involves negotiating procedural requirements, disciplinary norms, and relational and organisational ties, while recognising that accountability is distributed across individuals, teams, organisations, and external stakeholders such as funders (O’Neill, 2002; Spicker, 2022).

Empirically, we analyse 29 semi-structured interviews conducted in spring-summer 2024 by a team of 6 cross-disciplinary researchers as part of WP3 – Governing EducaTion: INterdisCIplinarity as a roadmap for lasTING and responsible policy (GET-INCITING) of the HESPRI project on improving higher education policies. The interviews are complemented by participant observation conducted during mobilities to partner organisations, which are an integral part of the staff exchanges programme. The participants are academics, members of scientific associations – many holding formal research positions – in Moldova (10), Japan (8), and France (11). Our data reveal how ethical practices reflect not only disciplinary norms and individual ethical decision-making, but also historical legacies, external funding pressures, and national governance cultures. Through this comparative lens, we articulate SER as a nuanced account of interdisciplinary ethics in practice.

Literature review: Situating ethical responsibility

Over the past decade, research ethics debates have shifted from abstract codes and principles towards the situated realities faced by researchers across disciplines, organisations, and national contexts, with institutions understood as both formal and informal rules of play (North, 1991). This transformation is particularly evident in the European Research Area, where funding regimes such as Horizon Europe prioritise interdisciplinary and international collaboration, and in countries like Japan, which have undergone sustained internationalisation in higher education and research (Chen, 2025; Ota, 2018). Ethical responsibility now extends beyond procedural compliance or reflexive practice; it emerges through everyday research activity shaped by local, organisational, socio-political, cultural, and historical dynamics that build different local ethical traditions. The latest refers to culturally embedded sets of formal and informal rules – hierarchy, reciprocity, sensitivities regarding some topics – that shape what is considered appropriate to ask, record, publish, or contest. These play an important role in how researchers interpret, negotiate, or translate formal requirements in practice.

It is worth noting that, in this context, research integrity and human research ethics are closely linked and are therefore often discussed through a shared vocabulary. In this paper, we consider them as analytically distinct categories, yet empirically intertwined domains. The first refers to norms and infrastructures, such as authorship, plagiarism, etc. The second refers to procedures oriented towards the protection of research participants, such as informed consent, confidentiality, anonymity, oriented towards the minimisation of harm for participants. Often, the term “ethics” covers both domains, and the relevance of the distinction varies by discipline and organisational setting. In this paper, we trace how, in practice, responsibility shifts between research integrity and human research ethics by using SER as a framework for examining how these two aspects become connected through everyday practice.

Several approaches laid important foundations. Procedural ethics – including review boards, data protection frameworks, and compliance checklists – provide accountability and consistency (Resnik, 2020). Yet these mechanisms largely originate in STEM and biomedical contexts, shaped by audit cultures, and often conflict with the relational realities of SSH fieldwork (Dingwall and Vassy, 2025; Pollock, 2012). Governance-focused scholarship documents the expansion of ethics committees, anti-plagiarism policies, and regulatory oversight across Europe. GDPR illustrates these tensions: while establishing uniform requirements for data protection (European Union, 2016), compliance intersects with socio-cultural and epistemic concerns, from data circulation and subjectivity (Raposo et al., 2022) to international collaboration and local contexts (Yakovleva and Irion, 2020). Applying GDPR to qualitative and ethnographic research requires reflexive and relational engagement beyond formal consent (Bӓhre, 2025).

In response, reflexive and relational approaches emphasise agentive ethical practice, encouraging reflection on power dynamics, positionality, and methodological choices, particularly in multilingual, interdisciplinary projects (Holmes and Rajab, 2022; Sultana, 2007). Context-specific and decolonial perspectives show that responsibility for ethical practice often shifts to researchers themselves. Ethical guidelines often stem from Western-centric frameworks (Czymoniewicz-Klippel et al., 2010; Iphofen, 2011; Whitsel and Merrill, 2021), clashing with local norms and producing inequalities, as we have seen in post-Soviet Moldova, or communication breakdown in hierarchical Japan, where strict norms regulate interaction (Cascant Sempere et al., 2022; Jonbekova, 2020). These insights complement virtue ethics, where researchers’ moral reasoning guides navigation of dilemmas (Adjovi, 2025; Morris and Morris, 2016). Multilingual research adds further complexity, including risks of misrepresentation when dominant languages such as English are privileged (Schembri and Jahić Jašić, 2022).

The emphasis on interdisciplinarity intensifies these dynamics. Large-scale projects, particularly under Horizon Europe or Japan’s Society 5.0 initiative on using cyberspace to address social challenges, require integration across SSH and STEM. STEM researchers prioritise procedural ethics – data integrity, IP protection, and approvals – while SSH researchers emphasise reflexive practices, including negotiating consent, positioning, and avoiding epistemic harm (Felt and Fochler, 2008; Sultana, 2007).

Our concept of SER provides a common framework for these interactions, seeing ethics as emergent from practice within organisational, cultural, historical, and socio-economic structures, and relational networks. Drawing on anthropology, economic sociology, and our fieldwork, SER captures how ethical tensions over consent, data management, authorship, and methodological choices emerge in practice where responsibility is enacted within multiple bounds, integrating procedural, reflexive, contextual, and interdisciplinary perspectives. From an anthropological perspective, we integrate Michael Lambek’s “ordinary ethics” (2010) showing how ethical action arises in everyday situations shaped by context, relationships, and judgement and Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledges” (1988) pointing to the production of knowledge from social, cultural, and embodied standpoints including researchers’ gender, which influences both perspective and accountability. From a socio-economic perspective, we draw on Polanyi (1957 [1944]), who argues that economic activity is embedded in social relationships, meaning individual actions are inseparable from the contexts in which they occur; and Granovetter (1985), who shows that economic actions are shaped by social ties. We also integrate the idea that reasoning is shaped by embodied experiences and local, context-specific knowledge (Sayer, 2011), informing what actors perceive as meaningful. Applied to research, this highlights that ethical decision-making and judgement in the field are grounded in lived experiences, interactions, and local understanding.

In developing SER, we combine these socio-economic insights with Lambek’s attention to everyday ethics and Haraway’s insistence on situating practice, but shift the focus from knowledge production to researchers’ agency. Ethical responsibility involves navigating networks of colleagues, collaborators, participants, and funders, including unequal power relationships. SER is not a box-ticking exercise; it is a starting point for dialogue across disciplines, recognising STEM procedural rigour while attending to SSH concerns for relational accountability. By emphasising communication and transparency, SER allows interdisciplinary teams to negotiate ethical challenges collaboratively, fostering responsible, context-sensitive, and genuinely shared practice. This framing captures the complexity of contemporary academic life, where interdisciplinary collaborations and international exchanges demand more flexible ethical navigation than rigid procedures or disciplinary codes can provide.

We are guided here by our data, collected by the authors and four other colleagues from HESPRI, funded by the EU under the Horizon Europe programme. The project’s research is organised around four work packages: WP1, which examines policy frameworks since 2000; WP2, which develops renewed approaches to assessing higher education quality and effectiveness; WP3, led by Dorina Rosca and where Sanda Caracentev is a member, which builds bridges between academia and policy by embedding interdisciplinarity into governance; and WP4, which explores digital infrastructures and Open Science as drivers of academic development. We now turn to our field sites of Moldova, Japan, and France, showing how socio-cultural and historical contexts shape research practices and ethical decision-making.

Republic of Moldova: Post-socialist legacies, EU integration, and ethics driven by informality

Moldova’s research environment reflects post-socialist legacies and recent internationalisation. Under the Soviet Union, universities were marginal to research, with industrial and defence institutes absorbing most R&D funding, leaving universities and the Academy of Sciences underfunded. After independence in 1991, weak governance and scarce resources made Moldovan academia reliant on personal networks and trust (Bischof and Tofan, 2018; Lovakov et al., 2022), while internationalisation became the main route for strengthening higher education, especially after joining the Bologna Process in 2005 (Wetzinger, 2019).

Reforms unfolded unevenly. For two decades, internationalisation remained highly centralised in ministry-driven procedures, reproducing Soviet-style managerial practices (Kushnarenko and Cojocari, 2012). Since 2017, research institutes have been transferred from the Academy of Sciences to universities and government bodies – an ambitious regional move (Campbell and Gherasimov, 2022). Yet underfunding, political turbulence, and unstable governance persist, leaving the system dependent on external funding. Even with Horizon Europe and the national Smart Specialisation (2024–2027) innovation programme, R&D spending remains at 0.22%–0.23% of GDP, far below EU averages (European Commission, 2024). This fosters criticisms of rushed centralisation and formal alignment with EU higher education and research policies (Wetzinger, 2022).

These structural weaknesses undermine ethical responsibility, shifting accountability onto researchers (Curaj et al., 2023), while the Academy of Sciences of Moldova (2024) identifies brain drain and limited collaboration as systemic threats. Yet ethical oversight remains narrowly focused on plagiarism and moral rules, offering little support for interdisciplinary research (Onofrei and Duhlicher, 2022). EU collaborations foster innovation but intensify compliance demands, particularly around Open Science, where weak safeguards heighten risks of data misuse (Turcan et al., 2022). Formal oversight, both ministry-driven and external, thus coexists with informal practices such as favour exchange, which has recently been criminalised as corruption but remains widespread due to low salaries (Osipian, 2019). Gender further complicates these dynamics. While women account for 69% of social sciences and 64.6% of medical researchers, only 23.6% of researchers are women in IT and engineering, and just 35.2% of professors are female (National Bureau of Statistics, 2025). Leadership also remains male-dominated: only 14 of 45 Academy Science Committee members and 5 of 24 rectors are women (Iațco and Bezviuc, 2023). In the ethnographic section, we show how Moldovan academics operate in an ethical environment marked by hierarchy, informality, and underfunding, negotiating EU procedures and relational practices within fragile institutions.

Japan: Centralised compliance, internationalisation drive and culturally informed ethics

Japan’s higher education system, like Moldova’s, has long been marked by centralisation, shaped by demographic decline, fiscal pressures, and managerial reforms that tightened state control over national and private universities (Kazuyuki, 2022). According to Chou et al. (2024), since 2006 the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has promoted a top-down model of research ethics through national guidelines, the Science Council of Japan’s Code of Conduct, and its ethical code of practice (the Green Book), alongside initiatives from universities, research organisations, and the Association for the Promotion of Research Integrity (APRIN). This balance between oversight and autonomy has proved difficult: while policies emphasise decentralisation to promote excellence, resources and roles have simultaneously been centralised to enhance efficiency (Yoshinaga, 2023).

Cultural norms reinforce these dynamics. Research has been shaped by values of hierarchy, loyalty, and social harmony (Sugimoto, 2020), fostering cohesiveness but also conformity (Lee et al., 2012). Historically, ethics were implicit, enacted through personal duty rather than formal consent (Lewallen, 2007). Misconduct cases, however, forced universities to formalise procedures, even as norms of duty and collective responsibility persisted (Macfarlane and Saitoh, 2008). Today, “research ethics” is still often defined narrowly as compliance with codes of conduct, underscoring the emphasis on individual responsibility (Chou et al., 2024).

Recent reforms have intensified centralisation, prioritising STEM and industry-oriented research (Muto, 2025) and embedding funder-driven expectations for ethics, integrity, and interdisciplinarity. These sit uneasily with internationalisation, promoted as soft power but criticised for reproducing neoliberal and exclusionary practices (Chen and Huang, 2024; Ota, 2018). International faculty face cultural frictions, navigating multiple ethical regimes, language barriers, and reconciling procedural with relational ethics (Chen, 2025). Meanwhile, competition-driven funding and reduced core support undermine curiosity-driven inquiry, erode research time, and generate precarity (Muto, 2025). For female academics, these conditions are particularly acute: motherhood often intensifies barriers to mobility, reinforcing domestic roles and limiting advancement (Watanabe, 2025).

Our findings further show how Japanese researchers navigate centralised institutions while cultural expectations of harmony and organisational hierarchy shift responsibility to individuals. Ethical accountability thus extends beyond compliance to include reputation, career progression, and resource scarcity. Gender inequalities further shape these negotiations, as women remain underrepresented and face entrenched obstacles within academia.

France: Autonomous academic traditions, organisational governance, and ethics as accountability

France provides a contrasting case of distributed responsibility, where ethics and social responsibility have become increasingly institutionalised, shifting from individual initiatives to structured frameworks embedded in governance, curricula, and practice (Deniau, 2024; Stadge and Barth, 2022). Rooted in an intellectual tradition that emphasises academic autonomy and critical engagement, France conceives academic freedom as both a right and a shared duty between researchers and organisations to protect scholarship from political interference (Wieviorka, 2022). Over recent decades, professional norms of integrity have evolved into formal structures, reinforced by the Academy of Sciences and national organisations such as the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). A decisive step was the 2015 creation of Research Integrity Officers (RIOs), signalling institutionalisation of research integrity (Maisonneuve, 2019).

The CNRS (2020) guide frames integrity as a shared responsibility: researchers ensure honesty, rigour, and transparency, while organisations provide oversight, training, and support. Ethics committees, integrity officers, and courses on responsible conduct of research reinforce these expectations, particularly around data management and publication. Accountability is conceived as both individual and organisational, extending to transparency in authorship, openness, and traceability. At the same time, researchers are positioned as accountable to society. Europeanisation intensifies this, with EU policies demanding alignment with continental priorities, collaboration, and compliance with the GDPR (Cramer and Rüffin, 2025). These measures intersect with France’s intellectual traditions – critical theory, postcolonial critique, and humanities scholarship – producing a layered ethical environment.

Yet structural inequalities persist. Women remain underrepresented in senior roles, and meritocratic ideals often obscure systemic barriers (Esnard and Grangeiro, 2025). Early career scholars, particularly women, must navigate both formal obligations and relational dynamics. Interdisciplinarity, promoted through funding criteria, creates opportunities but also heightens ethical complexity as researchers negotiate divergent disciplinary standards. In our ethnographic analysis, we show how situated responsibility captures these negotiations between formal obligations and culturally embedded practices.

Methodology

This study draws on 29 semi-structured interviews conducted in Moldova (10), Japan (8), and France (11), and participant observation, allowing for comparisons across national contexts. The three countries were selected based on three criteria. First, focusing on countries with a strong internationalisation drive in research practices to better understand interdisciplinarity in policy context (Moldova – alignment with world standards in research; France – rapprochement with “mainstream” English-language academia; Japan – industry-driven consolidation of Japanese innovation on the international arena). Second, a good representation across countries within the Horizon Europe programme (Moldova – associated country; France – member country; Japan – third country). Third, feasibility of conducting fieldwork based on existing collaborations and academic networks, as well as fulfilling the secondment criteria within HESPRI (France – scientific lead partner; Moldova – two academic and one non-academic partners; Japan – two academic partners). This interdisciplinary, international collaboration offered a unique opportunity to look at the three different contexts in a comparative light for the first time, opening avenues for further research.

Data collection took place in spring–summer 2024 as part of WP3 of the HESPRI Project, a 4-year project examining higher education governance in relation to three decades of neoliberal reforms. The consortium comprises 14 partners (10 in Europe) and key themes include research quality assessment, the measurement of scientific output, and digital transformations affecting universities. Within this framework, WP3 focuses on interdisciplinarity in policymaking, exploring how researchers and scientific associations contribute to policy discussions. The scope of this study aligns with WP3 objectives to better understand the relationship between scientists in both STEM and SSH disciplines and policymakers, with a focus on modes of communication, organisational research practices, and public engagement. The data used in this article represents a subset on research ethics, understood in the context of the study as a combination of ethical approval procedures, organisational culture in relation to research practices, and researchers’ personal experience of fieldwork dilemmas. This subset has been analysed in the context of the entire dataset which is based on the semi-structured interview guide developed collectively by the WP3 interdisciplinary team ahead of fieldwork and has been approved via formal ethical clearance procedure by WP3 leading organisation, namely Institut Européen d’Etudes du Développement (IEED) in France. All researchers who conducted fieldwork have participated in team meetings on using the interview guide in three countries and socio-cultural contexts.

Participants were recruited via email or in person at higher education and research organisations and academic events in each of the three countries by members of HESPRI research team. In the preparation stage of fieldwork, the team compiled the potential participant pool based on publicly available contact details of academics from STEM and SSH disciplines, across career stages and genders, who also hold roles in scientific associations. This pool was further expanded with potential participants identified by the team’s academic networks. Overall, despite best efforts to include all career stages and genders, women and early-career STEM scholars were underrepresented, particularly in STEM disciplines, reflecting persisting structural inequalities (van Den Brink and Benschop, 2012). All participants received information sheets about the study and confidentiality policy, had the opportunity to discuss any concerns, and were informed of their right to withdraw at any time. Participants then gave verbal consent to take part in our research and for the interviews to be audio-recorded on condition that their identity remains anonymous.

Data quality, analysis, and linguistic considerations

The diversity of national, disciplinary, and linguistic contexts shaped data collection. Interviews with an average duration of about 40 minutes, using the same interview guide, were conducted in English, French, Romanian, and Russian, allowing participants to use their preferred language and revealing dynamics of power, comprehension, and expression. In Moldova, interviews were in Romanian or Russian; in France, in French and English; and in Japan, in English, the project’s lingua franca. Near-native fluency often facilitated rapport, while cross-disciplinary (SSH vs STEM) encounters surfaced implicit assumptions and disciplinary expectations that might otherwise have remained hidden.

Interviewers’ positionality further influenced the data. Interviewers on HESPRI secondments were outsiders to host countries yet temporary insiders in local organisations, a dual role that encouraged openness about institutional dilemmas and funding pressures. In Japan, reliance on English limited nuance but yielded rich accounts shaped by participants’ international outlook. Participant observation at academic events, meetings, and informal gatherings complemented interviews, capturing ethical negotiations and practices not always articulated verbally.

Raw data has been stored in a password-protected Google Drive folder, with access only shared between WP3 members directly involved in data collection and analysis. Interviews not conducted in English have been transcribed and translated by relevant team members, then all identifying information (e.g. names and job titles of people, places and organisations, or specific research projects) has been removed from the transcripts. The anonymised transcripts have then been made available within HESPRI in line with EU data transparency and usability policies.

Analysis followed Braun and Clarke’s (2006) iterative thematic approach, applying descriptive coding to capture recurring issues and analytical coding to foreground patterns in how responsibility was narrated. Due to the interdisciplinarity of the research team and limited datasets, we have not used a specific data analysis software. Instead, the researchers who collected the data in one of the three countries participated in collating emerging themes which have then been iteratively discussed in team meetings to ensure data reliability. While participants’ lived experiences have emerged as a cross-cutting theme within the whole dataset, our analysis uncovered individual, collective, and institutional constructions of responsibility, as well as tensions between reflexive accounts and procedural logics imposed by external governance regimes through an increased external financing dependence. This coding illuminated how ethical decision-making is embedded in social, disciplinary, and organisational networks, highlighting responsibility as situated and relational. Cross-country comparisons are thus based on a thorough analysis of these themes and identified similarities or discrepancies, combined with participant observation in three contexts and existing research on socio-historic contexts in each country. However, due to the limited scope of this study beyond our team’s experiences and data collected from interviews and participant observation, we have been unable to further trace how different disciplines approach the ethics of an interdisciplinary project, particularly across career stages and national contexts. We are aware of these limitations and discuss further research avenues in our conclusion.

Reflexivity and situated ethical responsibility

Our own fieldwork embodied a form of situated ethical responsibility. Sanda Caracentev, an anthropologist of Moldovan origin, conducted interviews with senior STEM and SSH academics in Japan. Dorina Rosca, a sociologist and economist from France, coordinated interview guide development and ethical approval as WP3 lead at IEED and conducted interviews. As embedded researchers within WP3, we were responsible for aligning with funder expectations while negotiating organisational deadlines, ethics protocols, and team obligations. These dual pressures mirrored the broader dynamics discussed in this article: responsibility was distributed, negotiated, and embedded in structural and relational contexts.

Our ethical reflection considers our presence in field sites, disciplinary biases, and the interpretive frames through which we engaged with participants. Reflexivity was thus not an add-on but integral to data production and analysis, aligning with the project’s conceptual framework of situated responsibility. By combining multilingual interviewing, cross-disciplinary encounters, participant observation, and reflexive practice, we generated a multilayered dataset that highlights the socially and historically situated character of responsibility. These materials demonstrate how ethical considerations are enacted differently across countries, disciplines, and organisations, while also showing how researchers’ practices and positionality intersect with structural pressures.

Results and discussion: Situated ethical responsibility in Moldova, Japan, and France

In this ethnographic section, we discuss how ethical practice is negotiated within disciplinary, organisational, and socio-economic contexts, shaped by funding regimes, reward systems, and structural pressures as resulting from our multi-sited fieldwork. Drawing on anonymised interviews with respondents R1-R29 and insights from participant observation in the field, we show the continuing need for a better-defined concept like SER to facilitate researchers’ navigation of funding structures, evaluation metrics, institutional incentives, and often unclear expectations around researchers’ ethical responsibility. Interdisciplinary collaborations amplify these dynamics, requiring further negotiation between STEM proceduralism and SSH reflexivity.

Overall, the results based on our data across three countries show some common themes around the shifting of ethical responsibility onto researchers regardless of organisational ethical frameworks; a strong emphasis on relationality in ethical oversight, particularly in teams; and a heightened awareness of research ethics among SSH researchers. The main distinctions emerged around national and organisational regulations and funding regimes. In Moldova, EU compliance and ministry-driven frameworks strongly influence researchers’ practices; in Japan, ministry-driven proceduralism structures decisions; and in France, project-based pressures and competitive funding environments shape responsibility. Ethical reasoning across these settings is heterogeneous, reflecting the interplay of guidelines, local norms, and context-specific conditions. In the following sub-sections, we show how researchers navigate ethical responsibility across multiple actors and organisations in each of the three countries and discuss the applicability of SER in interdisciplinary research resulting from researchers’ lived experiences of conducting ethical research.

Moldova

Interview data from Moldova suggest ethical responsibility remains largely emergent, reactive, and individually mediated, reflecting the country’s post-socialist legacies. Participants repeatedly emphasised that, in the absence of ingrained organisational norms, formal ethics structures were undefined and underdeveloped, introduced mainly in response to EU integration and funding requirements:

[. . .] until very recently, this question was never addressed. People here worked [without respecting confidentiality]. Then, I think two years ago, we had the National Agency for Research and Development [. . .] told us that [. . .] this is like that in Europe, and we are approaching the European Union, we have to comply with [ethical] rules. [. . .] each institution [organisation] should have a committee about ethics in research, and this committee should draft some rules to obey when you work with [humans].

(R5, mid-career male SSH researcher, Chisinau)

Such examples point to the continuing influence of Moldova’s post-Soviet academic system, which relied on hierarchical, ideologically constrained structures (Kushnarenko and Cojocari, 2012), leaving little room for reflexive ethical deliberation. Moreover, researchers are caught within a difficult duality: on the one hand, existing research practices rooted in the Soviet era provide structure; on the other hand, the slow response to evolving practices in Europe and globally renders this structure inefficient when researchers face ethical decisions in the field. In a research environment where ethical oversight is still perceived as largely administrative, the practical applicability of SER is particularly useful. Indeed, several participants described committees as “existing on paper” with minimal impact on actual research practice:

I announced to people within the scientific council. . . well, we should make such an ethical council, and it was finished. Nothing changed.

(R5, mid-career male SSH researcher, Chisinau)

The required changes are, though, harder to implement when legacy practices persist alongside emergent frameworks. More participants described continued reporting of respondents’ personal details in publications, a practice rooted in Soviet-era methodologies, and a lack of appropriate training in research ethics:

They just go to the village and ask somebody about something. But they indicate the name [. . .] of the respondent. We have a list of respondents, and you have to write it. But I think it’s from Soviet times. [. . .] I would like to know how to do it exactly, but I did not find a guideline for this.

(R4, senior female SSH researcher, Chisinau)

In these circumstances, participants often framed ethical responsibility as a matter of personal conscience rather than institutional enforcement, which, reflecting Lambek’s (2010) understanding of ethics as embedded in everyday life and interactions, contributes to placing responsibility onto individual researchers. Our data show multiple examples of individual decisions applied in navigating fieldwork within ambiguous ethical guidelines. Some invoked moral principles and “common sense” rules, such as avoiding stereotypes and respecting the cultural context of study participants, even when formal guidelines were absent:

Well, I think there are some unwritten rules, like to respect the ethnical identity, not to use stereotypes. I think these are some general rules that aren’t discussed, but they are like human conduct; they are considered to be natural.

(R5, mid-career male SSH researcher, Chisinau)

Before being in another cultural community, I try to get acquainted with the culture of the new social environment.

(R7, senior female SSH researcher, Chisinau)

Others described responsibilities for anti-plagiarism and proper attribution as distributed across research teams and doctoral supervision frameworks rather than embedded in organisational ethics training:

In the framework of the doctoral school, the student is responsible for both personal responsibility of the author and the scientific consultant. . . But even here, all our publications are controlled against plagiarism [by both the University and the National Agency for Quality Assurance in Education and Research].

(R10, senior female SSH researcher, Chisinau)

These practices, together with heavy funding pressures reported by several interviewees, reflect a hybrid enactment of SER: researchers negotiate ethics relationally within teams and across hierarchical structures while relying heavily on personal judgement. The personalised interpretation of limited formalised procedures, particularly in STEM non-medical disciplines with strong industry links, underscores the uneven distribution of ethical responsibility and the tension between individual moral agency and organisational mandates:

We don’t quite have any [. . .] rules or some kind of internal rules to [do ethical research]. Of course, we have tasks we have to execute. Our managers just keep looking, keep monitoring to make them correct, not to steal any information.

(R9, mid-career male STEM researcher, Chisinau)

The data also suggest gendered and disciplinary dynamics in how ethical responsibility is perceived and enacted, pointing to a broader organisational relevance of SER. Men were overrepresented in the sample, STEM fields were underrepresented, and early-career researchers were marginal. While not representative, these patterns resonate with broader structural inequalities documented in Moldovan academia (van Den Brink and Benschop, 2012) that influence how ethics is discussed, taught, and internalised, further highlighting the situated and relational character of responsibility. The Moldovan case shows that ethical responsibility is enacted through individual interpretation of ethical responsibility, team norms, and evolving organisational expectations amid historical legacies, emerging compliance structures, and informal practices.

Japan

In contrast to underdeveloped ethical regulations seen in Moldovan academia, our data from Japan reflect an environment where ethical responsibility is strongly institutionalised. At the same time, Japanese researchers’ navigation of fieldwork somewhat echoes the heightened responsibility in making ethical decisions for Moldovan researchers, but is more strongly mediated by cultural norms and disciplinary traditions. Participants consistently described compliance with university and ministry guidelines as foundational to research practice, particularly in STEM fields. As one senior STEM researcher explained:

The first thing that we teach students in our labs is related to the ethics of research, and of course, research note-taking, research disclosure, and the repeatability of experiments. All these aspects are very important, and only based on this, we can actually carry out exceptional research. So, we are all the time, ethics is the base of our work.

(R11, senior male STEM researcher, Kyoto)

Here, ethical responsibility is framed not as a constraint but as an enabling condition of scientific excellence, tightly bound to procedural rigour and reproducibility that is particularly important in STEM fields. SSH researchers placed the emphasis on organisational frameworks, describing ethics as a matter of compliance with university or association rules, depending on discipline. One respondent explained that:

When a researcher does something which concerns personal data or human rights, then they have to receive permission from the ethical committees at their own universities. [. . .] In some fields, especially in medicine and sociology, academic associations also have their rules, but in associations where I work, our universities are political science associations, so we don’t have specific rules.

(R13, senior male SSH researcher, Hokkaido)

Another stressed the proliferation of overlapping frameworks:

We have many guidelines. [. . .] One is by the academic society [association]. [. . .] And also, the Ministry of Education made ethical guidelines for university professors. [. . .] The guidelines by the Ministry of Education are much harder.

(R16, senior male SSH researcher, Kyoto)

Such accounts illustrate a dense, multi-layered architecture of ethical oversight, where ministries, associations, and universities impose formal requirements that researchers must navigate, making interdisciplinary collaborations particularly difficult without a common understanding of such formal constraints, acknowledged by SER. Moreover, this culture of compliance is prone to producing risk-averse practices, as the same researcher admitted:

Working well means [if the ethical committee disapproves], we cannot do research in the field of critical field [in a research field with significant ethical implications]. So, to commit to the ethical thing, we don’t do the research.

(R16, senior male SSH researcher, Kyoto)

Alongside these pitfalls of proceduralism and bureaucracy, cultural taboos emerged as a powerful force shaping the scope of ethical research, from incipient stages of doctoral training where students avoid certain research topics or changing academic supervisors (Nerad, 2015) to adapting research interests to “fundable” topics (Kingston, 2023) at more senior stages. Sensitive topics, such as family background, were described by participants as off-limits in Japanese academia, particularly hard to navigate for researchers of non-Japanese backgrounds:

I am not allowed to ask about the parents’ educational background in Japan because it’s really taboo in Japan. [. . .] Taiwanese people said they are allowed to ask about their parents’ educational background, whether their parents go to university or not. So, its cultural background affected ethics, I think.

(R18, early career female SSH researcher, Tokyo)

Another respondent contrasted this with international contexts:

In the United States [of America], it’s a political issue, and they can do research. [Taboos are] why we were silent [during a conference in Japan].

(R16, senior male SSH researcher, Kyoto)

These reflections reveal how cultural norms set tacit boundaries on what can be researched, even in the absence of formal prohibitions, underscoring the embeddedness of ethics in national moral economies that is not necessarily reflected in ethical guidelines, but captured by SER. Responsibility was also framed relationally, as the obligation to involve researchers familiar with local contexts in collaborative projects:

We should include our researchers familiar with this culture among our project members to deepen their understanding.

(R15, senior male SSH researcher, Kyoto)

This points to a more pronounced recognition of ethics as not only normative compliance but also as culturally situated reflexivity, where responsibility is distributed across teams to ensure contextual sensitivity, by SSH disciplines. STEM participants, by contrast, often regarded ethics as marginal to their research:

As far as I know, I don’t feel there is an ethical problem. Because our field is, we are investigating the material itself, not [. . .] human biological [issues].

(R12, senior male STEM researcher, Kyoto)

Another remarked simply,

[. . .] material science, physics, chemistry. . . I don’t know. I have never thought of that.

(R14, senior male STEM researcher, Kyoto)

These accounts suggest that, for Japanese researchers, ethical deliberation is often discipline-specific, with STEM researchers focusing narrowly on methodological integrity while SSH researchers navigate complex socio-cultural constraints. Our Japanese data thus show a dual orientation: normativity alongside tacit cultural prohibitions. This duality distributes responsibility across organisations and the moral economy of research, making ethics simultaneously codified, relational, and context dependent.

France

While Moldovan and Japanese cases highlighted uneven distributions of ethical responsibility within contrasting levels of organisational ethical oversight, our French data reflect a more hybridised research environment. Here, formalised ethics structures – doctoral training, GDPR compliance, intellectual property regulation, and organisational review – are strongly present, yet often operate alongside, and at times in tension with, the autonomous character of French academic life, characterised by more informal, relational, and personal approaches to responsibility. It is important to note that STEM researchers are underrepresented in our French dataset, with most researchers who expressed awareness of and interest in ethical practices in their research coming from SSH disciplines. Like in Japan, participants described a highly layered system, where state and organisational mandates cascade downwards; however, it becomes clear that researchers retain agency in negotiating how these frameworks are enacted in practice. On the one hand, the prominence of state-driven priorities reflects the financial dependence of French universities on state funding (Tandilashvili, 2022), coupled with further compliance with organisational, legal, and other funders’ requirements. As one senior SSH researcher explained:

In fact, it is the government that proposes the projects, and the laboratories adhere. [. . .] So, it is the researchers who decide whether the projects proposed by the government correspond to their ethics, to the laboratory’s ethics.

(R19, senior female SSH researcher, Montpellier)

These top-down priorities are strongly related to the ethical orientations of laboratories, underscoring the situated nature of responsibility within France’s research system, where institutionalised ethics infrastructures – such as designated ethics officers or project-level guidelines – are seen as increasingly normalised. One respondent noted that:

At the [university], there is a person who accompanies the research projects on ethics.

(R21, senior female SSH researcher, Paris)

Another detailed the layered compliance demands tied to different funders:

Depending on the research and the funding modalities [. . .], we have a good practice guide for the respect of data collection [. . .]. And then afterwards [. . .] we also have to fill out a whole bunch of information on the respect of data and commitment.

(R22, senior female SSH researcher, Paris)

These testimonies reflect the multi-scalar regulatory landscape shaping French academia, where funder and organisational-specific protocols intersect, sometimes redundantly, with broader European frameworks such as GDPR. Yet even these formal structures are not universally internalised, further pointing to the intrinsic value of a framework like SER that recognises such nuances. Some participants suggested that training requirements remain surface-level, oriented towards plagiarism prevention and quotation practices rather than deeper reflection on fieldwork dilemmas. The importance of academic networks becomes evident:

I think [the training is] mainly for questions of intellectual property, plagiarism, things of that kind. [. . .] At the moment, I haven’t had any difficulties of that kind. I think that if I encounter any difficulties, I can turn to my research director or to the doctoral students who attend the doctoral school.

(R23, early-career female SSH researcher, Paris)

On the other hand, participants recounted moments when normativism collided with, or failed to capture, the relational challenges of fieldwork compounded by colonial legacies. For instance, one researcher described the intricacies of working in a field where gender and cultural sensitivities are critical to successful research:

In Arabic countries, for example, you have some cultural or religious issues about filming or recording the voices or even speaking to women, for example. I, as a woman, didn’t have all these difficulties because I also speak a little Arabic, so it makes things easy. [Also], I’m not interrogating about sexuality or beliefs or whatever.

(R26, senior female SSH researcher, Paris)

Another noted difficulty in cross-cultural contexts encounters:

Well, you have to study. You have to be sure that you use the appropriate terms for addressing, for example, non-European cultures.

(R28, mid-career female SSH researcher, Paris)

These accounts exemplify how ethical responsibility in France is not reducible to normative compliance but is enacted through situated negotiations in multilingual, postcolonial, and religiously diverse contexts. Given the complexity of these entanglements, SER facilitates research in diverse cultural settings and in mono- and multidisciplinary teams, since French SSH researchers also described ethics as a collective and evolving moral background in which norms are internalised, shared, and used by researchers to navigate ethical issues.

Norms are always anonymous. I don’t imagine any judgment on [them]. [Since researchers are aware of ethical norms], I have never heard of [a problem with ethics].

(R19, senior female SSH researcher, Montpellier)

Here, SER once again points to Lambek’s point on ethics as rooted in everyday practices (2010), where responsibility is sustained less by coercive enforcement than by implicit, shared understandings and by attentiveness to the sensitivities of participants and collaborators. Another participant captured this relational ethos:

We are all trying to be respectful. And at times, we have to say certain truths, what we think is true. It’s in the way of saying it. It’s not about not saying it, but it’s the way of saying it. It’s more in the background. As I told you, talking about the Bible to a Muslim person is going to be different from talking about it to a Jewish person, an atheist or a Christian person. So, we try to manage sensitivities.

(R29, senior unaffiliated female SSH researcher, Paris)

Still, several participants emphasised the limits of formal ethics structures in France, noting that responsibility often rests on the individual researcher’s background and skills like the ability to build rapport. One academic of Canadian origin observed:

French university seemed exceptional to me [only] to realise that there was much less ethics in the French university than in the Canadian university. [. . .] ethics comes from our own learning and work.

(R24, mid-career female SSH researcher, Paris)

Similarly, a senior researcher recalled having to design her own consent procedures in doing her research abroad:

When I did my research in France, this problem had never been posed anywhere, neither by the institution [organisation], nor by the thesis director, nor by our ground interlocutor. [When doing research elsewhere, I was asked to] provide this kind of form that I had never written before. I asked my thesis director [PhD supervisor] and her institution [organisation], but in the end, I did not receive the answer [. . .]. [So, I] searched for information on the Internet. I created the form myself without being validated by my director.

(R27, senior female SSH researcher, Paris)

Such examples highlight that French ethical responsibility is less about enforcement than about negotiation across state mandates, organisational norms, laboratory cultures, and interpersonal trust, revealing a dual system: formal oversight and training coexist with a relational, situational enactment of responsibility

Overall, across all three contexts, ethics in internationalised, interdisciplinary research transcends the binary of codes versus reflexivity. While Moldovan researchers treat ethics as external compliance, French scholars combine formal training with reflexivity, and Japanese colleagues navigate normativity with unspoken taboos. Responsibility thus sits at the intersection of local cultures, disciplinary norms, and academic governance regimes, which are key to understanding ethics in contemporary research.

Conclusion

Across the three national contexts, our findings show that ethical responsibility in research emerges through negotiations that take place within teams, across disciplines, and in dialogue with organisational and national governance regimes. Researchers in all settings described responsibility as enacted in practice rather than defined by formal rules closely tied to relational dynamics, disciplinary cultures, and funding pressures.

Within this common terrain, the specific configurations of ethical responsibility diverge in our three national contexts. In Moldova, weakly embedded institutional structures and externally introduced regulations mean researchers often rely on personal judgement and informal deliberation. Japan offers a different landscape, where well-established and rigorous formal procedures intersect with often implicit cultural norms that shape what is considered ethically permissible. In France, researchers navigate dense layers of oversight alongside traditions of disciplinary autonomy and colonial legacies, producing a mode of responsibility that combines compliance with situational and relational negotiation. These variations show that while the texture of ethical reasoning differs, the underlying process of balancing structural requirements with context-sensitive judgement is shared across settings.

This combination of commonality and divergence makes SER a particularly valuable analytical tool for funding programmes like Horizon Europe, where interdisciplinary collaboration is encouraged but also tightly regulated. The framework draws attention to the everyday work of negotiating responsibility while recognising that these negotiations are shaped by the historical, disciplinary, and cultural specificities of each research environment. Further developing SER should involve clarifying how these negotiations unfold across different layers of governance and how responsibility moves between individuals, teams, and institutions, something our study’s limited scope could not yet capture. There are other limitations – SSH perspectives dominate, and women and early-career STEM researchers are underrepresented, particularly in contexts where language barriers reduced our access to certain groups. The absence of senior leadership voices also emphasises lived experience over institutional decision-making. Future research would thus benefit from broader disciplinary representation, a wider range of positionalities, and closer attention to how organisational priorities shape researchers’ ethical practices. This would strengthen SER as a tool for comparing ethical practice across diverse academic systems while keeping relationality and situated judgement at its core.

Finally, while SER is not intended as a prescriptive governance mechanism, its principles can inform the development of reflective spaces within projects—whether through dedicated discussions, project-level materials, or training activities that support ethical reasoning without reducing it to procedural compliance. By emphasising negotiation as central to ethical practice, SER provides a way forward for studying responsibility in increasingly complex, international, and interdisciplinary research settings.