On doctoral (in)visibility and reframing the doctorate for the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT

The paper explores how doctoral education and doctoral researchers in Europe are currently positioned, in relation to changes in the conditions of academic work and in the context of recent critiques of the doctorate (Cardoso, S., O. Tavares, C. Sin, and T. Carvalho. 2020. Structural and Institutional Transformations in Doctoral Education: Social, Political and Student Expectations. Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature; Whittington, K., and S. Barnes. 2021. “The Changing Face of Doctoral Education.” In The Future of Doctoral Education, edited by R. Bongaart, and A. Lee, 5–17. Routledge.). Two research questions, one about doctoral researcher visibility/invisibility and the other concerning how holistic changes to doctoral education might be approached, are posed. The paper first considers the extent to which doctoral researchers are rendered invisible in their universities and what the negative and positive consequences of this are for doctoral candidates. A conceptual framework for examining invisible paid or unpaid work, drawing on Hatton’s (Hatton, E. 2017. “Mechanisms of Invisibility: Rethinking the Concept of Invisible Work.” Work, Employment and Society 31 (2): 336–351) research about invisible paid work and disadvantage, is used to shape this discussion. The same framework is used to explore both existing critiques of the doctorate and recent significant changes to academic work and how they may have shaped or should shape, doctoral education. Finally, the paper examines a possible holistic reframing of the doctorate, drawing on work by Morley (Morley, L. 2013. Women and Higher Education Leadership: Absences and Aspirations), exploring how doctoral candidates and supervisors as people, universities as organisations and the knowledge that feeds into doctoral theses, could all be changed for the better.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctoral education
• invisibility
• doctoral researchers
• doctoral knowledge
• academic work

Introduction

The paper considers the status and (in)visibility of doctoral studies, processes, theses, structures and researchers in Europe university settings. It explores how doctoral education is being affected by recent developments in the conditions of academic work and university environments (Cardoso et al. 2020; Whittington and Barnes 2021) and examines how changes to the doctorate might be tackled by universities in a holistic rather than piecemeal way. Two research questions are posed to help with this analysis. The first is ‘To what extent are doctoral researchers rendered (in)visible in higher education institutions and what are the consequences of both visibility and invisibility for doctoral candidates?’ Invisibility is considered important since, as suggested here, while doctoral researchers are less visible than Masters or undergraduate students, with consequences for socio-economic status, legal rights and occupation and use of space, there is also likely to be less emphasis on making holistic rather than piecemeal changes to doctoral education. Improving the visibility of doctoral researchers would enhance the chances of developing a more comprehensive approach to reframing the doctorate. A sociological theoretical framework developed to investigate invisibility, disadvantage and inequality in women’s paid and unpaid work (Hatton 2017), is used to shape this discussion and also to explore critiques of the doctorate and recent changes to academic work which affect the roles that doctoral researchers may enter after they graduate. The main source for the analysis is existing literature about challenges to doctoral education in Europe and beyond, including journal papers, edited books (Cardoso et al. 2020; Lee and Bongaart 2021; Yudkevich, Altbach, and de Wit 2020) and a 2019 declaration about the key priorities for global doctoral education (Nerad et al. 2019). A very recent report on the future of the doctorate in Europe has also just produced a vision for building the foundations of research via doctoral education (Georghiou and Hasgall 2022). It is recognised that the doctorate takes different forms in different European countries (Kehm 2020) and that what doctoral researchers do also varies according to academic discipline but here, for space reasons, the emphasis is on examining overarching critiques of the doctorate. The second research question is ‘Given extensive critiques about the doctorate, including its fit with contemporary academic work, how could universities embark on a reframing of doctoral study in Europe which attempts to respond to those critiques?’ Given the issues about invisibility of doctoral researchers considered in the paper and the tendency of many institutions to only make piecemeal changes to doctoral education when problems are identified, a more holistic reshaping of the doctorate is suggested rather than taking each issue separately. Accordingly, a repurposing of Morley’s (2013) conceptual framework used for building a comprehensive approach to the enhanced promotion of women academics to full professor is proposed, using a model which directs attention to orchestrating change in people, organisations and forms of knowledge in order to explore how doctoral candidates and supervisors, universities as organisations and the knowledge that feeds into doctoral theses, could all potentially be harnessed for the improvement of the twenty-first century doctorate.

Doctoral researchers are usually only a small proportion of those studying at comprehensive universities in Europe and thus tend to get less institutional attention and are less visible than bachelors’ and master’s students. Even if doctoral researchers are salaried (common in some European countries), the status of doctoral candidates is rarely comparable to that of other academic staff and their funding is still precarious, as it is time-limited. By contrast, the doctoral degree itself is more visible in universities. This is because having a doctorate is part of a recognised pathway to an academic career (Finkelstein and Jones 2019). Other doctoral matters like slow thesis completion and high drop-out rates (Dowle 2020; Hasgall, Saenen, and Borrell-Damian 2019) have also brought some visibility to the doctorate’s shortcomings.

Reframing the whole doctorate makes sense in the light of changes to academic work, the scarcity of permanent academic jobs, the existence of many opportunities in non-academic fields for doctoral researchers and the effects on HE of factors such as mental health (Levecque et al. 2017) and the Covid-19 pandemic (Balaban et al. 2021; Hasgall and Peneoasu 2022). The doctorate could, for example, easily be made more flexible by taking advantage of the online conferences, seminars, defenses, supervisions and digital administration that Covid-19 related changes have brought about in European HE systems (Hasgall and Peneoasu 2022). Doctoral work could also be made more centre-stage in higher education institutions (HEIs), since greater visibility of doctoral education and researchers helps ensure they are fully valued by universities, not only when they win prizes or graduate on time.

The (In)visibility of doctoral researchers

This section utilises a sociological theory about the drivers and effects of work invisibility on inequality in relation to disadvantaged groups (Hatton 2017), which itself draws on earlier research about invisible domestic or voluntary work by women (Daniels 1987). Is doctoral study actually work though? Even where doctoral candidates are classed as students, tasks such as helping with other research projects, laboratory demonstrating, teaching or marking are quite evidently work, whether paid or not. Hatton’s framework also suggests that work invisibilities can aid understanding of disadvantage and power relations and indicates that invisibilities are driven by three linked systemic mechanisms: sociocultural (e.g. gender, race or social class), socio-legal (including regulatory matters) and spatial (use of space) elements, that in her view, often work in tandem. However, as Hatton implies, once invisibilities are revealed, workers can be alerted to these and can try to overcome them or turn them into advantages. Furthermore, being invisible may even be helpful to doctoral researchers if it allows agency, autonomy and critical, creative thinking to flourish without fear of surveillance, although the extent of this agency and autonomy is not well documented in the literature on doctoral education. Being visible also isn’t always positive; it may mean that more information about those researchers can more easily be used in monitoring progress, institutional metrics or league tables. For part-time students, their work is often less visible, both spatially (if they don’t, or seldom, visit a physical campus) and socioculturally, as their doctoral-related networks are more likely to be virtual or external to the university. Much doctoral work, if not laboratory-based, can be out of supervisor sight for periods of time (especially during data collection and analysis, as well as in writing-up periods); this can be both negative (lack of advice) and/or positive (if good progress is made).

Hatton defines ‘invisible work’ as:

‘labour that is economically devalued through three intersecting sociological mechanisms – … cultural, legal and spatial mechanisms of invisibility – which operate in different ways and to different degrees.’ (Hatton 2017, 337)

Sociocultural mechanisms operate through cultural ideologies of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, ability, and on workers’ bodies, identities and skills. We already know about difficult access to the doctorate for people of colour (Pasztor and Wakeling 2018; Williams et al. 2020), first-generation applicants (Bahack and Addi-Raccah 2022) and people with a disability (Booksh and Madsen 2018). Sociolegal mechanisms operate around unpaid, unofficial or informal work and student status. Doctoral students don’t benefit from the same legal protections as an employee but may have other advantages such as reduced train fares and no income taxation. Sociospatial mechanisms refer to the spatial segregation of workers (as for example, in working from home or undertaking fieldwork). We can see the effect of these mechanisms during the Covid pandemic when most doctoral researchers were forced to work from home, with poor WiFi connectivity, cramped housing, care responsibilities and in isolation from peers (Jackman et al. 2022; Levine et al. 2021; Marinoni, Hillijge, and Jensen 2020; Wang and DeLaquil 2020). Addressing invisibility of doctoral candidates and their work is thus an important issue in the debate around reframing the doctorate, as long as attention is also paid to positive aspects of invisibility, something not emphasised in Hatton’s (2017) work.

Doctoral degree visibilities and invisibilities

The forms the doctoral degree takes (Kehm 2020), the status of those who study for it, the mode of study (part or full-time), who supervises, who examines and the extent of (in)visibility, vary considerably in Europe and globally (Altbach, de Wit, and Yudkevich 2020). The doctorate can be studied full-time, part-time, face-to-face or increasingly, online, as remote doctorates predated Covid-19 (Kumar and Coe 2017). The mode of study significantly affects visibility, as part-time and remote candidates are less visible than full-time doctoral researchers but mature students may be able to use their own agency and allow invisibility to provide valuable thinking and reflecting time. There are also different forms of doctoral careers and trajectories (Finkelstein and Jones 2019), ranging from those who enter a full-time doctoral programme at a very young age, with an intention to become an academic, take a third-space hybrid role (Whitchurch 2012) or go to an NGO or the private sector, to those who do a doctorate later in life, either full or part-time and who seek enhancement in their existing jobs or a new career direction. Some who become academics never gain permanent jobs and may continue to lack visibility. Younger doctoral researchers tend to be more spatially visible in HEIs than mature entrants (especially if the latter are part-time) and are more common in STEM fields but late entrants may have more sociocultural confidence because of their previous work experience and be more aware of to what socio-legal rights they are entitled.

Not all countries have formal registration for doctoral researchers, which can lead to spatial invisibility but could also be positive if it encourages more diversity in applicants. Modes of supervision vary from the apprentice model of one doctoral candidate and one professor (Schneijderberg and Teichler 2018), to co-supervision and team supervision, which may be across disciplines, between networked collaborators or HE partners in different countries or using the co-tutelle arrangement for supervision in at least two different countries. The latter sets of arrangements make the researchers more visible (and prestigious) since they are often in receipt of external funding and part of international networks. Team supervision in the same institution is also growing in Europe (Hasgall, Saenen, and Borrell-Damian 2019) and may be seen by some as preferable to solo supervision, including more candidate visibility and avoiding conflict if they don’t get on with their sole supervisor. However, joint supervision also has its challenges, including sometimes too much visibility and conflicting opinions from different supervisors (Guerlin and Green 2015). There may be also be different interpretations of candidate sociolegal status and rights. On the other hand, disagreements with doctoral researchers may be easier to resolve if more than one supervisor is present at meetings and different perspectives may be more visible and more easily aired. The next section considers visibility and recent critiques of the doctorate.

Critiques of the doctorate

There have been many recent international analyses and critiques of the doctorate (Barnacle and Cuthbert 2021; Cardoso et al. 2020; Yudkevich, Altbach, and de Wit 2020). These certainly raise questions about the overall degrees of visibility of the degree itself, as well as that of doctoral researchers but not always in a positive manner. The critiques include restricted access to the doctorate for those from disadvantaged backgrounds (invisibility of the degree and doctoral researchers), over-production of graduates for academic jobs (high visibility of this situation but a lack of preparation for more ‘invisible’ other careers), visible slow thesis completion, the invisibility of poor mental health and assessment of the doctorate (the former as supervisors are not always well versed in how to spot poor mental health and the latter because the content and form of assessment is often taken for granted) and the extent to which doctoral education institutional structures and spaces are visible to and seen as valid by their wider universities. It is not possible for space reasons to cover all current doctoral critiques; what follows is a selection of topics that relate to matters that European universities are more likely to have a voice in reshaping.

Who gains access to doctoral programmes?

Although across Europe, there are many international doctoral researchers as well as local ones, the doctorate is not always equally open to and visible by, those from disadvantaged backgrounds, even if they have the potential to succeed. There is, for example, an absence in some doctoral programmes of people of colour (Arday 2020) or other minoritised groups, even though equality and diversity are allegedly prioritised by European universities (Hasgall and Peneoasu 2022) p 19. This is not an issue confined to Europe and even recruiting candidates from the global south does not solve problems of colonial doctoral curricula (Kidman, Manathunga, and Cornforth 2017). The practices of enrolling on a doctorate vary a great deal from very informal to extremely formal processes and the latter can be demanding for candidates who lack social capital and are hence less visible to those selecting doctoral researchers, whether as students or members of staff (Williams et al. 2020).

Overproduction of doctoral graduates

One common and very visible criticism about the doctorate is that of too many graduates relative to the academic jobs available (Bloch, Graversen, and Pedersen 2015), a critique that typically emerges from those studying labour markets but is also about the spatial distribution and visibility of doctoral candidates. Bloch et al observe that there are both push and pull factors leading doctoral graduates to enter non-academic jobs. Other researchers explore the variety of visible but precarious academic roles and (often less visible) non-academic career paths for doctoral graduates (Finkelstein and Jones 2019). There are also gendered doctoral employment paths, whereby, as in the Czech Republic (Cidlinska, 2021) and elsewhere (VITAE 2016), women, often less visible than their male peers, choose to enter any well-paid professional job they can find outside academe in preference to precarious postdoctoral positions. The overproduction argument assumes most doctoral researchers are heading for academic jobs, which suggests that the broader capability of doctoral candidates, including that of women and disadvantaged groups, is not always socioculturally valued, a point also made about invisible workers by Hatton (2017). Many universities in Europe, encouraged by the EU Salzburg II Principles (European University Association Council for Doctoral Education 2016), have developed extensive transversal skills programmes for doctoral researchers, though until the pandemic these were often only available face-to-face and thus often only semi-visible and often inaccessible to many non-full timers. Furthermore, as research in Belgium demonstrates, private sector employers often complain about lack of team skills and project management in doctoral graduates (Bebiroglu et al. 2021). Universities cannot control labour markets but they can be more visibly open about the small number of permanent academic jobs and encourage acquisition of relevant skills for other less scarce but perhaps also less visible non-academic roles.

Doctoral researcher mental health

Another factor which leads to adverse critiques of the doctorate is poor mental health. Here the invisibility of some doctoral researchers can lead to problems supervisors are unaware of (and often unequipped to deal with) and is a major factor in non-completion or delayed completion. Doctoral researchers can experience poor mental health and low self-esteem, even if salaried, as found in a large Belgian study (Levecque et al. 2017). However, a New Zealand longitudinal study, which compared the mental health of undergraduates who went onto become doctoral candidates with those who did not, suggested only a small increase in mental health problems compared with those undergraduates who don’t continue on to doctoral work (Winter et al. 2020). The completion times for doctorates in New Zealand are shorter than in Europe, so that may affect candidates’ wellbeing. Some writers have suggested that wellbeing can be supported within institutions using a combination of more visibly signposting institutional processes and services, as well as making more visible to doctoral researchers the possible personal characteristics, environmental factors and social connections that can lead to mental illness or loss of wellbeing (McCray and Joseph-Richard 2020). Another approach may be to place more emphasis on currently less visible aspects of transversal skills in doctoral education which provide alternative forms of agency, such as public engagement with and public understanding of academic work, which addresses the valuable but often invisible and hence overlooked citizenship contribution doctoral researchers can make (Deem 2020).

Thesis completion

Not completing a thesis or submitting late, in some HE systems, can lead to an institutional reduction in completion-based funding. Timely completion is also a very visible concern. Many universities and funding bodies monitor time-to-degree. A 2019 EUA Council for Doctoral Education survey found that ‘a majority of early-stage researchers (i.e. 66%) complete their doctoral dissertation within six years (Hasgall, Saenen, and Borrell-Damian 2019) p. 28 but that leaves more than 30% who don’t. Dowle (2020), in his work on timely thesis submission in the UK, has suggested supervisors can support prompt submission by the development of visible doctoral researchers’ agency. This involves building epistemic agency (the knowledge-creation process), relational agency (including peers and keeping in contact with supervisors) and self-efficacy (how to navigate positive and negative critical events in the thesis, such as data collection or a household crisis). All of these can increase the likelihood of timely submission (Dowle 2020), as well as improving the sociocultural and spatial visibility of doctoral researchers in institutions.

Doctoral thesis assessment

The way in which the PhD is assessed is another arena of critique. Here concerns of visibility and invisibility are much to the fore. Closed and largely invisible oral defenses, as in the UK, are potentially problematic, with no public scrutiny, so audio recording or independent chairs are often used to assist good practice. Open oral defences are obviously highly visible but there is usually a much less visible preliminary stage when an examiner panel reads and reports back on the thesis and unless this is satisfactory, the thesis does not proceed to the defense stage. Also in a few systems, it is possible to reject a thesis at defense stage, as research on theses rejected by examining panels in social science and humanities in Swedish universities shows (Stigmar 2019). Open defenses allow anyone to attend, so the process is highly visible. On the other hand, a student with mental health problems may find an open defense very challenging. Furthermore, someone might be in the audience for an open defense with the intention of causing problems for the candidate. Remote defenses, whether closed or open, have become common during Covid 19 lockdowns (European University Association Council for Doctoral Education 2020; Hasgall and Peneoasu 2022). Initially, remote defenses were considered problematic but have come to be seen as useful (ibid), since it is easier to include international panel members, with no travel costs and it avoids visa problems for international students.

Structures and doctoral education

Finally, the structures within which doctoral education take place are also the subject of critique, particularly where there is little or no infrastructure in place beyond supervisors. Where that is so, doctoral researchers can be rendered less visible both socioculturally and spatially and may also be vulnerable in socio-legal terms too (for example in relation to handling poor supervision or bullying complaints). However, structural change is occurring in Europe that adds to doctoral education visibility. A 2019 Europe-wide survey found that most respondents had:

Doctoral programmes with specific elements such as taught courses, milestones, mobility options, etc. are present in 73% of responding universities … Organisational units such as doctoral schools which oversee the development of programmes, ensure quality, develop regulations and guidelines, etc. are present in 62% of responding universities. (Hasgall, Saenen, and Borrell-Damian 2019, 12)

Notwithstanding this, the freedom to determine the content of doctoral programmes and the operating level of doctoral or graduate schools (institution level or subject-based units) as well as the autonomy to alter structures, varies considerably across Europe. Also, while doctoral/graduate schools can assist socio-cultural, spatial and legal visibility of doctoral candidates and education, they are far from a panacea for challenges to the doctorate (Baschung 2020). Nevertheless, as a recent UK and Ireland survey demonstrates, doctoral education structures and strategic development may now be increasingly linked; 75% of the institutes surveyed had a doctoral school or equivalent and used it to promote their doctoral strategy (Smith McGloin and Wynne 2022). Having examined some critiques of the doctorate, the argument turns to looking at how changes to academic work may be or ought to be affecting doctoral education.

The doctorate and recent changes to academic work

This section explores some features of contemporary academic work which are not always fully discussed in doctoral education.

Precarity

Academic work has been in flux for some time, as recent research in Finland shows (Siekkinen, Pekkola, and Carvalho 2020). One of the most evident features is the extent to which academic work is infused by precarity (pay levels, insecure contracts) and the relative invisibility and lack of legal rights of temporary staff (Courtois and O'Keefe 2015; Murgia and Poggio 2019). Precarity exists for several reasons (Bozzon, Murgia, and Poggio 2019). The first is the way HE research is funded, typically by external bodies who offer short-term grant contracts that necessitate temporary research labour and teaching buyouts for Principal Investigators (PIs). This in turn means that short-term contracts are offered to doctoral or postdoctoral applicants to undertake work that PIs are not doing themselves. It also suits some universities to use temporary contracts as a financial buffer (one aided by the relative spatial and sociolegal invisibility of relevant staff), with contracts easily ended if necessary. Precarious workers are also often less valued than academics with permanent posts. Some argue precarity is due to overproduction of doctoral graduates (Bloch, Graversen, and Pedersen 2015) but numbers of doctoral researchers do not in themselves create that situation. Precarity makes academic careers less attractive to doctoral researchers, despite the variety of pathways available (Finkelstein and Jones 2019).

Performance management

The second increasingly present feature is that of considerable and visible performance management of academics’ research outputs, as Pereira’s ethnography of feminist Portuguese scholars demonstrates (Pereira 2017). Here visibility is not a positive element (just as Hatton 2017 suggests in her research when talking of surveillance of employee activity). Performance management itself is not new, as previous research on the permeation of academe in the UK by new managerialism demonstrates (Deem, Hillyard, and Reed 2007). However, the extent of measuring and making visible, performance in teaching and research in HEIs is still increasing (Kenny 2018). It includes not only appraisals, work targets, bibliometrics, and student teaching evaluations (Teelken 2018) but also digital tools. These include software which records powerpoints and voice-overs from actual lectures and stores them for student use but also makes those lectures visible to managers (O’Callaghan et al. 2017). The mass creation of online teaching materials during the Covid pandemic (Le Grange 2020) is also easily visible to managers and potentially offers yet more surveillance of academic performance. Covid 19 has hastened the use of external technology platforms for teaching such as Microsoft Teams, which store numerous data about users that are visible in their wider university. This suggests that though invisible academic work is sometimes problematic, visibility is not always more positive. The reliability and validity of academic performance measures can also be affected by other factors such as overall workload balance. For example, a Dutch study showed that claims about women academics publishing less than male counterparts can be overcome when research and teaching workloads are balanced for all (Leisyte 2016). However, to date, such approaches are rare.

The status of academic work

Some commentators argue that the status of academics is declining and that they are no longer regarded as doing ‘special’ work (Musselin 2009, 2013). Indeed, Human Resource practitioners rather than academics increasingly decide who may enter the profession and with what qualifications and skills, especially at senior level (Vandervelde et al. 2021). We also know that discrimination often occurs in postdoctoral job interviews (Herschberg, Benschop, and Van den Brink 2018) as these interviews (often tied to external grant money and organised by the relevant Principal Investigator) tend to be less visible to HR than more senior hiring activities. Academics in some HE systems have also lost autonomy in relation to their work (Carvalho, Cardoso, and Sousa 2014) and ceded power to manager-academics (Deem, Hillyard, and Reed 2007) and administrators (Rowlands 2013; Veiga, Magalhaes, and Amaral 2015). In addition, some HE systems in Europe, as well as having Senates (or similar) for academic decisions, and special groups to select rectors, also have governing bodies full of external stakeholders. They may be from business or the public sector but often have only a limited understanding of how HE operates and much of what goes on in a university and the work of academics is often invisible or unfathomable (Deem and Magalhaes 2023).

Speed up, hierarchies, specialisation and the politics of academic work

Academic work is becoming speeded up (Ylijoki 2011), with expectations that staff will respond very quickly to student emails or texts and mark essays and exams rapidly. Also, whilst some academic hierarchies in HEIs are visible, others are less so, such as a bias against women working in the complex world of interdisciplinary research (Ylijoki 2022). There is too, a move to greater specialisation and division of labour in academe (Macfarlane 2011b; Nyhagen and Baschung 2013), with more posts that are teaching-only, including full professorships and also hybrid academic/administrative staff occupying ‘third space’ work, such as research management (Whitchurch 2012), an interesting example of the spatial/socio-cultural invisibility of some HE work. The presence of women in such roles also often brings sociocultural invisibility, though this can also give third space workers some valuable autonomy (Roberts 2020) Academic work suffers from gendered politics too (Deem 2018), with women, non-binary and trans-people being less visible and less valued, as Hatton’s (2017) research notes in other work contexts. Additionally, academics are also critiqued from all sides, from failing to decolonise the curriculum sufficiently (Adefila et al. 2021; Schucan Bird and & Pitman 2020), to being accused by the political right of being too left-wing. Research on academics’ political leanings in Europe suggests a complex picture of academic political beliefs across disciplines, whilst finding that there were more left-leaning academics than in other professions (van der Werfhorst 2020).

Doctoral education, international mobility and collaboration

Until Covid-19, many established academics and doctoral researchers in Europe were highly geographically mobile, via research collaboration, conferences and mobility schemes. Mobility has mostly been a positive and visible development in European HE (Alemu 2020) but staff mobility absences can also lead to less time for face-to-face supervision of doctoral researchers and less likelihood of recognising and identifying the latter’s problems, hence contributing to doctoral candidate invisibility. Mobility also conflicts with climate change actions. Doctoral mobility during the pandemic has partially been addressed with more online or blended provision of training, conferences and supervision during the Covid-19 pandemic but we do not yet know if these changes will be permanent (European University Association Council for Doctoral Education 2020; Hasgall and Peneoasu 2022). A good many doctoral students have benefitted from mobility schemes and the international collaboration and visibility it can bring (Henderson 2019; Horta et al. 2021), though women with children can find even short-term mobility difficult to organise. International collaboration, visibility and innovation in doctoral education is very important in Europe, partly through EU funded networks of doctoral researchers and also via new initiatives like the European Universities Erasmus + initiative (https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_1264). This started in 2019 and successful universities develop collaborative strategic partnerships with universities in different countries, focusing on joint online teaching programmes (including doctorates), student and staff mobility (virtual, blended, physical), use of digital tools, pursuit of innovation, inter-culturality, multilinguality, research, entrepreneurship, work placements and involvement with regional governments and industry. Alliances of this kind can make doctoral researchers both more visible and more employable. The analysis now turns to what steps could be taken to reframe the doctorate.

(How)#can the doctorate be reframed?

There have been many debates about how to revitalise the doctorate and new books on this topic appear almost every year (Barnacle and Cuthbert 2021; Bongaart and Lee 2021). There are also some endeavours to focus on what might be the major characteristics of a worldwide contemporary doctorate, for example, the Hannover declaration (Nerad et al. 2019) arising from a major global event in Germany in 2019. The Declaration set out principles relevant to a twenty-first century doctorate, ranging from global values about research through diversity in disciplines, people and forms of mobility, to using evidence-based approaches, developing original, responsible, and ethical thinkers and enabling doctoral researchers to autonomously create new ideas and knowledge. These are very good principles, though they tend to focus a good deal on the full-time traditional doctorate, not on part-time or professional doctorates. Furthermore, the issues considered in the paper about the extent to which doctoral study currently includes invisible and/or undervalued work, are such that principles alone are insufficient and more is needed.

The argument here draws on research about how universities can ensure that more women academics become full professors and take on senior leadership roles (Morley 2013). Morley’s change framework builds on earlier work (Schiebinger 1999) which emphasises the need to address key concerns in equality of academic promotion by approaching transformative change of people, processes, systems, values and knowledge in universities in a more holistic way than is often attempted. Morley’s research was commissioned by the UK Leadership Foundation for Higher Education to see if it was possible to develop a more comprehensive strategy to improve the promotion prospects of women academics progressing into full professorships and senior management. Previously it was common that interventions such as running workshops for women seeking promotion or training interviewers in inclusive and fair interviewing happened but they were rarely linked together as a coherent intervention in the same institution. What Morley suggested (and it has proved very successful at increasing the numbers of women promoted in a number of UK universities) was that for women’s promotion prospects to really improve, a number of different initiatives needed to be combined rather than introduced as separate and one-off activities. The framework as used here emphasises the importance of taking care of planned change in all three components of higher education, that is, people, organisations and knowledge, rather than referring to the specificities of what could be done for women academics, which clearly raises quite different questions and solutions than the reframing of doctoral education. The model itself (but not the techniques Morley suggested) can thus be applied to doctoral education, in seeking to achieve more comprehensive changes, not just in doctoral researchers and their education but also transformations in what counts as valid academic knowledge for doctoral theses and what universities’ purposes and goals for what doctoral education should look like in the twenty-first century. Literally this means working on issues related to doctoral researchers and supervisors and the broader context of precarious and performatively-driven academic work, matters related to universities as organisations and considering what counts as doctoral knowledge, broadening its scope, its interculturality and multilinguality. Of course, some HE systems in Europe are less amenable to making such changes than others, especially those that are highly centralised, so it is recognised that holistic change may not be possible everywhere. It is also true that some of the challenges of doctoral education are not simply related to organisational, people or knowledge-related factors but the latter are matters that universities have at least some scope to change, whereas, for example, they can’t change labour markets.

Doctoral researchers

How could we improve doctoral education from the perspective of the people who undertake doctorates? Consulting doctoral students and would be applicants for doctoral study would be a key starting point. Some important ways forward include ensuring that all who have the potential to do a doctorate have access to it, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, social class background or disability. Additionally, some of the effects of Covid 19 disruption on European doctoral education (European University Association Council for Doctoral Education 2020; Hasgall and Peneoasu 2022) lead to a conclusion that having a more flexible approach to doctoral education, as well as to the types of knowledge used in theses (emanating from the global south as well as the global north) and the nature of topics chosen, can allow more originality and creativity to thrive. At the same time flexibility could enhance doctoral autonomy and critical thinking, both features of the doctorate recommended by the 2019 Hannover declaration (Nerad et al. 2019). In some European HE systems, doctoral researchers are staff rather than students or hold both statuses (e.g in Sweden) and if this was to happen more widely, it would not only aid social and cultural visibility but also improve sociolegal rights and visibility. However, care would need to be taken not to make doctoral researchers so visible that they are afraid to exercise agency or feel they are only valued for their degree output metrics. Supporting and encouraging interculturality amongst both doctoral candidates and supervisors, plus the use of virtual mobility schemes (e.g twinning doctoral researchers with peers and academics at international institutions) may help compensate for lack of physical mobility whilst not being able to travel so widely in the future, both due to Covid-19’s persistence and for climate change reasons. Prioritising wellbeing and encouraging work/life balance amongst both doctoral researchers and supervisors could challenge the ‘long hours’ culture typical of many university and independent research environments (Moran and Wild 2019). Emphasis on engagement of more doctoral researchers with the wider public, as in the Canadian British Columbia Public Scholars scheme where candidates get two years of funding to orient their research planning and findings towards public participation and dissemination (Porter 2021), could open up the assets of doctoral study to the public. Finally, ensuring that all supervisors are supportive of their supervisees and don’t bully or harass them (Hunter and Devine 2016), use their work without acknowledgment or regard them as cheap labour, would be very motivating for supervisees. Almost all these measures would also increase the social, cultural and spatial visibility of doctoral researchers in universities.

Universities as organisations

How can we improve universities as organisations and their approach to doctoral education? Whilst this is not the only possible route to change in doctoral education, it is one that is in the power of most universities to change. Firstly, it would help if universities moved away from having too many invisible and hierarchical structures and disciplinary silos. Furthermore, universities could attempt to reappraise their academic staff and doctoral researcher selection practices (Herschberg, Benschop, and Van den Brink 2018) and ensure the processes are visible and transparent. Lack of clear regulations on doctoral education can also cause problems, especially for those who do not have the legal status of employees, so an exercise about regulation clarity could be conducted by administrators and doctoral students working together. Moving away from a fixation with institutional reputation towards a greater and more visible concern with social justice (Swartz et al. 2019), diversity and equality, would also be advantageous. In theory, many European universities say that equality and diversity are prioritised in doctoral education, with 82% mentioning this in a recent survey as having very high or high priority (Hasgall and Peneoasu 2022) p 19. However, in reality, the evidence of this commitment is not always forthcoming, as a global rankings scheme found out when out of 750 universities sending equality data on gender equality policies, many could not provide any evidence of those policies actually working (Bothwell 2022). Universities could also explore how they can reduce precarity in postdoctoral jobs, which requires considering both how research is funded and how teaching is made visible, valued and organised (experienced academic researchers often escape from teaching responsibilities by passing them onto doctoral researchers). This could be accompanied by a greater engagement in the welfare and academic achievements of doctoral researchers and enhanced valuing of their sociocultural visibility, as well as economic effects of their work as researchers and part-time teachers. Both these moves would contribute to greater visibility and value of doctoral candidates. Some universities have stopped organising open debates on important topics of public interest, yet encouraging doctoral researchers to engage in such debates, would massively increase doctoral candidates’ visibility, as well as improving community engagement. Finally, universities would do well to pay full attention to future-proofing around sustainable development goals and climate change, issues which many doctoral researchers are either researching or to which they have ethical commitments.

Doctoral knowledge

Last but not least, how can we make doctoral knowledge more inclusive? Making room for different kinds of doctoral knowledge, not just global north and colonial knowledge, would fit with efforts that have been made to decolonialise the undergraduate and Master’s curriculum in many HE institutions (Jansen 2019) and also be consistent with the idea of more inclusive universities (Leišytė, Deem, and Tzanakou 2021). This could be something initially discussed with the whole doctoral community. In some disciplinary fields, theoretical or ‘pure’ knowledge is valued over its application, yet as some universities like British Columbia in Canada have found, doctoral research with a real-life purpose and application can be extremely valuable (Porter 2021). Fully supporting open science (on which many HEIs have confusing policies, some of which mainly refer only to publishing issues), including data and methodological technique sharing, repositories and preprints, without forcing doctoral researchers to pay to publish, would help build positive doctoral visibility, as would developing improved infrastructure and support for interdisciplinary research. In many countries, doctoral research can only be pursued by individuals, so exploring collaborative doctorates would be consistent with current academic working practices in some disciplines. In some countries, alternatives to the traditional monograph thesis are regarded as less valuable (Altbach, de Wit, and Yudkevich 2020) but exploring new doctoral degree models can be beneficial to both the visibility and diversity of doctoral researchers, who aren’t all young or studying full-time. The notion of what constitutes an original contribution to knowledge has become a kind of thesis myth (Trafford, Leshem, and Bitzer 2014), which could usefully be discarded. Additionally, the Covid 19 pandemic has significantly disrupted doctoral education (Hasgall and Peneoasu 2022; Jackman et al. 2022; Jung, Horta, and Postiglione 2020; Marinoni, Hillijge, and Jensen 2020) and many affected doctoral students are worried that their degrees may be forever labelled ‘Covid PhDs’. It is really important that universities do everything they can to prevent doctoral knowledge and its assessment being labelled in that way (Houston and Halliday 2021).

Some concluding remarks

Using the two research questions, ‘To what extent are doctoral researchers rendered (in)visible in higher education institutions and what are the consequences of both visibility and invisibility for doctoral candidates?’ and ‘Given extensive critiques about the doctorate, including its fit with contemporary academic work, how can universities embark on a holistic reframing of doctoral study in Europe which attempts to respond to those critiques?’, the paper has explored a number of concerns about the state and (in)visibility of doctoral education and doctoral researchers in Europe. The first question dealt with in the paper is about the extent to which doctoral researchers and/or doctoral education can be rendered more visible inside European universities but also be helped to use invisibility more creatively and positively. Using a conceptual framework about invisible work (Hatton 2017), it was suggested that across different HE systems, a mix of sociocultural, spatial and legal mechanisms do indeed affect the balance between invisibility and visibility of doctoral researchers and doctoral education. Changing aspects of visibility in the doctorate where necessary, such as wider access by underrepresented groups to doctoral education, provision of better spaces for doctoral work and clearly establishing the legal status of doctoral candidates (where they are not currently employees), would start to address this balance. So too would supervisor emphasis on doctoral candidate agency.

There is also a pressing need to make some changes to the doctorate itself, whilst maintaining its academic integrity, criticality, creativity and autonomy of thought (Nerad et al. 2019). The idea of reconfiguring the doctorate is a longstanding debate in the literature but now made more time-sensitive due to the disruption the Covid 19 pandemic has caused to doctoral researchers in Europe and elsewhere (Hasgall and Peneoasu 2022). This includes the weaknesses exposed by the pandemic in the doctorate itself (e.g flexibility of regulations, as well as costs and trauma of lost data collection opportunities and extensions of study). It also includes tackling the growing conditions of precarity amongst early career researchers in HE, difficulties in doctoral researchers building networks at online conferences, disruption of international mobility, a growing and maybe permanent emphasis on remote learning and supervision, and labour market challenges to the employment of doctoral graduates in jobs outside academe in some countries (Levine et al. 2021; Marinoni, Hillijge, and Jensen 2020). Current critiques of the doctorate include access issues, overproduction of doctoral graduates for academic jobs, poor mental health and wellbeing amongst doctoral researchers and the dropout rate. Current assessment of the doctorate does not test all the skills and knowledge gained during the doctorate, including transversal skills. To date, almost none of these issues have been fully resolved. Furthermore, recent changes to academic work mean that that it is viewed as a less attractive a career than it once was, partly due to precarity, decline in status, low pay and speed-up of work.

The second research question relates to how the doctorate and doctoral education can be holistically reframed and made more visible. There is no shortage of suggestions about what to do but at present there is little coordination of transformation and also in some countries, national regulations mean it can be challenging to make some changes. Drawing on Morley’s (2013) change framework involving addressing the people involved (doctoral researchers, supervisors), making some organisational changes and paying attention to widening concepts of acceptable doctoral knowledge, a number of suggested actions were put forward under each category. If even a modest proportion of these initiatives were achieved, the doctorate would become more flexible, more diverse, more visible, more future-proofed and doctoral researchers would be more empowered. Universities could refocus on their educational, research and third mission objectives, without myriad distractions such as institutional rankings and charismatic leaders. Doctoral knowledge, in becoming more broadly defined, would reach out to more knowledge users, including the public, could include more global south as well as global north knowledge, would draw on decolonised knowledge, and would be more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. This holistic trio of interrelated change processes, would reduce problematic invisibility of doctoral researchers as well as achieving positive visibility for a comprehensive reframing of doctoral education.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosemary Deem

Rosemary Deem is a sociologist and Emerita Professor of HE Management and Doctoral School Senior Research Fellow, Royal Holloway (University of London), where she was also: Dean of History/Social Science (2009–2011); Vice-Principal: Education (2011–2017); Teaching Innovation & Equality and Diversity (2017-2019); Doctoral School Dean (2014–2019). She was also Faculty of Social Sciences & Law Postgraduate Dean (2004–2006) and Faculty Research Director (2007–2009) at Bristol University, and Dean of Social Sciences (1994–1997) and Graduate School Director (1998–2000) at Lancaster University. Her other roles include: Fellow, UK Academy of Social Sciences since 2006, Co-Convenor ECER Network 22 (Higher Education), Co-editor, Higher Education (Springer) since 2013, OBE in Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to HE & Social Science, 2013, 2015–2018 Chair, UK Council for Graduate Education, and Chair of Trustees, Sociological Review Foundation (2020-present). Her research interests are in HE policy, governance, management, leadership, inequality, diversity, inclusion in educational settings, and doctoral education.