ABSTRACT
There is a plethora of manuals and regulations on the subject of what counts as quality work, or even as good enough work in the doctorate. But the rules themselves are never the whole story; playing a game well is different from just knowing the formal rules of the game. In this chapter, I want to discuss some of the institutional and academic cultural arrangements that shape the judgements that will be made about whether the doctoral work is good enough. In particular, I want to talk about two things: the tacit elements of understanding a particular disciplinary field, and the wave of changes affecting universities today – the benchmarking and league tables, the concerns about productivity, research assessment exercises, the Bologna process, and the like. These are beginning to filter quite markedly how supervisors think about their work, and the kinds of pressures as well as supports doctoral students will encounter. They are also beginning to expand the ways in which success in doctoral work is being measured, no longer as just about the quality of the thesis itself, but extending to activities and outputs during and beyond the process of study. Doctoral studies and expectations are not identical across different countries and fields
and times. This chapter speaks less to doctoral studies in the USA, which continues to be a relatively self-contained system in which a solid array of coursework has always been part of the doctoral journey, than to changes that are being widely experienced in other parts of the world. Over the past decade governments have been increasingly taking some interest in doctoral studies and seeking to influence, measure and regulate what happens in doctoral education. At the same time, universities are themselves demonstrating a growing awareness of global student mobility and of international and competitive contexts in the ways they approach their own doctoral provision. In Australia, as in much of Europe, it is only recently that doctoral studies have begun
to be widely referred to as ‘research training’. Especially in the humanities and social sciences, a doctorate was thought of rather as an opportunity offered to talented and already well-qualified individuals to produce something of worth, something that would be their own distinctive contribution to knowledge. ‘Training’ was something associated with vocational trades, not something that happened in universities; it was associated with learning an already defined activity rather than producing a new contribution to knowledge. Even now in my university, whereas bachelors and masters graduates are
acknowledged at graduation ceremonies only by their name and a handshake, for doctoral graduates a short account is read out of the new contribution to knowledge that each has made and the chancellor stands and tips his hat as well as shaking hands with each new graduate. The sense that completing a doctorate is an individual achievement and a special achievement is strong. But over the past decade doctoral studies have also very much become part of a research
training agenda, both within universities and in the policies of governments and external agencies (Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education 2004; University of Oxford 2009). More and more work is taking place to ensure that doctoral students have received proper training as part of their studies. New scrutiny is set up to ensure that those who ‘supervise’ them are sufficiently expert; that the environments they study in expose them sufficiently to what good quality research looks like; that they have been taught and assessed in courses that ensure they have mastered the principles of research in their particular fields. What is at issue here is not the individual and what they have achieved, but the process and its collective output to the university or to national research productivity. This is a changing environment for many universities and supervisors. In this chapter I
want to consider some of the paradoxes of doctoral work and some of these changes that have been taking place in the management and expectations of doctoral studies. I begin by looking at the doctoral task and the importance of understanding that the
doctorate is about being judged by norms of a field. In judging whether a sufficient/ good/doctoral-level contribution to knowledge has been made, examiners apply their substantive understandings about the state of play in the field of the doctoral endeavour: what is already known and what marks an advance. Methodology textbooks and doctoral regulations proliferate, but ultimately can never alone spell out this particular substantive standard. So ‘norms of a field’ is not a static set of criteria, and examiners’ judgements, too, are also being influenced by changes, changes in the global arena of knowledge production, and in the way they themselves are being assessed. The chapter then considers how today ‘quality’ has now also become a descriptor that
can refer to the conditions and activities through which doctoral students study, not just the work they produce. It has become something that is seen as amenable to technical definition and benchmarking and measurement; something that is associated with national research assessment exercises, that is part of the research ‘productivity’ of universities. It might seem that these moves are not ones that need directly concern doctoral students, but in fact they are beginning to impact on the experience and pressures and ways doctoral students will be judged, and this is a second ongoing theme of this chapter.
