When the governmental tail wags the disciplinary dog: some consequences of national funding policy on doctoral research in New Zealand

Abstract

This paper explores disciplinary approaches to knowledge production and the supervision of doctoral students in the context of New Zealand’s current Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF). In the last decade New Zealand has experienced significant changes to the way doctoral students are funded by central government. Funding has moved away from a ‘head count’ model to one that rewards specific performance criteria of staff and timely completion of students. In the new regime, research outputs by way of peer reviewed publications, conference presentations, grant awards, postgraduate completions and so forth constitute the significant markers of such performance. Yet in general terms, the production of knowledge varies considerably by academic discipline. This paper uses qualitative methods to explore the potential for the PBRF to privilege some approaches to knowledge production (and models of doctoral supervision) while challenging the viability of others.

Keywords:

• disciplinary
• doctoral students
• funding
• knowledge production
• research
• supervision

Notes

1. For a fuller discussion on methodology of these original studies including method of data collection, response rates and distribution of results by college of enrollment, see Sampson (2004, 2008).

2. Mann‐Whitney U‐test revealed significant improvements to rates of agreement for all six items for the Engineering students (p ranged from .03 to < .01). In contrast, response from the Humanities/Social Sciences students did not change significantly for any of the six items measured from the first to the second survey.