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In the last decade, doctoral education has undergone a sea change with several global trends increasingly apparent. Drivers of change include massification and professionalization of doctoral education and the introduction of quality assurance systems. The impact of these drivers, and the forms that they take, however, are dependent on doctoral education within a given national context. This paper is frontline in that it contributes to the literature on doctoral education by examining the ways in which these global trends and drivers are being taken up in policies and practices by various countries. We do so by comparing recent changes in each of the following countries: Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, the UK, and the USA. Each country case is based on national education policies, policy reports on doctoral education (e.g., OECD and EU policy texts), and related materials. We use the same global drivers to examine educational policies of each country. However, depending each national context, these drivers are framed in considerably different ways. This raises questions about (1) their comparability at a global level and (2) the universality of the PhD. Also we find that this global-local nexus reveals unresolved tensions within the national doctoral educational frameworks.

As higher education (HE) institutions globally become increasingly performative, competitive and corporatised in response to neoliberal rationalities, the exigencies of HE leadership are being realigned to accommodate its value system. This article draws on recent British Council-funded research, including 30 semi-structured interviews, to explore women's engagement with leadership in HE in South Asia. A potent affective economy was discovered. Leadership was associated with affects such as competitiveness, aggression, impropriety, stress and anxiety, in ways that were intensified by highly patriarchal and corporatised HE cultures. Indeed, its difficulties and toxicities meant that leadership was rejected or resisted as an object of desire by many women. We illuminate how different forms of competition contribute to the affective economy of HE leadership. The research also raises wider questions about the possibilities of disrupting dominant neoliberal constructions of HE if those who question such values are excluded (or self-exclude) from leadership positions.

This paper draws on British Council commissioned research in response to concerns about women's absence from senior leadership positions in higher education in South Asia. The study sought existing knowledge from literature, policies, and available statistics and collected original interview data from 30 academics in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. A central finding was that gender is not a category of analysis in higher education policy, research or statistical data in the region. Our interview data suggest that leadership was frequently not an object of desire for women. Being associated with particular types of masculinities, leadership often carried a heavy affective load for those women who transgressed patriarchal socio-cultural norms and disrupted the symbolic order of women being led by men. Leadership was frequently perceived and experienced by women in terms of navigating a range of ugly feelings and toxicities that depleted aspirations, well-being and opportunities.

This article aims to deconstruct the underpinning tenets of the term "newer researcher into higher education." In recognition of the ambiguities of the term, we begin by questioning the nature of the field(s) of research into higher education (HE). Secondly, we critique the policy discourses associated with the term "newer researcher." Then, with a view to illustrating the over-linear assumptions of such discourses, the article articulates the biographies of practising researchers in this field through narrative reconstructions of the five authors' own routes as researchers into HE, openly acknowledging their temporalities and serendipitous conditionalities. Finally, we consider the nature of a career in the context of the professionalisation of routes into HE research. Our concluding remarks return us to the question of the status of HE research and to suggestions of positive ways to embrace the dilemmas we face.

This article reports on a recent small-scale phenomenological study into the student experience of the doctoral "viva voce". It was prompted by strong concerns about "viva voce" processes on the part of a Director of Graduate Studies in an English university. The study involved semi-structured interviews with 20 respondents from eight English universities in a range of disciplinary areas. An initial analysis of the interviews illuminated the powerful affective dimensions of the "viva voce" and the gendered nature of its processes. Resisting the binary separation of reason and emotion, the paper draws upon discursive theories of affect, gender and subjectivity to consider the affective economies that are illuminated in this data and suggests that this involves the reproduction of gendered hierarchies.

The notion of lifelong learning has become a mantra within educational policies. However these have been strongly critiqued for reflecting an understanding of learning that privileges the economic benefits of participation in formal education. In UK contexts, the importance attached to widening participation in higher education is one manifestation of these policy discourses, which can be interrogated as a form of governmentality. This paper draws upon a recent small-scale mixed-method study of different vocational learners' transition from Level 3 courses to consider how these policy discourses are being mediated by "learners" who were qualified to enter higher education, but decided instead on alternative life courses. The analysis suggests that policy constructions of participation in higher education sit at a disjuncture with respondents' longer-term experiences of institutionalised education processes. In other ways, lifelong learning seemed to be willingly embraced in respondents' different commitments to learning and self-development, although higher education institutions were not often seen as a source of this learning. The article aims all the same to allow this interpretation of respondents' voices to speak back and disrupt policy mantras.

This article responds to recent UK proposals on measuring and recording student achievement (Universities UK 2007) to highlight issues that are relevant across different higher education contexts, which are increasingly intertwined through the expansion of the Bologna process. Drawing from wide-ranging literature on assessment and sociology, this paper argues that the introduction of new assessment technologies cannot be seen from a purely technical perspective but instead requires a deeper appreciation of assessment as a social practice, which contributes powerfully to the construction of learner subjectivities in ways that are not necessarily benign. Although not suggesting this leads to any easy solutions, the concept of 'meta-social' awareness may be useful in better supporting a diverse student body in confronting the complexities of the twenty-first century.

What if knowledge is a form of doing, an engagement between a knowing subject and what is known? What if learning is a contextualised performance involving students engaging with prospective and current social identities, and therefore an ontological as well as an epistemological accomplishment? What then becomes of formative assessment within different disciplinary pedagogies? In this paper, we open up the possibility of formative assessment as encompassing a disciplinary meta-discourse within the context of teaching as response. We draw on data from a postgraduate context to illustrate how the identities of teachers and learners may be brought into play. Formative assessment is seen to involve movement across a concrete-procedural-reflective-discursive-existential continuum, and between the convergent and divergent. We suggest that by asserting the centrality of disciplinary knowledge and identities, the frameworks presented may be used heuristically to entice academics into thinking more specifically and organically about pedagogies which are more appropriate to the changing nature of twenty-first-century higher education. (Contains 5 tables.)

This paper is based on a small-scale mixed-method research project, which was located in south-east England and was funded by the British Academy. The project, investigated the factors that affected young people's decisions not to progress to higher education (HE) after following a Level 3 vocational pathway in upper secondary education. Set against the context of divergent and somewhat contradictory government policy initiatives, it draws on the concept of imagined futures as a way of considering students' "decision-making" in their transition from further education to other locations. This paper explores how a group of young people completing their vocational courses in summer 2008 viewed--or imagined--their futures. Contrary to policy discourses, vocational pathways did not necessarily offer straightforward progression to HE. Respondents' "imagined futures" did not lack agency, but HE was not an immediate part of them. (Contains 1 note.)

This article reports on aspects of a recent research and development project in doctoral education. It focuses on the use of email for tutor's formative assessment within the early stages of a Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) in an English university. Its case study methodology included participant observation of the programme workshops, critical discourse analysis of the email texts, and two series of in-depth, semi-structured student interviews. The tutor whose feedback was analysed had previously researched and theorised formative assessment, so the research allowed his previous theoretical insights to be explored and developed in an early doctoral context. The article concludes by discussing the problematic power of feedback at this level, given the culturally constructed associations of feedback with summative assessment, and implications for supervisory practice. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

This paper reports on empirical research into formative assessment conducted in a blended learning environment within a professional doctorate in education (EdD.) programme in an English university, focusing primarily on peer discussion forum activity. This was conceptualised within sociocultural learning theories, where learning entails processes of identity formation. The data presented suggests the usefulness of online environments for supporting students' development of subject positions as researchers, thereby constructing new relations between peers, as well as tutors and students, in addition to providing shared textual resources upon which the tutor's feedback can then build. The paper discusses how this might contribute towards more collective forms of doctoral supervision. (Contains 2 figures and 1 note.)

The article reports on a small-scale in-depth research study investigating formative assessment enacted and theorised from a sociocultural perspective within a part-time Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) programme in an English university. Going beyond its conventional conceptualisation within psychological and motivational frameworks, formative assessment here encouraged students to view their learning as entailing the development of identities as researchers. The research adopted a case study approach, drawing upon participant observation, discourse analysis of online discussion forum and email feedback, and two series of student interviews. Although the practice of formative assessment remains problematic, students' responses suggest the value of tutor feedback, including its ontological dimension. Given the wide-ranging backgrounds of the learners who participated in this study, our findings suggest the relevance of a sociocultural view of formative assessment for supporting a more diverse doctoral student population. This leads us to argue for doctoral supervision to be conceptualised more firmly as a pedagogic relation in which formative assessment has a key role. (Contains 3 figures.)