ABSTRACT
In the course of this book we have not attempted to offer a comprehensive study of all aspects of academic socialization, even in the academic disciplines we studied. In contrast to some comparable works, for instance, we have not provided a systematic review of student culture in the graduate school; nor have we concentrated on how graduate students survive and learn the ropes in the early weeks and months of their postgraduate study. Rather, we have tried to concentrate on a more sustained discussion of how postgraduate study, and the work of doctoral students and their supervisors reproduce specific and distinctive forms of knowledge. We do not regard academic disciplines and their boundaries as ‘given’. We acknowledge that the reverse is true: disciplines, research fields and their boundaries are inherently arbitrary. The natural and social worlds do not present themselves pre-packaged as the subject-matter for social anthropology, development studies, biochemistry, artificial intelligence or geography. In the most general sense, such academic divisions are arbitrary. We do, however, recognize that these distinctions and discriminations have considerable weight as social phenomena, and have equal, if not greater, significance in furnishing the social frameworks for knowledge production.
