ABSTRACT
In the USA, the UK and Australia, a combination of credential inflation and attendant instrumentalism has resulted in theory being a disparaged part of educational research, and thus also doctoral research in education. This disparagement comes in part from the conflation of theory with abstract purposelessness, and its connection with soft research as opposed to applied research into, and for, educational policy and practice. In many ways this dichotomy is paradigmatically located, in that it is only some forms of theory that are seen as under attack. In the UK in the mid-1990s, Ball (1995) lamented a-theoretical moves within sociology of education to issues of management, measurement, evaluation, and so forth, and the resultant creation of new fields such as ‘school improvement’, ‘leadership’, and so forth. In the early 2000s, qualitative researchers in the USA have felt the veracity of their work is undercut, and inadequately funded due to an emphasis on ‘evidence-based’ research, coded as large-scale ‘scientific research in education’, as ‘gold standard’ quantitative research (see Lather 2006). However, Atkinson and Delamont (2006) argue that this is a very insular viewpoint that conflates shifts in the USA with trends in other countries. They argue that in the UK rigorous qualitative research is not only respected, but also centrally located within research council funding schemes. Nonetheless, Sikes (2006) writes that in the UK the marketisation of education and research has meant that ‘research which apparently provides value-free, objective, and quantifiable evidence that can directly inform practice is favoured and funded’ (p. 47). Clearly the world of theory and research is a fraught one. This fraught world also pervades the world of doctoral education, as these debates
filter through to the type of doctoral research that gains funding and the type of research that gains clearance by university ethical review boards (Sikes 2006). This can also impact on what gets valorised in doctoral programmes, notably in those countries where doctoral courses are the norm. In reflecting on a conversation she had with her doctoral students about theory in educational research, Pat Sikes comments that:
the group split into two fundamentally opposing camps. There were those who said that they found theory scary and frightening, the aspect of their work that they approached with the most trepidation and even with fear and loathing. The other,
smaller group, by contrast, said it was theory that excited them, and that theory … ’floated their boat’.
