Higher Education Practitioners and Their Professional Ethics: A Qualitative Content Analysis

This qualitative empirical article explores the ways that higher education professionals in the United States make sense of their professional ethics in relation to their role at the institution. It applies sensemaking theory as the theoretical framework to explore 65 professional ethics statements from a wide range of administrators with differing experiences and disciplines. Using qualitative content analysis as the methodology, this study developed four themes related to how administrators make sense of their professional ethics. Those themes include creating a bricolage of different codes of ethics, incorporating personal identity and experience, evolving with their respective roles, and finding ethical models and foils.