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Refereed/Peer-reviewed This paper argues that public accountability discourse and research quality processes designed to support it are associated with the validation of methodological approaches in social research which claim to capture the real condition of the social world and to remedy its ailments, supporting an expansion of representative modes of scholarship, and a technicist social research culture. Philosophically reflexive modes of thought in social research that offer an important check to power as knowledge are increasingly being marginalised. The paper concludes that the effects of discourse and practices of public accountability on methodological diversity in social research need to be considered in higher education critiques of power to resist this, necessarily entailing reflection upon the philosophical status of ‘objective knowledge’.

Current understandings of the expectations and educational needs of commencing PhD students are based on research focusing on the retrospective recollections of middle or late-stage candidates about the extent to which their expectations at entry were met. This article explores the prospective expectations of 199 commencing PhD students at the point of entry into doctoral study. Students’ expectations of PhD study, of being a research student, and of supervisors’ expectations of them were collected at doctoral orientation events in an Australian university. The study found that commencing students reproduce institutional discourse about the doctorate being a high-stakes test of the individual’s preparedness for membership of an academic discipline, and they envisage a difficult trial involving hard work, initiative, self-sacrifice, and intellectual innovation with little outside support. The implication for institutions is that the same narrative does not need to be placed centre-stage within orientation and induction. Rather, institutions need to bring narrative and practices surrounding PhD commencement more into line with the contemporary doctorate emphasising to incoming students that, undertaken within a networked and supportive environment, the doctorate can involve both enjoyment and work-life balance. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Although there has been considerable post hoc research on student views of supervisors, there is little on how candidate expectations are constituted at or close to the point of commencement. This study reads students’ commentary about the ‘ideal supervisor’ at the point of institutional induction to examine commencing candidate expectations, concluding that student discourse reflects historical, guild notions of the supervisor as ‘master’, and institutional messaging about the primary responsibility of the supervisor for positive research degree outcomes. The ‘ideal’ supervisor imagined by commencing candidates possesses highly esteemed character virtues and research mastery such that they can meet all needs and guarantee a successful outcome and a positive candidate experience. The paper concludes that institutional representations of the supervisor role need to change to re-situate supervision within wider networks of engagement and support and this needs to be reflected in the design of institutional orientation. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

With the massification of higher degrees, the efficiency gaze has fixed on students and supervisors, or on their relationship, as the ‘problem’ to be managed, in need of administrative regulation, skill improvement or perhaps emotional management. This critical review of a selection of higher education journal articles on doctoral supervision published in the past 20 years within the UK, Australia, Sweden and the Netherlands aims to summarise what we have learnt about ‘the problem of supervision’ to date, and to suggest possible ways forward in light of this within the changing doctoral education climate. The review observes four distinct conceptual frames that prescribe how research education is thought in these contexts, each taking in a specific understanding of what constitutes ‘good supervision’, with implicit relations drawn between academics, doctoral candidates, academic developers and government. The review highlights the importance of the challenge mounted to the conception of supervisors as distant masters with sole responsibility for research outcomes. At the same time, the article argues that a de-contextualised, psychological lens dominates educational thought about research education and innovation, pointing to the need for a greater emphasis on content and context learning within future research and practice around doctoral education. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In recent years, contentiously for some, universities have developed generalist skills lists and associated curricula in response to government demand for more ‘employment- ready’ graduates. Such training usually includes writing and communication. In Australia and the UK, guidelines designed to support the development of skills programmes describe research training as ‘generic skills’ and/or ‘discipline-based’. This framing effectively precludes a discussion of academic literacies perspectives on curriculum development and pedagogy for research training. In a review of some key insights from academic literacies and consideration of their implications for research training, the article discusses why academic literacies are not skills-based, strictly generic or informed by the students’ discipline. The article suggests a reframing of the terms of research skills discussion to accommodate academic literacies perspectives. This would involve recognition of curriculum and pedagogy that aims to introduce the complex and diverse written genres, research purposes, rhetorical conventions, language functions and cultural norms that students are working with, an approach supportive of both effective student writing and subject learning. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Innovation has become a key term driving change in higher education, particularly within the research and higher degrees’ domain. The policy premise that productivity, economic growth and social benefits arise from wide spread exploitation of innovation is driving changes in research including the emphasis upon end users, industry-partnerships, research which can be commercialised, and research training that produces industry ready doctoral graduates. While innovation is increasingly the primary objective of research policy, its economic conditions of emergence and distribution have not traditionally been subject to reflection within either educational lines of inquiry or government discourse and policy. This paper presents some objections to the prevailing policy view from economics,sociology and globalisation perspectives in education. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Purpose: In the past ten to 20 years, centrally co-ordinated research training curriculum has emerged in countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK and other parts of Europe where structured content for the doctorate has not traditionally been provided, or was provided locally only by those schools/departments resourced to do so. Yet, there has been little discussion of content learning or doctoral curricula of any kind within the non-US higher education literature. As Green (2012) observes, curriculum is a ‘missing term’ within these doctoral education contexts. Design/methodology/approach: This article explores students’ perceptions of the usefulness and outcomes of a doctoral series of social philosophy methodology workshops offered to social science and humanities disciplines in an Australian university. The data set includes qualitative responses on 501 post workshop questionnaires and 14 in-depth qualitative responses to a follow-up online questionnaire.Findings: The article suggests that cross-discipline curriculum on the philosophy underpinning diverse methodological perspectives opens a space of encounter among disciplines and theoretical views that facilitates an appreciation for the importance of theoretical engagement within the discipline, as well as receptivity to working constructively across theoretical divides. The article explores what underpins this for students—a ‘non-partisan’ introduction to a broad range of approaches, enabling ‘one to locate oneself’ within a ‘continuum of social thought’, in which foundational uncertainty about the objective status of knowledge is read to suggest philosophical consistency within an approach, while remaining cognisant of the criticisms and affordances of different points of view. Language learning and the inclusion of postmodern perspectives are central in this.Research limitations/implications: The article concludes that curriculum and context learning, including exposure to diverse methodological perspectives for the social sciences and humanities, needs to be given more consideration in scholarship and practice in doctoral education.Originality/value: There has been little discussion of content learning or doctoral curricula of any kind within the non-US higher education literature. As Green (2012) observes, curriculum is a ‘missing term’ within these doctoral education contexts. While consideration has been given to the role of writing and the writing process in cross-discipline learning, little has been reported about the role of curriculum for methodology in the cross-discipline context. It remains unclear what kinds of curriculum themes or foci could facilitate the sorts of relational, textual, and conceptual processes involved in promoting an appreciation of different discipline/methodological perspectives in the cross discipline context (Ivanitskaya et al, 2002; Lattuca, 2002). What set of axioms are held in common among a set of disciplines that could encourage both engagement with discipline theory, as well as receptivity to working constructively across discipline and theoretical divides? This paper describes an experiment in a non-credit bearing series of workshops drawing from social philosophy offered to doctoral students across social science and humanities disciplines in Australia. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

It is often assumed that doctoral students can be best supported by socialisation into academic culture, and that problems with writing arise from the individual deficiencies of students or perhaps poor supervision. The policy environment emphasises skill deficiencies and increased monitoring of students and supervisors, skills training to produce 'industry ready graduates', and interdisciplinary and end-user driven research. There has been less reflection on academic culture, its influence on academic writing, and upon the kinds of educational support required for both students and supervisors to produce effective research writing in the discipline. This paper reflects on insights raised within the higher education literature about academic subjectivity and its relation to writing and supervision. The paper links examples of ineffective doctoral citation and reading practices with discourse within academe about students as academic outsiders awaiting judgement from academic gatekeepers, and of research subjects as persons possessed of individual research 'capacities' decontextualized from specific discipline research practices and knowledges. The paper concludes that there is a need not simply to socialise students into academic culture, but to challenge specific presumptions within academic culture, and to support both students and supervisors in the take up of a peer to peer, discipline-based subjectivity in research writing. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The disproportionate under-representation of women among engineering faculty and workplaces, and the tendency of women engineers to drop out of the profession in higher numbers than their male coun...

As the doctorate becomes increasingly international, communities of educators, researchers and policy makers are being formed who can consider the international trends, patterns and issues facing universities, supervisors and students in these changing times. Doctoral education in international context was produced in the context of the 2nd International Doctoral Education Research Network (IDERN) conference in Malaysia. It is addressed directly to doctoral supervisors, students, doctoral program coordinators and policy makers and discusses many key issues arising in the changing doctoral education landscape. It provides useful theoretical underpinnings and insights into the complexity of contemporary global doctoral education and how these issues are negotiated across boundaries.

One of the outcomes of the policy emphasis upon skills formation in countries like Australia and the UK has been an increase in cross-disciplinary structured programs for higher research degrees raising implicit, but often unexamined, questions about the curriculum and expertise that should inform them. Key insights from applied linguistics and composition studies about disciplinary similarities and differences and writing pedagogy for the development of university-wide structured programs are discussed in the article. In addition, student evaluations of two "social sciences, humanities and business" writing programs that were developed to reflect these insights are reported. The findings are read to suggest that the framework within which research training is conceptualized must consider not only the diversity of domains and activities that characterise higher degree research, but the communicative purposes against which research texts are evaluated and differentiated. The overlapping and contrasting nature of these purposes suggests collaborations among specific discipline groups in structured program provision within the research degree cohort, rather than the local/general research training split that is often assumed. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The traditional focus of the PhD is the production of a research thesis34. In recent years, a second purpose for the PhD has developed that emphasises the development of researchers. This emphasis is sometimes referred to as the‘generic skills agenda’35 which, among other things, emphasises broader communication skills than those implicit in the ability to produce and defend an academic thesis. This focus has resulted in the development of what are effectively ‘curricula’ for doctoral education through the promulgation of documents such as the 1999 Australian Deans and Directors of Graduate Studies Statement on Skills Development for Research Students (DDOGS 1999, revised in 2005) which included reference to communication skills as one of four generic skills which Higher Degree by Research (HDR) students should attain as part of their training. In the UK, 2001 saw the Research Councils and the then Arts and Humanities Research Board issue a Joint Statement of the Skills Training Requirements for Research Students (RCUK 2001). There has been an associated and increasing emphasis on ‘employability’ post-PhD. In the Australian context, these developments have been discussed most recently in Innovation: Inspiring Australia—a national strategy for engagement with the sciences (DIISR 2009).

The ‘knowledge economy’ has been received with considerable scepticism by scholars within the fields of political economy, social and political philosophy, and higher education. Key arguments within this literature are reviewed in this article to suggest that, despite policy claims, ‘knowledge economy’ does not describe a ‘new’ mode of economic production, but a discursive recasting of the relations between ideas and the economy. The article argues that knowledge economy policy discourse undermines older understandings of the role of universities within a democracy, and fails to recognise and support the distinctive and diverse nature of university knowledge innovations. The dangers of allowing economic logic to supersede educational concerns are exemplified with reference to Australian research degrees. Here the focus upon ‘generic’ training to produce ‘knowledge workers’ manifests in an approach that does little to support doctoral students and their supervisors in the actual work of research.

Foucault's work has given rise to increased methodological sensitivity of the political dangers associated with traditional qualitative approaches in the social sciences. There is a growing awareness that the widespread use of the research interview is not indicative of a deepening insight into the workings of culture, but is part of a broader social technology for its reproduction. In an effort to re-imagine interview methodology, scholars have read Foucault to suggest the need for greater attention to the active co-construction of research conclusions arising from interview based research. This has led in turn to the view that post modern approaches produce localized, temporally specific knowledge that fails to shed light on deeper, more enduring social structures. This paper questions these interpretations of Foucault's work, arguing that they fail to accurately represent his genealogical method or to consider its implications for research ethics. Foucault rejects a view of knowledge as emerging from the active social constructions of agents or of institutionalised ‘interests’. Rather, Foucault sees knowledge as an outcome, often accidental, of interrelated historical practices and discourses that produce the subjects and objects of social science discourse itself. The implications of Foucault's work for thinking about research ethics is not a return to authenticity or to analyses of social structure, but a rejection of the centralised, regulatory claims of an organised scientific discourse. The paper comprises a review of social science responses to post structural insights, coverage of the critical epistemological differences between Foucault's method and other key social theory paradigms, and a discussion of the critical ethical issues these differences raise for the social sciences.