ABSTRACT
The critical doctoral student in marketing has to tread a very uneasy path. In the critical thesis, the writer occupies an ambivalent location in relation to their disciplinary culture, as a critic of it, but at the same time negotiating their own acceptance and belonging to that culture through and beyond their doctoral research. Further, the ontologies that often underpin critical marketing doctorates contain a commitment to challenge the very foundations of the thesis genre and its assumed worlds of knowledge and knowledge making. At the same time there is a need to satisfy the requirements of this modernist genre, to produce a piece of research that scientifically makes an original contribution to a given field of knowledge.
