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Extending collective practices ofdoctoral education from natural toeducational sciencesKai Hakkarainena, Kaisa Hytönenb, Juho Makkonenc & ErnoLehtinend

a Department of Education, University of Turku, Turku, Finlandb Department of Teacher Education, University of Turku, Turku,Finlandc Institute for Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki,Helsinki, Finlandd Centre for Learning Research, University of Turku, Turku, FinlandPublished online: 04 Jun 2014.

To cite this article: Kai Hakkarainen, Kaisa Hytönen, Juho Makkonen & Erno Lehtinen (2014):Extending collective practices of doctoral education from natural to educational sciences, Studiesin Higher Education

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Extending collective practices of doctoral education from naturalto educational sciences

Kai Hakkarainena*, Kaisa Hytönenb, Juho Makkonenc and Erno Lehtinend

aDepartment of Education, University of Turku, Turku, Finland; bDepartment of TeacherEducation, University of Turku, Turku, Finland; cInstitute for Behavioural Sciences,University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; dCentre for Learning Research, University ofTurku, Turku, Finland

The purpose of the present investigation was to examine how a collectiveknowledge-creation-oriented approach to doctoral education is being adopted inresearch within the field of education. The authors interviewed nine leaders ofnational centres of excellence in science research and 12 education professorswhose research communities cultivate collective practices of doctoral education.In order to examine how the collective practices differ from the individual ones,the authors also interviewed nine education professors from well-known Finnishand other European universities engaged in supervising traditional monographtheses. Three principal features of the collective model (CM) of doctoraleducation were distinguished: (1) pursuit of collectively shared research objects;(2) pursuit of externally reviewed co-authored journal articles; and (3) focus oncollective supervision. The results indicated that the principal features of the CMcan be productively implemented in research in the field of education despitecertain challenges and constraints addressed in this report.

Keywords: academic practices; article-based dissertation; co-authoring; doctoraleducation; knowledge creation

Introduction

The purpose of the present investigation is to examine how collective practices of doc-toral education typical of natural sciences are being adopted in education and othersocial sciences. Because the writing and publishing aspects of doctoral educationhave not been sufficiently addressed in former research (Lee and Aitchison 2009),this study focuses primarily on examining academic writing and knowledge-productionpractices that intellectually socialize doctoral students to the process of creating aca-demic knowledge. Based on theoretical considerations and research on doctoral edu-cation, we distinguish the principal features of two prototypical models of doctoraleducation: the individual model (IM) and the collective model (CM) (see Becher andTrowler 2001; Delamont, Atkinson, and Parry 2000; Hakkarainen et al. 2013). Onemust acknowledge, of course, hybrid cases and fuzzy boundaries in these models.The nature of the research objects, types of epistemic artefacts pursued and supervisorypractices distinguish these doctoral education models from one another (Table 1). Wedo not see the CM and the IM as inimical models. Natural sciences relied on the

© 2014 Society for Research into Higher Education

*Corresponding author. Email: sakahy@utu.fi

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lone-scholar model in the beginning of the last century, and the collectivization of aca-demic research is a relatively recent phenomenon (Merton 1973; Thagard 1997) thatincreasingly extends to social sciences and many areas of their application.

The IM involves doctoral students pursuing personally chosen research problems. Itaims at producing a monograph that is usually not published beyond local publicationseries. It is also possible, but rare, that doctoral students following the IM publish somechapters of their dissertation as articles. A personal relationship with a supervisor pro-vides the guidance needed during the process. Constructing an extensive dissertationhas often been considered as the peak, formative experience in a scientific career, cul-tivating the student’s independent scientific mind and the ability to deal with a largeargumentation structure. Successful pursuit of doctoral research requires strong aca-demic direction and personal support from the supervisor. It is challenging for a super-visor to provide proficient supervision for diverse personal dissertation projectssometimes not closely related to his or her own research.

The collective model (CM), in turn, focuses on socializing doctoral students to aca-demic practices by providing them early opportunities to apprentice in research com-munities (Austin 2009; Becher and Trowler 2001; Delamont, Atkinson, and Parry2000; Golde 2005; Knorr Cetina 1999; Pyhältö, Stubb, and Lonka 2009). It hasthree principal features. First, participants are guided to pursue shared researchobjects embedded in their supervisor’s research projects rather than merely personalones. In an optimal situation, the CM provides doctoral students the opportunity to par-ticipate in the collective creation of scientific knowledge. Collective knowledge cre-ation involves sharing these objects and transmitting them from one cohort orgeneration of investigators to the next. Working with research objects shared by acutting-edge research group may allow a doctoral student to work at the frontiers ofknowledge instead of starting from scratch or merely replicating earlier investigations(Holmes 2004). However, only some supervisors are pursuing truly cutting-edgeresearch.

The second principal feature of the CM is that doctoral students are socialized topublish in international scientific journals through co-authoring (Florence and Yore2004; Hakkarainen et al., forthcoming; Kamler 2008; Morrison, Dobbie, and McDo-nald 2003). While doctoral students in natural sciences are acculturated throughco-authoring to write like scientists and learn to publish in high-ranking journals,

Table 1. Principal features of the individual model (IM) and the collective model (CM) ofdoctoral education.

Principalfeatures (PF) Individual model (IM) Collective model (CM)

1. Researchobjects

Pursuit of personal problemsand research projects.

Pursuit of collective research problemsembedded at research leader’s network ofprojects.

2. Epistemicartefacts

Pursuit of personalmonographs.

Pursuit of article theses consisting ofrefereed articles co-authored betweenstudents and supervisors.

3. Nature ofsupervision

Personal relationship betweenstudents and the supervisor.

Distributed supervision embedded inparticipating in shared knowledgepractices with junior and seniorresearchers.

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students in social sciences often have to learn these skills through personal trial-and-effort efforts, if at all. Accordingly, they tend to seek ‘safe-spaces of publication’(Kamler 2008, 287) rather than rising to higher standards. Doctoral students working inresearch groups tend to be more productive after completing their theses than those pur-suing their dissertation alone (Platow 2012). Co-authoring is a crucial aspect of the CMbecause it involves senior researchers (a) sharing part of the credit concerning collectiveachievements; (b) investing part of their time in coaching newcomers; and (c) providinglearning challenges and developmental opportunities that gradually become moredemanding across the trajectory of the doctoral process. A crucial aspect of theprocess is learning to produce epistemic artefacts in a standard and (where appropriate)evidence-based format that passes rigorous peer review by investigators coming frommore or less different contexts. An established practice in Scandinavia and elsewhere inEurope is pursuing an article thesis co-authored with the supervisor and other col-leagues (for practices regarding making a PhD from publications, see Dong 1998;Dudley-Evans 1999; Green and Powell 2005; Kwan 2013).

The third principal feature of the CM is distributed supervision that does not onlydepend on personal relations between doctoral students and supervisors (although theseare important) but also capitalizes on the shared knowledge practices and distributedresources of a research group consisting of junior and senior researchers and theirteams (Lee and Boud 2009). Well-organized research groups constitute cognitive-cultural systems of academic research (Nersessian 2006); mentoring and apprenticingpractices are an essential aspect of their activity (Austin 2002). Through sustained par-ticipation, new doctoral students are gradually socialized to shared knowledge prac-tices; a great deal of learning takes place through horizontal (between-peer) (seeFenge 2012) and vertical (between newcomers and senior researchers) knowledgesharing. Interview data from collective doctoral students participating in medical andscience programmes indicate that two-thirds of their agentic talk involved referencesto socially distributed resources and the pursuit of shared research objects (Hakkarainenet al. 2013). Success in the doctoral process, however, is often as deeply dependent onthe supervisor’s personal efforts as in the IM. Engaging students at an early stage inscientific conferences provides a basis for creating their own international academicnetwork, without which advancement to the top of their field would not be possible.Integrating doctoral investigations with the collective pursuit of research characteristicsin the CM arguably puts doctoral students at the centre of efforts to advance scientificknowledge. Through membership in larger professional research teams and with thehelp of active international networks, doctoral students are able to participate in ambi-tious research studies that can result in widely recognized scientific findings.

In this article, we describe the Finnish doctoral programme on which the presentinvestigation focused. The full-time students involved are funded by four-year doctoralprogrammes, researcher posts in externally funded research projects, assistant posts inuniversity departments and grants from private foundations. However, many socialsciences students pursue their dissertations on a part-time basis and work outside uni-versities. Course work is only about one-third of students’ total workload, and most oftheir time is devoted to pursuing doctoral investigations. A thesis, when completed,must be accepted by two external evaluators from other national or international univer-sities. The student is then granted the right to publicly defend the thesis; after that it ispublished locally. Monograph theses constitute an extensive (200–500 pages) report inwhich personal investigations carried out by doctoral students are reported, often usinga national language. Article-based theses consist of a 40–80-page introduction

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(synthesizing background, methods, results and significance of the findings) as well asthree to five internationally refereed original studies in which the doctoral student isusually the first author. In hybrid cases, monographs are organized as separatestudies to be published after the thesis is accepted. The thesis is evaluated accordingto the success of the oral defence, quality of research, originality of investigationsand the significance of the findings. Dissertation articles are assessed as part of thethesis according to the quality and impact (prestige and scientific importance) of thejournals in which they have been published (Swedish National Agency for Higher Edu-cation 2006). Degree requirements for doctoral studies are the same in all fields andequivalent to PhD degrees in many European countries.

Through interviews with research leaders, the present investigation addressed thefollowing main problems:

(1) How are the principal features of the individual and collective models of doc-toral education implemented in educational research and natural sciences,respectively?

(2) To what extent is the collective model of doctoral education being extended tothe field of educational research?

(3) What kinds of challenges and constraints are involved in transforming practicesof doctoral programmes in education in the collective direction?

Method

The first author interviewed 30 research leaders from Finnish and other European uni-versities that allow pursuing doctoral dissertations consisting either of a monograph or asummary of articles. The interviewees were in the following three groups: (a) nineleaders of Finnish national centres of excellence (COE) in physics, medicine and neuro-science – in other words, natural sciences – who had extensive experience with the CM(N1–N9, N represents ‘natural science’); (b) 12 leaders of Finnish or European edu-cational research communities who were focused, to varying degrees, on transformingacademic practices within their research communities toward the CM and article theses(A1–A12, A represents ‘article’); and (c) nine Finnish education professors who hadextensive experience supervising traditional personal monographs (M1–M9, M rep-resents ‘monograph’) and who assisted in relating the emerging collective practicesto features of the IM. Table 2 presents a summary of the interviewees’ backgrounds.

The interviews addressed the knowledge-creation process in terms of the nature ofresearch problems, methods of socializing doctoral students to the communities’research practices, approaches to co-authoring with students, and scientific supervision.Each of the themes involved several subordinate questions that were pursued when therespondents did not spontaneously discuss the issue in question. The length of inter-views varied from 42 minutes to 155 minutes. The Finnish participants were inter-viewed in Finnish and the international participants in English. The interviews wereaudio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed according to qualitative contentanalysis using the ATLAS.TI 6.0 program. The contents of the transcribed interviewswere roughly categorized according to the principal features of doctoral education.After that, we produced qualitative descriptions of content regarding each of the prin-cipal features; separate descriptions were produced for natural scientific and edu-cational practices.

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Results

Principal feature 1: nature of research objects

The natural-science research leaders revealed that their doctoral students’ research pro-blems emerged from the communities’ collective needs and prevailing research pro-jects, finding their fit with previously initiated lines of inquiry. As N4 emphasized, itis the senior investigators’ responsibility to create research questions that are in accord-ance with the nature, historical development and future trajectory of the researchgroup’s work. In this regard, N6 stated:

Of course it isn’t reasonable to think that a person who is coming to do her doctoral dis-sertation and is in a scientific sense at the very beginning of her career, could come up withsuch a central research question that it would be prioritized above what has been discussedin this circle; it’s just not possible.

Table 2. Participant background and principal features of doctoral education.

Code Gender Nation*OwnPhD**

SupervisedPhDs Prestige***

Minutes ofinterview

N1 F FIN Article > 31 1 125N2 M FIN Article 1–10 1 94N3 F FIN Article 11–20 2 128N4 M FIN Article > 31 1 42N5 M FIN Mono 21–30 1 110N6 M FIN Article 11–20 1 57N7 M FIN Mono > 31 2 91N8 M FIN Article 1–10 2 98N9 F FIN Article 21–30 2 86A1 F FIN Mono 1–10 3 144A2 M INT Mono 11–20 3 103A3 F FIN Article 11–20 2 141A4 M FIN Mono 21–30 2 155A5 F FIN Mono 1–10 3 97A6 M INT Mono > 31 1 118A7 F FIN Article 1–10 2 64A8 F FIN Article 1–10 2 110A9 F FIN Article 11–20 2 93A10 M INT Mono > 31 2 81A11 M FIN Mono > 31 1 155A12 M FIN Mono 1–10 2 152M1 M FIN Article 1–10 3 130M2 M FIN Mono 11–20 3 66M3 M FIN Mono 21–30 2 46M4 M FIN Mono 1–10 3 72M5 F FIN Mono 11–20 3 98M6 M FIN Mono 1–10 3 72M7 M INT Mono 21–30 2 123M8 F FIN Mono 1–10 3 64M9 F FIN Mono 1–10 3 61

* FIN=Finnish; INT=International. ** In order to protect the participants’ anonymity, only a rough estimateof supervised PhDs is provided. *** The participant’s citation record was assessed using the Publish orPerish program (http://www.herzing.com) and categorized from the most highly cited (1) to the least cited(3): Group 1 (10,001–25,000), Group 2 (1001–10,000) and Group 3 (less than 1000 citations).

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From obtaining external funding, it follows that the whole community, including doc-toral students, must pursue a joint research object. As pointed out by N3, N6 and N9, itis common for research questions to be passed on through generations of students so ifone student is sidelined, a subsequent student inherits his or her problems. When newdoctoral students are contracted, they will continue lines of research established byearlier ones who often provide support as postdoctoral researchers. When doctoral stu-dents become more experienced, however, they can more centrally participate inframing research problems. By pursuing collectively shared problems, students canmake a significant contribution to joint knowledge-creation efforts, a point emphasizedby one of the most highly regarded Finnish scientists: ‘My so-called fame, both nation-ally and internationally, is based to an exceptional degree, on these brilliant studentswriting their PhDs’ (N4).

The monograph supervisors’ interviews revealed that the individual doctoral stu-dents’ research objects usually represented the students’ personal, academic or pro-fessional interests. Students usually ask investigators to be their supervisors whoseresearch orientation is theoretically and methodologically close to their own interests.Beyond selected students working on the research leaders’ own research projects, dis-sertations represented heterogeneous topics that were not directly linked to the super-visors’ research efforts. Some monograph supervisors, however, experienced a fewdoctoral students working on the supervisors’ research projects and sharing manyaspects of their lines of inquiry.

Almost all the collectively oriented educational research leaders worked to createpractices embedding dissertation projects in collectively shared lines of research. Asin the natural sciences, educational research communities were built around the doc-toral students pursuing collectively shared research objects that put the students inthe centre of the collective knowledge-creation process. However, rather than repre-senting strictly defined research questions, the shared research objects were oftendefined in terms of certain research phenomena the methodological instruments devel-oped by a research group made accessible. While A4 acknowledged the importance ofhaving a shared research object for doctoral students to pursue, he pointed out that theresearch objects are more constrained in natural than in social sciences, where theoreti-cal approaches frame investigation:

So this [object] has been at the centre the whole time [when pursuing shared research], butof course it’s a lot more loose and open than it typically is in a natural science group whereit happens that those specific themes have a lot more variation, which begins to be aproblem.

Many interviewees emphasized that although doctoral students are recruited to work ona particular research project, it is important to let them construct their own personallymeaningful research problems embedded in a shared research theme:

But even if I were to serve them the research question on a silver platter, they could nottake it from me because they need to construe it themselves. So even if they ended up withthe same research question that I’ve had in mind, it might take them six months, and theyneed to walk the path themselves. (A3)

A2 highlighted the senior researchers’ responsibility for defining the problems, direc-tions and methods of inexperienced doctoral students more strongly than did theother educational research leaders. He often writes a short summary of his research

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project based on which students apply for a doctoral position. This allows him to delib-erately form a coherent research programme in which several doctoral students pursue ajoint research object and share their competence:

If you are not able to establish the common research object that you share over a certainperiod of time, you will not be able to keep the group together; you will not be able toaccumulate knowledge and advance your line of research. (A2)

Moving to collectively shared research problems was not initially easy for educationalresearchers. In some cases, the university administration did not allow supervisors tostrongly direct dissertation projects because doctoral students were considered tohave the right to freely choose the focus of their theses. It would also be harder to evalu-ate students’ capability for independent research if their study was integrated with thatof their supervisor. Some students seeking to do their doctorates may already have theirown research interests that may be difficult to integrate with those of the supervisor.Nevertheless, the pursuit of collectively defined problems fuses a student’s knowl-edge-creation efforts with collective pursuits, instead of letting him or her proceed attimes through individual fumbling in the dark. A11 described academic research as alarge and unfinished construction site; in order to advance, one must continue buildingon existing foundations:

So if someone goes and builds some shack outside the framework, then it’s just a bunch ofnonsense. There’s got to be some kind of connection to the main structures of building, Imean it can be a strange extension or an add-on but it must be connected to it in some way.(A11)

By anchoring investigations to the ‘long march’ (Holmes 2004, xvi) of an alreadyestablished research tradition, a doctoral student may be able to advance a researchline initiated by earlier generations of investigators and, thereby, contribute to the col-lective advancement of knowledge.

Principal feature 2: production of personal monographs versus co-authoredjournal articles

Though not all the natural-science research leaders had been initially socialized to‘journal science’ (Fleck 1935/1979, 112), all of them had cultivated collaborative pub-lication practices in their research groups and were oriented toward supervising article-based dissertations.1 Such co-authored dissertation articles represented the mainresearch output of these research groups. In some groups, all publications that were pro-duced belonged to a doctoral student’s dissertation. Doctoral students learn to publishthrough co-authoring with the research leaders and senior researchers but may later alsoco-author each other’s articles. External researchers contributing some portions of dataare often partners in co-authoring as well. Instead of a doctoral student alone, the wholeresearch group assumes responsibility for producing publications, often through weeklyresearch meetings. Even if the manuscript is jointly re-written 20 times, the doctoralstudent responsible for collecting and analysing the data is usually the first author.Going through review statements collaboratively is a central part of many scienceleaders’ supervisory practices. While they focused on publishing articles with doctoralstudents in high-impact journals, N8 acknowledged this to be risky because manu-scripts easily get rejected and repeated revisions take time; in the PhD process, ‘timeis money’. N4 argued for a practice in which even one article appearing in the most

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prestigious journals, such Nature or Science, is seen as sufficient for an acceptable doc-toral dissertation.

The collective model was extended to the field of educational research by depart-ments or supervisors borrowing the article-thesis model from medical or scienceresearch:

The idea came from the models given by other sciences, because I mean we already hadincredibly capable research groups in the 70s and 80s in the fields of natural science andmedicine, so of course we were interested in finding out how it is that they do it. (A4)

For most of the education professors (except A3, A7, A8 and A9, who had writtenarticle-based theses themselves), learning to publish internationally required tremen-dous personal and peer-collective efforts, with hardly any support from their supervi-sors. These professors now encouraged their doctoral students to write an articlethesis because producing monographs, which tend to be forgotten on a library shelf,is ‘a dying art’ (A11). The value of the article model is that ‘the object is public inthat others see it being developed [in dissertation articles] and that it isn’t that oneday I march out with a finished manuscript in my hand’ (A11).

Article-based dissertations were preferred by education professors oriented towardthe CM because those require meeting academic standards beyond a local community;they were considered to improve the quality of educational research. Research leadersA3 and A10 aimed to socialize students to the co-authoring process during the latter’smaster’s studies: ‘In general I’ve started with the idea that when people are doing theirgraduate thesis, that the thesis… is already a completed, potential article [to beco-authored with the supervisor]’ (A3). The main responsibility for completing thearticle lies with the doctoral student; therefore, doctoral students are usually the firstauthors of their investigations, despite extensive support and guidance. The researchgroup assumes responsibility for publications by collectively discussing doctoral stu-dents’ work in seminars, meetings and joint analysis and writing sessions. The super-visor is likely to make a more substantial contribution to doctoral students’ first articlesthan to subsequent ones. Nevertheless, writing the last article may be as challenging asthe first one, despite accumulating experience because of rising standards: ‘when we’redoing something really demanding at the top… you need that support from the com-munity just like you did in the first one’ (A4). Supervisors and senior colleaguesassist in choosing a publishing forum and tailoring a manuscript according tojournal-specific requirements. A central norm is to collectively address peer reviewsso students are never left alone to deal with harsh review criticism. One communityorganizes specific seminars for collectively reflecting on review comments and improv-ing doctoral students’ manuscripts under the strong guidance of senior researchers.

The divide between the CM and the IM is not absolute. Many education doctoralcandidates are practising teachers or administrators motivated to synthesize their pro-fessional experiences rather than attain a research career based on internationally recog-nized publications. Many of the monograph supervisors interviewed were orientedtoward supervising historical, sociological or ethnographic investigations. Researchdesigns involving interpretative analysis of large bodies of data (e.g. documents andvideo-recorded participant observations) in national languages make pursuing articlepublication more challenging than, for instance, typical educational psychologystudies based on internationally validated self-report questionnaires. Many collectivelyoriented educational research leaders still tended to guide students with a large body of

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national data or representing experienced practitioners’ part-time studies to pursuemonographs. While many theses guided by A11 and A12 were monographs, their doc-toral students were required to publish two journal articles parallel to pursuing theirtheses in a hybrid approach.

Individually oriented supervisors focused mostly on supervising monographswritten in the national language, Finnish. However, some were moving toward anarticle-based approach; M8 supervised several article theses and M1, M8 and M9were supervising article theses in progress. Monograph supervisors focused on assist-ing students in structuring their theses, framing their arguments and ensuring a coherentline of argument was present. Monthly seminars were held in which doctoral students’texts were commented on by fellow students interested in similar themes, but the super-visors’ own critical readings and comments played a crucial role. Some of theseresearch leaders also encouraged their students to publish dissertation results at confer-ences and in journals nationally or sometimes internationally; such publication effortswere not, however, systematic but usually left to a student’s own initiative and onlyseldom involved co-authoring.

In spite of the CM becoming a more common practice in doctoral education, somemonograph supervisors still considered co-authoring between doctoral students andsupervisors to be unethical because the supervisor could take advantage of a student’swork to build his or her own publication record. The collective research leaders arguedthat senior researchers should not put their name on a student’s article without playingan essential role in planning and implementing the investigation; merely commentingon a manuscript is not enough. Because the point of co-authoring is to socialize doctoralstudents to journal science, concrete contributions of seniors and juniors to advancingjoint investigations and writing shared articles are needed instead of simply puttingone’s name on a ready-made student manuscript. The collective supervisors reportedthat they contribute willingly when given early warning of required participation inwriting the article. Without collective facilitation, an inexperienced student wouldnot be able to pass rigorous journals’ criteria. Sometimes it is difficult for doctoral stu-dents, who come from an individualistic academic culture, to understand seniorresearchers’ critical role in establishing the research tradition in which the co-authoredarticles are produced. When encountering a student who did not like to have researchleaders’ names on her article, A3 compared the supervisor’s role to building ski tracksacross an unknown forest:

She really didn’t get it that everything was prepared for her and that she had well-oiledskis and sticks and everything, and when she did the skiing and sweating she thoughtthat the person who built the ski track and the coach didn’t do anything. But if she hadgone at it alone in the dark, in knee-deep snow then she would have never made it.

Although problems and tensions concerning authorship may arise in collaborativeresearch communities, conflict situations were generally solved by talking openlyabout problems and agreeing on joint publication principles.

Principal feature 3: practices of personal versus distributed supervision

The present science research communities had a large number of doctoral students andpostdoctoral researchers in various stages of the process, and new doctoral studentswere being integrated as equal members to their community. Supervision herecannot rely on mere personal relations because research leaders have limited time for

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the intensive personal guidance of students. Distributed supervision involves doctoralstudents participating in daily activities in a shared laboratory space that enables theirsocialization to the research group and appropriation of its conceptual and methodo-logical repertoire as well as sharing support and guidance: ‘Doctoral students are phys-ically present here… so that the support comes to a great extent from that team, andpeer support plays a very important role as well’ (N9). Providing guidance to newco-mers is seen as a central aspect of academic payback ethics:

What I try to emphasize is that we’ve all been supervised by someone, [who] has taken thetime to show us, to teach us these things so it’s our responsibility as a researchers to con-tinue this kind of chain. And this is how it works, that we help others sort of teach othersand they [in turn] will be teaching others. (N8)

Supervision usually takes place at joint research meetings organized on a day-to-daybasis in which doctoral students participate as full community members. Such meetingsare, however, seldom organized for the sake of supervision but represent a researchgroup’s regular academic practices. Students often have several supervisors or a super-visory committee, including several internal and external senior researchers. N4 high-lighted the community’s significance as an environment supporting doctoral students’academic development; she experienced it as a personal failure if a doctoral student wasleft alone without the community’s support:

Everybody needs a home base, if you don’t have a home base then you can’t be immedi-ately globally networked. So it applies here; these younger researchers are already wellnetworked; they can introduce those [newcomers] to them [international researchers atconferences]. And hopefully, it is possible for these young, brilliant young researcherswith their stupid questions to rise like rockets to the position of flock leader or to bethe central figures in this kind of international networking. (N4)

The monograph supervisors interviewed appeared to fully represent the traditional prac-tices of supervising doctoral students prevailing in educational sciences. Many of themwere regarded as excellent supervisors of a number of high-quality theses. Their doc-toral students appeared to be in different kinds of structural positions; those having uni-versity posts or positions in recently established disciplinary doctoral school wereintegrated well within their respective research communities, whereas those workingoutside the academy on part-time bases were not. Transmitting adequate academicresearch skills and competencies to doctoral students is especially hard in the frequentcases of professionals who only study part time and have very weak networking linkswith academic research. The main supervision instruments were research seminars withspecific themes and personal meetings. Although research seminars met on a monthlybasis, only those students interested in a certain theme were usually present; there wasoften not a physically present community of junior and senior investigators mediatingthe doctoral process. When monographs are pursued outside a university, the individualstudents may not meet their supervisors more than a few times a year. The monographsupervisors acknowledged that it is tremendously challenging to provide adequatesupervision to a wide variety of doctoral projects unrelated to their own academicexpertise. M6 characterized himself as ‘a renaissance man’ who had to stretch hisexpertise across extremely heterogeneous academic contexts. Monograph supervisorstried to cope with the challenge of supervising heterogeneous theses by collaboratingwith other senior researchers having expertise complementary to their own. Neverthe-less, supervising investigations going in multiple, unrelated directions was considered a

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major burden even after obtaining extensive experience and sharing expertise withcollaborators.

The pursuit of an article thesis, in contrast, involved cultivating collective supervi-sory practices aimed at facilitating scientific investigations suitably written for journals.A1, A3 and A9 highlighted the significance of peer support in the PhD process:

What’s central to it is that the process of supervision is not between the supervisor and theone being supervised, instead it includes the whole research group. One of my centralprinciples is to create this kind of group flow, so that the group, even though there maybe conflicts or problems or even competition between members, they still understandthat by helping each other they can get significantly further. (A3)

Traditional seminar sessions are not necessarily arranged; in place of them, forexample, A1 organizes meetings in which article manuscripts are discussed collectivelyand students’ forthcoming conference presentations are practised. In addition, many ofthe research leaders conduct personal supervision meetings with students. The articletheses supervisors, in particular, and some monograph supervisors systematicallysend their first- and second-year students to international conferences to becomeacquainted with and receive feedback from international experts. In the cases of A4and A11, inviting international researchers to their own research communities toshare academic competence has been very important. When graduating, the collectivedoctoral students have an international network of research contacts and collaboratorsin addition to their dissertation.

Supervision practices in Finland have become more organized and structured acrossmonograph and article contexts because of the emergence of discipline-specific doc-toral schools over the last 10 to 15 years. As A1 noted, one cannot ask a student topursue an article-based dissertation without providing full-time funding either from dis-cipline-specific doctoral schools, research projects or private foundations. It is commonto have supervising committees in the contexts of monographs and article-based theses.Although students working on research projects learn many useful skills from theirpeers and senior colleagues, they sometimes must cope with conflicting demandswhile distributing their efforts between project work; coaching and supporting juniorstudents; and focusing on their own dissertation research. In order to negotiate suchdemands, collective doctoral students need direction from their supervisor. A furtherchallenge is that article acceptance is sometimes delayed, which hinders a dissertationproject’s advancement; the supervisor must help students keep the academic flameburning when articles are delayed or rejected or when they require drastic modification.

Discussion

The present investigation addressed how the article-based CM of doctoral educationcan be, and has been, extended from natural sciences to research in the field of edu-cation, which has traditionally relied on the monograph-based IM. Interview datafrom natural-sciences supervisors was used as reference material. The results indicatedthat the article-based, collective practices of doctoral education have been productivelyextended from natural sciences to the field of educational research, although there weresignificant differences between science and education research practices. Differencesalso existed between monograph supervisors and those of article-based theses, althoughthey were less remarkable than expected. The IM and CM were not mutually exclusive

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because many monograph supervisors were moving toward the article model andarticle-based theses supervisors often supervised monographs as well. Research pro-blems chosen by students pursuing monographs were reported to be based on their per-sonal interests and were often loosely related to the supervisors’ theoretical andmethodological approaches. Students pursuing article theses were reported to rely onlines of inquiry that were clearly embedded in their supervisors’ networks of researchprojects. Simultaneously, however, research objects were not directly transmitted fromone generation to another in a way characteristic to natural science; the objects tendedto be more open and fluid.

The most important factor distinguishing between the IM and CM appeared to bethe systematic pursuit of co-authored international journal articles, which only charac-terized the CM. Personally authored articles are, frequently but less systemically,reported to be published by students pursuing monographs. The nature of researchdesign and data (e.g. large bodies of ethnographic data in a national language) wereviewed as constraining the possibilities of publishing in journals. The analysis of super-visory practices further indicated that education doctoral candidates consist of twopopulations: (1) students working in research projects, university positions or disciplin-ary doctoral schools (internal students); and (2) practising teachers and other pro-fessionals pursuing doctorates on a part-time basis outside the academy (externalstudents). The latter population appeared to constitute the majority of education docto-rates. Although monograph and article-based theses supervisors integrated their internaldoctoral students with their research groups, only the CM group appeared to systema-tically and deliberately capitalize on the collective sharing of investigations and publi-cation efforts on a day-to-day basis between peers and between junior and seniorinvestigators. Because research seminars that meet infrequently are the main supervi-sion instrument, the external doctoral students have serious difficulties socializing toacademic practices. Practitioners oriented toward synthesizing their professionalexperiences may not be motivated to learn how to achieve international publicationand pursue article-based theses. After sharing encouraging experiences with theirpeers, students aiming at a professional academic career, in contrast, can be motivatedto learn to produce journal articles. This may, however, require opportunities to work atleast occasionally on their dissertations on a full-time basis.

If a central task of doctoral education is to educate ‘stewards of a discipline’ (Goldeand Walker 2006, 5) who are able to create knowledge through their inquiries and pub-lications, then the collective practices characteristic of article-based dissertations wouldbe of strategic importance. Creating academic practices in accordance with the CM tooka major effort on the part of the collective research leaders we interviewed. Only a fewof them had, in their time, the opportunity to appropriate collaborative practices of aca-demic knowledge production from their supervisors. Many of the education professorsare still oriented toward national rather than international publication. Hence, majorefforts in cultural or expansive learning (Engeström 1987) had to be undertaken inorder to establish productive knowledge-creating practices in the respective researchcommunities. Article publication, the pursuit of externally funded projects and theaccumulation of a citation record are interdependent aspects of academic activity. Inorder to pursue more ambitious investigative projects, investigators need externalresearch grants; obtaining these grants requires successful participation in competitiveassessment situations in which the academic record plays a crucial role. The creation ofcollective publication cultures arguably represents intergenerational learning (Hakkar-ainen et al. 2013; Holmes 2004); new doctoral student cohorts can immediately be

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socialized through co-authoring to a research group’s most advanced international pub-lication practices cultivated across years (Hakkarainen et al., forthcoming).

A limitation of the present investigation was that only discursive, retrospectivereports of academic practices were analysed without investigating the actual enactmentof practices in the research communities in question first-hand. Such an analytic choicesignificantly shaped the participants’ accounts of their doctoral education practices,which left many aspects of academic activity in their research groups unexamined.The participants may have been motivated to give a positive impression of the practicesprevailing in their groups. Further, they may have recounted actual activities in terms oftheir own ideals or preconceived notions of the process. Nevertheless, highly regardedresearch leaders’ interview responses to explicit questions concerning various aspectsof their academic practices can reasonably be expected to provide valuable informationabout their communities’ knowledge practices, thus revealing how they conceptualizedand reflected on their academic practices.

Implications of findings

Although educational sciences used to be considered ‘national’ sciences (i.e. sciencesserving primarily national and societal needs) without professionally organizedresearch groups and international publishing practices, the situation is rapidly changingdue to tightening quality standards and international scientific competition. Research insocial sciences in Europe and North America takes place more often in competitivelyfunded, multi-disciplinary research projects (Green 2009; Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons2001), which are expected to produce interlinked results and internationally refereedjournal contributions. The current investigation takes place parallel to a substantialtransformation of the Finnish higher education system; universities, their departmentsand academic employees have become accountable for their productivity across all dis-ciplines. A significant percentage of academic institutions’ funding is currently deter-mined according to their measured performance in the production of degrees andpublications, in which journal articles and their impact play an essential role. Such insti-tutional pressures, which are also common outside Finland (see e.g. Kwan 2013), arelikely to elicit further collectivization of academic research and an extension of thearticle-based doctoral education model. Although there are tens of thousands of publi-cation forums in numerous disciplines, generalizing the article model across disciplineswould stretch journals’ capacities to the utmost. In order to decrease completion times,the number of articles required for a dissertation has been lowered from five to three,although there are disciplinary differences. Although the impact and prestige of jour-nals in which doctoral articles are published was not previously prioritized in socialsciences, it is becoming more important.

The present investigators are in accordance with Walker et al.’s (2008) suggestionto improve the quality of doctoral education by placing intellectual communitiesfocused on collaborative research at the heart of doctoral scholarship (see also Jones2009; Lee and Boud 2009). Doctoral education practices in Finland are changing interms of requiring that all doctorates be part of university-based disciplinary doctoralschools and pursue their dissertations more often on a full-time basis. Having an oppor-tunity to pursue research in an academic research group is likely to facilitate students’socialization to challenging academic competencies. Simultaneously with enhancingpublication-related competencies, pursuing an article-based dissertation in a researchgroup is, however, also likely to make doctoral students more dependent on their

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supervisors than the traditional individual model. Not finding a shared research objectwith a supervisor would likely have a devastating effect on a student (Hakkarainen et al.2014). A further risk related to publication-oriented research cultures is academic capit-alism (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004), which makes doctoral students a part of a ‘pub-lication machine’ serving the interests of senior researchers, their funders and theuniversity. Internal doctoral students in social science might lose the very strong pos-ition they traditionally have in Finnish universities in terms of being considered juniorfaculty members. Certain limitations and constraints are also related to the collectivemodel. In many cases, individual doctoral students’ topics are very narrow parts of alarger project and may not be intrinsically interesting to them. When pursuing a docto-rate in a research collective, doctoral students may only have limited autonomy andvery few opportunities to influence theoretical and methodological decisions concern-ing their dissertation research. Sacrificing the students’ interests and their study require-ments to those of the supervisors would, at least to some extent, endanger efforts toeducate stewards of a discipline, although such sacrifice is not peculiar to the collectivemodel.

While the transition from monographs to article-based dissertations socializes doc-toral students to international publication practices, it does not necessarily improve thequality of doctoral research. When the publication record determines departmentalfunding, investigators may start recycling routine investigations in accordance withKuhn’s (1962) normal science in order to maximize their publication record. Althoughthe strategy of repeating empirical investigations with small variations may functionwell in natural sciences, it would not facilitate the advancement of educational research(A4). Rather than endlessly applying given research instruments with new populations,we need investigations focused on developing new methods and pursuing innovative(and, therefore, risk-laden) projects (Dunbar 1995). Natural-science leaders alsoaddressed such a limitation when discussing ‘salami science’ (N2; N4), which involvesdividing data into minimal publishable slices; this practice does not facilitate theadvancement of knowledge. There is a danger that the higher-level objectives of doctoraleducation addressed above may be sacrificed on the altar of academic accountability.

The traditional monograph model has functioned rather well across many decadesand assisted in socializing entire generations of researchers in education and othersocial sciences; the present authors have no wish to deny its successes or completelysupplant it. Because education doctorates represent two populations, i.e. studentsaiming at a professional research career and practising teachers, it will likely beuseful to continue supervising monographs and article-based dissertations. However,it seems evident that the only way for small countries to stay competitive in the eraof globalization is to internationalize their universities and socialize advanced studentsto the international culture of scientific knowledge creation. Therefore, it is worthwhileto work towards the further entrenchment of the collective model in social sciencesbecause it entails the collective pursuit of epistemic artefacts that are subject to externalreview and, thereby, likely to meet more rigorous epistemic standards than those thatcharacterize locally published monographs. If a doctoral dissertation was once con-sidered as the peak of an academic career, it is more often seen as a starting point,the equivalent of a driver’s licence in academic research, attained through systematicand adequate training. Professionally organized research groups are able to accumulateknowledge and the experience of pursuing challenging investigations and, thereby,capitalize on collective rather than merely personal creativity in academic research(Hakkarainen et al. 2013).

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FundingThis investigation was supported by the University of Helsinki [grant 210600] and the Academyof Finland [grants 127019 and 1265528].

Note1. “Journal science” refers to publishing original studies in peer-reviewed journals.

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