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Teaching in Higher Education
ISSN: 1356-2517 (Print) 1470-1294 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cthe20
PhDs by publications: an ‘easy way out’?
Penelope (Penny) Niven & Carolyn (Callie) Grant
To cite this article: Penelope (Penny) Niven & Carolyn (Callie) Grant (2012) PhDs by publications: an ‘easy way out’?, Teaching in Higher Education, 17:1, 105-111, DOI:
10.1080/13562517.2012.640086
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2012.640086
Published online: 08 Feb 2012.
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POINTS OF DEPARTURE
PhDs by publications: an ‘easy way out’?
Penelope (Penny) Nivenaand Carolyn (Callie) Grantb*
aCentre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning, Rhodes University,
Grahamstown, South Africa;bFaculty of Education, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa
PhDs by publications are a relatively new model for doctoral research, especially in the context of the Humanities or Education. This paper describes two writers’
experiences of conducting doctoral studies in this genre and in these faculties.
Each discover alternative ways of employing a body of published research papers in development of an overarching thesis. The writers argue that whilst it can be a pragmatic choice for some, PhDs by publications are more likely to be highly complex meta-narratives and that an overview of past research is fraught with theoretical, conceptual and epistemological challenges in the quest for coherence.
They claim that the nomenclature ‘PhDs bypublications’ or ‘throughpublica- tions’ is misleading: in the epistemological space of Humanities or Education studies, this mode of doctoral research is more accurately represented as a ‘PhD withoralongsidepublications’. They conclude that the particular affordance of the model is that it privileges accounts of the process of knowledge building and of descriptions of the gradual emergence of ‘doctoralness’ in the person of the researcher.
Keywords: publications in doctoral research; meta-narrating past research papers;
theorising an alternative kind of Humanities/Education PhD; doctoral experiences
In recent years the role of doctoral and research education has become a space of contestation and increasing complexity (Boud and Lee 2009). The PhD thesis ‘is changing and metamorphosing rapidly into a wide variety of different forms of output’ and there is diversification of the routes to the attainment of a doctoral qualification (Lee 2010, 13). While doctoral degrees ‘by publication’ or ‘by and through projects’ are more common in the sciences and in performance- or design- based disciplines (Allpress and Barnacle 2009), they are less common in Human and Social Science faculties (Draper 2008). The landscape also varies from country to country, for example, PhDs by publications are fairly common in Scandinavian countries (Lee 2010), but much less so in the United Kingdom where, despite the availability of this model for doctoral students, its uptake has been limited (Robins and Kanowski 2008). In our own South African context, the opportunities for publication-based doctorates are often taken up in the natural and biomedical sciences, but they are rare in Humanities and Education faculties in which our research is based. Apart from the Humanities and Education faculties at the University of KwaZulu-Natal,1other South African Higher Education Humanities
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] Vol. 17, No. 1, February 2012, 105111
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and Education faculties are mostly undecided about whether to permit this kind of PhD.
One of the writers of this article, Callie, has recently completed a doctorate in a
‘publications’ genre and the other, Penny, is referring extensively to a body of her own published research papers in her as-yet-unfinished doctorate. At the outset of our studies we were largely unaware of the wide, international debates around innovations in doctoral education, the new variant forms of PhD, or the role that doctorates are now playing in the global competitive knowledge economy (Boud and Lee 2009). The discussion that follows is grounded in our shared, personal experiences of working towards a doctoral qualification within the model of the
‘PhD by publications’ and how, in a relatively untutored, self-directed manner, we made sense of the genre for ourselves in practice. The purpose of this paper is to formulate insights into these sense-making processes in a bid to stimulate debate around some of the critical issues that we encountered. We explain why we defied convention and selected to do our PhDs in this alternative manner and outline some of the objections and challenges we faced. We became particularly interested in the different understandings of knowledge and knowledge construction which working within this mode seemed to generate. So it is on the basis of our own lived experiences of working within the parameters set by a body of prior publications that we believe we can now contribute, retrospectively, to theorising this kind of doctoral work.
Our research interests centre around teacher leadership within a distributed leadership framing in South African schools (Callie) and epistemological access in first-year Humanities students from under-resourced backgrounds (Penny). As academics, we had both been publishing in scholarly journals for some years but began to experience either self-imposed or institutional pressures to raise our academic profiles. Feeling somewhat ambivalent about such pressures, as well as the prospect of launching into many more years of intensive study, the opportunity to do
‘PhDs by publications’ seemed to offer a pragmatic option. Besides, we felt, our papers had advanced our fields, demonstrated our competence as researchers, showed some originality, had undergone rigorous processes of review and redrafting and had been endorsed in respected, peer-reviewed journals. Perhaps, we speculated, this amounted to something roughly equivalent to a doctorate, or, at the very least, halfof a doctorate? In the dearth of well-theorised, independent advice in the early stages of our studies, we decided thaton balanceour former publications didnot display the full range of generic capabilities, skills or dispositions that would be expected of a doctoral candidate and that the presentation of publications in the context of a PhD study would need to reside in the framing of a substantial meta- narrative, as we will explain later on.
Our self-doubt was certainly reinforced by some sceptical voices amongst colleagues and in Faculty or Higher Degrees committees where PhDs by publications tended to be regarded as a ‘quick-fix’ solution or an ‘easy-way-out’ to the qualification. Concerns seemed to centre on whether doctorates based in a series of short pieces of writing could ever generate sufficient depth or engagement with the topic or argument (Lee 2010). We also acknowledge the inherent dangers in this approach. There is potential for theoretical, conceptual or methodological incoher- ence. The papers may have been written at different times and in different contexts using varieties of theories and approaches, and they may be variable in quality and focus. Research papers offered to journals are often written in the hurly-burly of busy 106 P. Niven and C. Grant
teaching schedules, demanding family commitments, or in response to institutional pressures to ‘publish or perish’ and may indeed fail to show the theoretical depth, range or originality that should be the hallmark of a doctoral study.
There seems to be general agreement that the crucial, defining quality of the doctorate is that it must display originality and it must constitute a contribution to knowledge (Draper 2008; Gilbert 2009; Lee 2010). This value was endorsed by the institution in which we were registered: a doctorate needs to ‘make a distinct contribution to the knowledge or understanding of the subject and afford evidence of originality shown either by the discovery of new facts and/or by the exercise of independent critical power’ (University of KwaZulu-Natal 2007, 25). A doctorate by publications is not exempt from this condition. Yet the regulations and procedures that we anxiously consulted to guide us through the process seemed vague, generalised and unrealistic, or couched in terms very like the classic PhD.
In fact, there seems to be very little national or international consensus on what exactly a ‘PhD by publications’ should consist in. For example, in the Swedish context, this kind of PhD requires four journal articles in international peer-reviewed journals brought together into ‘a compilation for examination with an exegesis or
‘‘cover story’’, that gives an account of the collection, the research that informed the production of the articles, and the ‘‘doctoralness’’ of the body of work submitted in the portfolio for examination’ (Lee 2010, 1213). In Australian universities, Robins and Kanowski (2008) advise that, typically, three to five research articles are required to constitute a PhD thesis, accompanied by introductory and concluding chapters.
The University of KwaZulu-Natal rule states that a thesis of this kind would need to consist of one or more (published or unpublished) original research papers of which the student is the prime author ‘accompanied by introductory and concluding integrative material’ (University of KwaZulu-Natal 2007, 27). As Draper (2008) argues, university regulations often provide little clarity on the number of articles required for a doctorate by publication, nor do they offer guidance as the purpose, format or length of the accompanying documentation. This contributes to the view that the PhD by publication is a ‘quick fix’ or ‘easy-way-out’, and this could leave candidates either vulnerable or cynical.
Nor were we the only ones struggling with what ‘doctoralness’ means in this context. Our supervisors, peer advisors and colleagues, and in Callie’s case, the institutional and national examiner, all had little first-hand experience of this alternative mode of doctorate. They too were unable to draw on a substantial body of experience, theory, literature or expertise. Given the novelty of this genre in our faculties, and in the Humanities and Education faculties in the country as a whole, we were all pioneers on ‘a road less travelled’ although we appreciated the courage of the institution in making this doctoral model available to us.
On the basis of our experiences and subsequent reflections, we now wish to make several claims about the nature of PhDs by publications in the hope that this will generate some useful discussion on the issue. Firstly, we interrogate the way in which this kind of doctorate is named‘PhDsbyresearch papers’, in the sense ofby means of.In the Humanities and Education contexts we would argue that this is misleading.
A PhD of this kind will always be merely ‘accompanied by’ papers ‘with’ or
‘alongside’ a main thesis. We prefer the term ‘PhDswithpublications’. Secondly, the
‘integrative material’ cannot merely ‘accompany’ the papers as though this is an extrinsic element that can be added on in the form of introductions or conclusions.
Instead, the integrative material is at the heart of the thesis and the key to coherence and originality. The integrative process is in the construction of a substantial, overarching ‘meta-inference’ (Tashakkori and Teddlie 2003) or ‘meta-narrative’, and the work of this kind of thesis in a Humanities or Education context is in the identification and fashioning of the meta-narrative. Our third claim resides in the alternative epistemological values that are inherent to this kind of doctoral work and we will explain this insight in detail later on.
We each developed different ways of meta-narrating our earlier research papers.
Callie describes her approach as follows: ‘The most challenging conceptual manoeuvre in my PhD revolved around its retrospective design. How was I to bring together, into a single coherent thesis, eight published independent papers? As I re- examined my papers, I found myself ‘‘working backwards’’ to develop a ‘‘logic of connectivity’’’. In this context ‘logic’ denotes reasoned thought while ‘connectivity’
implies a form of linking, joining or relating. This complex process worked at a range of levels but the retrospective development of three doctoral research questions assisted in the clustering of the papers to guide the synthesis process. At a methodological level, the papers were connected through the design of the doctorate as a ‘mixed research synthesis study’ (Sandelowski et al. 2006). The papers were also connected at a theoretical level (distributed leadership theory) as well as through a common literature review. Finally, connectivity was established through the PhD insights which evolved out of a secondary analysis of the findings across the papers.
However, this sense-making was a complex, iterative process which at times appeared illogical and downright impossible. Sometimes I felt I was ‘forcing a fit’
between the chronicles2and the research questions in the ‘unnatural circumstances’
of the synthesis process’ (Grant 2011). I lived through times of incredible self-belief and times of complete bewilderment. There were moments when I confidently claimed the scholarship to design the thesis as I deemed best and other moments when I felt completely disempowered by the daunting task ahead of me (Grant 2010).
I was acutely aware that for the logic of connectivity to work, multiple drafts of the thesis would be required which would involve multiple layers of re-thinking, re- reading, re-writing and re-tensing before the construction of the meta-inference and the construction of the chapters were complete. It was only at the end of the process that ‘I could confidently argue that the insights that emerged from the study were greater than the sum of the individual findings from the chronicles and offered an original contribution to knowledge in the sub-field of teacher leadership (Grant 2010).’
Penny adopted a new meta-theoretical standpoint on her earlier research: ‘I began to read in Critical Realism (Bhaskar 1979/1998; Bhaskar 1998; Collier, 1994).
In realist philosophy, reality is understood as stratified, differentiated and complex.
There is a stratum of subjective experiencesthe Empirical domain; another stratum of potential events the Actual domain; finally, a layer that underlies them both the Real domain. The Real represents the largely unseen generative mechanisms, causal powers and tendencies which account for ‘‘what must be the case’’ for events and experiences to appear or occur as they do. I conceptualised my past research as located in the domain of the Actual, and the work of the Doctoral study as the retroductive examination of these events to find out what was generating them from within the Real domain. I identified the generative mechanisms I sought by drawing on Archer’s social ontology (1995), looking first at the structural, material conditions 108 P. Niven and C. Grant
in which the research papers were conceived, the cultural ideas (such as theories, values or beliefs) they were drawing on, and the mediating agency of the researchers themselves, with their concerns, projects and autonomous deliberations. So my PhD explores the interface between structure and agency in Educational Development research in South African universities. I asked what institutional and cultural conditioning was I drawing on (or rejecting) as a ‘researcher-agent’ and how this was being played out in my papers. The adoption of this fresh meta-theoretical perspective is allowing me to develop an independent stance in relation to earlier research work. Critical and Social Realism have shown up what is ‘there’ in the papers but also what is ‘not there’, or absent. They refocus aspects in the Education Development field that are un-researched or under-researchednot because former researchers were blind or ill-intentioned but because they explored issues with theoretical lenses that failed to draw attention to ways in which the field might be explored or conceptualised. I see my papers as a body of data, a starting point. The doctorate is only indirectly concerned with the content of the papers (which conveniently avoids the potential for repetition in the PhD study itself). Rather, it concerns the form the papers took and expounds the formative processes involved in researcher emergence’.
These accounts suggest that Callie’s PhD is a ‘stronger’ version of the model and Penny’s is a ‘weaker’ version, but in both cases the papers represented bodies of data on the basis of which new, yet related theses were developed. In neither case
‘integrative material’ was simply added on to an extant set of papers.
Perhaps the most important claim that we can make about PhDs with publications is that they are epistemologically and ontologically different from classic PhDs. We discovered this in the processes of enacting or ‘embodying’ this kind of doctoral research. We found that re-contextualising papers within the setting of a doctoral study meant that they began to shift focus or to carry meanings and significances that were not there when they were discrete, stand-alone articles. They seem to take on a life of their own and to interrelate in unexpected ways. They needed re-ordering, re-formulation, re-interpretation or even re-theorisation. The whole needed to exceed the sum of the parts, yet the parts stubbornly resisted synthesis. It was then that we began to recognise that our PhDs were operating within an alternative kind of onto-epistemological frame. A ‘modernist’ research journey is linear and incremental: typically, it has a clear beginning and proceeds in logical stages, usually with ‘truth’ or knowledge claims being made at some end-point. The modes of inferencing are by means of the formal logic of induction or deduction. But we found ourselves using abduction as we recontextualised our data within larger conceptual frameworks. Orretroductionseemed a more appropriate inferencing tool as we ‘worked backwards’ from the starting points represented by our papers.3
The adoption of a ‘PhD with publications’ model had located us in ways of knowing and knowledge building that were more ‘postmodern’ than ‘modernist’.
A reflexive re-examination of past research involves processes of deconstruction and fragmentation. The meta-narrative is an attempt at reconfiguration of finding another ‘pattern’. Former papers are ‘excavated’ or understood as historical artefacts of some earlier time. As we strove to make sense of the complex interplay of ‘then’
and ‘now’, we were no longer able to sustain our original interpretations of data which now seemed partial, naı¨ve or out-of-date. There was a disconcerting emergence of a multiplicity of perspectives, a disruption and instability of the ‘researcher-self’.
Our experiences of writing were circular, recursive and iterative, more akin toweaving thanbuilding.We became involved in our own action research processes as we shifted to and fro, back and forth, in and out of earlier examples of our work as the new thesis gradually started to emerge. We recalled Denzin and Lincoln’s reference to certain kinds of qualitative research as ‘bricolage’ and researchers as ‘bricoleurs’
who, with whatever tools come to hand, inventively repair and ‘recycle used fabric into beautiful quilts’ (1994, 548). They suggest that our research endeavours might be understood as ‘cobbled stories. . .which help us and others to understand how and why we did what we did, and how it went very wrong. . .’ (Denzin and Lincoln 1994, 548). We suggest, therefore, that there is a sense in which PhDs with publications are almost inevitably times of ‘taking stock’, periods of subjective reflexivity, in which we consider the direction that our ways of knowing have taken us and ‘try and imagine a new future’ (Denzin and Lincoln 1994, 548). Although none of the processes described here are exclusive to postmodern research, we would nevertheless argue that our embodied participation in the structures of a revisioned kind of PhD shifted our understandings of knowledge and its generation and took us beyond the idea of the classical conceptions of the PhD as ‘stewardship’ or as the steady, incremental advancement of disciplinary knowledge (Green 2009).
We have discovered that PhDs with publications are not an ‘easy way out’ to the qualification. Although Callie’s PhD took her two years, from registration to completionand Penny seems set fair to graduate in a similar time frame there is nothing in our experience that suggests this mode is ‘easier’ than traditional doctoral studies. The fact that one sets out with an already existent body of data certainly reduces the time to completion and this is an affordance. But our sense is that in a Humanities and Education context, PhDs ‘by’ publications will never be a comfortable epistemological fit. We argue that it is unrealistic to assume that this kind of study can ever be a victory narrative or ‘journeyman’s certificate’ (Lee 2010) in which a candidate lays down past research achievements as evidence of worthiness to be granted a doctoral qualification. On the other hand, PhDs ‘with’ or ‘alongside’
publications could be very useful to some Humanities and Education candidates.
Differently conceptualised, this kind of study lends itself to a self-reflexive account of journeying in a given field. It privileges the creative enactment of the generative processes of coming to ‘know’ in that field. Such doctoral work could challenge the discourses of PhDs as ‘knowledge products’ in a ‘knowledge economy’ for the purposes of ‘knowledge consumption’ in a globalised academy. On the contrary, we would rather celebrate the model as enabling accounts of researcher emergence in which the researcher as a ‘self-organising agent’ (Lee and Boud 2009) can be observed to be developing ‘doctoral capabilities’ (Lee 2010). What was most creative and rewarding for us was the model’s potential to recognise ‘the importance of the person of the researcher’, to focus on ‘the doctoral experience. . .as a ‘journey’’
and to track ‘the internal process of increased understanding’ (Leonard and Becker 2009, 71).
Notes
1. The University of KwaZulu-Natal formalised ‘PhDs by Publications’ in the Education and Humanities faculties in 2008.
110 P. Niven and C. Grant
2. In her thesis Callie represented her papers as ‘chronicles’ which were ‘stranded’ (Teddlie and Tashakkori 2006) and woven into new patterns.
3. Retroduction involves creativity and imagination ‘thought operations’ in which the researcher abstracts what must have been the case for phenomena to be as they are (Danermark et al. 2002, 801).
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