National policy responses to European institutional pressures on doctoral education: the case of Flanders and Portugal

ABSTRACT

During the past two decades, a shared set of norms and ideas on doctoral education and its purposes has emerged. As the EU strives to transform itself into a knowledge society, countries are expected to have more doctorate holders and orient doctoral education towards the non-academic labour market. However, the interaction between the changes on the European and the national level has not been explicitly conceptualized. This study aims to do that, discussing the different ways in which national policy actors have engaged with this European model in doctoral education. By channelling, buffering and filtering these institutional pressures, they navigate the relationship between the European model, their own preferences and the domestic situation. Using document analysis, we address the cases of Flanders and Portugal, two higher education systems which follow this European model, but also note significant differences owing to their institutional legacies and domestic context.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctoral education
• European higher education
• employability
• European policies
• channelling-buffering-filtering

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to extend their heartfelt thanks to Martina Vukasovic for her kind words, constructive feedback and helpful insights and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

We see no direct conflict of interest arising from our work. However, for completeness’ sake, both authors have been funded as doctoral students by the national funding agencies mentioned in this study, and Freek has in the context of his PhD consulted for the European University Association, though this was not linked to any personal benefits, financial or otherwise.

Notes on contributors

Freek Van Deynze is currently putting his transferable skills to good use as a staff member of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel’s Researcher Training & Development Office. He graduated from Ghent University with a master’s degree in Sociology and Political Science (EU-Studies). During his time as a PhD student at the Center of Higher Education Governance Ghent in 2014–2019, he researched doctoral education policy in Flanders and Europe and was involved in the 2019 EUA-CDE survey and report.

Patrícia Santos is a PhD student in Sociology at ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon, with a grant from the Foundation for Science and Technology. Between 2004 and 2011, she participated in the conception, development and evaluation of education projects in non-governmental organizations in Brazil and Portugal. Since 2011, she has been involved in research projects in the field of sociology of education and sociology of knowledge at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES-IUL). Currently, her line of research is related to doctoral education in Portugal.

Notes

1 Knowledge economy discourse initially emerged at the level of public policy in the late nineties (Olssen and Peters 2005). It was spread by reports from the OECD and World Bank, and the idea that knowledge would be essential for future economic success began to inform governmental policies around the globe.

2 Flanders is a region in the Belgian federal state. Since the late eighties, education and science policy are almost wholly within the jurisdiction of the regional authorities.

3 For Belgium 3%, for Portugal 2%.

4 Though called ‘responses’, it is more helpful to think of the national policy actors as ‘engaging and interacting’ with these pressures in ways that show more agency than ‘responding’ might imply.

5 See the supplementary materials online for a list.

6 Lacking comparative regional data, Belgium is used as a proxy for Flanders in this paragraph. This is unlikely to significantly distort the resulting image, if anything downplaying differences rather than exaggerating them.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) [grant number G.OC42.13N] and by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) [grant number SFRH/BD/102400/2014].