This thesis investigates whether academic dishonesty—specifically uncredited textual borrowing—can be considered a profitable strategy for individuals pursuing leadership roles. Drawing from the fields of leadership studies, economics, and ethics, the study explores the relationship between plagiarism in higher education and professional advancement within leadership-track disciplines. The central research question, “Is cheating profitable?”, is addressed through a mixed-methods approach combining computational text analysis with sociological theory and leadership literature.
The empirical foundation of the study consists of a dataset of approximately 15,000 master’s theses sourced from Norwegian university repositories, representing both leadership-oriented disciplines (Law and Legal Studies, Business Administration, Political Science, Economics, and Industrial Economics) and control disciplines (Philosophy and Psychology). Paragraph-level similarity analysis was conducted using TF-IDF vectorization, Incremental Principal Component Analysis (IPCA), and FAISS-based nearest-neighbour search. This method enabled the identification of uncited paragraphs bearing strong resemblance to cited material—used here as a proxy for potentially unethical academic behavior.
Findings reveal that Business Administration theses exhibited significantly higher levels of uncredited textual similarity than those from control disciplines, suggesting a pattern of strategic citation omission or academic borrowing. In contrast, Philosophy and Psychology displayed minimal overlap, consistent with their emphasis on critical thinking and original argumentation. Additionally, data from Microdata.no show that the majority of Norway’s political and corporate leaders hold degrees in leadership-track disciplines, underscoring the relevance of the academic environments under scrutiny.
While high similarity does not in itself confirm plagiarism or intent to deceive, the study raises important concerns about the structural incentives present in leadership education. These findings align with theories of moral disengagement, elite reproduction, and the “slippery slope” effect, suggesting that certain academic cultures may implicitly normalize ethical compromises in pursuit of performance outcomes.
By combining large-scale textual analysis with theoretical insights into leadership ethics and institutional behavior, this thesis contributes to ongoing debates about academic integrity, the meritocratic ideal, and the formation of professional elites. It concludes that academic dishonesty may, under specific structural conditions, function as a rational—if ethically problematic—strategy for advancement, prompting a critical re-evaluation of how integrity is taught, measured, and rewarded in higher education.
