Abstract
The old division of labour between fundamental and applied or problem-oriented research has almost disappeared, and with it, the functional distinctions between universities, public labs and industrial and other private research. Doctoral research training can then also become diversified in terms of its content and its location. Closer analysis of ongoing changes, in particular, the emergence of a regime of strategic science, is necessary to specify requirements for a career in science in the coming decades. Disciplines as we know them may not be of major importance, but interdisciplinarity as such is not the answer. For universities, the key challenge is to diversify and recombine, both cognitively and institutionally, into what I call a post-modern university, which includes overlaps and alliances with centres (of excellence and relevance), public labs and various private organizations. In such a university, a doctoral student can wend his or her way through the types of locations, just as is to be expected of his or her later career.
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Notes
The pattern of knowledge reservoirs and uptake by (scientific) users also occurs in traditional academic research areas, but then normally remains limited to the researchers in that area. One could see this as an extreme (‘pure’) case of the hybrid picture sketched in the main text. Historically, such ‘pure’ areas are in fact a recent phenomenon (from mid-19th century on). Therefore, when Gibbons et al. speak of Mode 1, the academic–disciplinary mode, this is not the basic pattern of scientific research, but a historically contingent regime covering roughly a century, from 1870 to 1970. It is within this regime that PhD training as we used to know it was shaped.
The original French text is slightly different, and more convincing. For example, the final sentence reads: “.. les ingénieurs sortent de l’École non seulement formés aux métiers traditionels, mais prêt à saisir, voire à inventer, les emplois de demain: multimédia, communications, ingéniérie de la conception …”
Interestingly, in the Netherlands research in these two areas was funded by different organizations (the national funding agency NWO and the dedicated organization ZON, Health Care Research Netherlands), but the Medical Council of NWO recently merged with ZON to exploit overlap and synergy.
In the Netherlands these would be the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) and the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB).
The PhD dissertation is a type of product that will never be required in the later career, so why train students how to do it? It is an initiation rite, but even that will become less important because the “tribes” (cf. Becher, 1989) are less clear (“porous”) and of varying composition.
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Rip, A. Strategic Research, Post-modern Universities and Research Training. High Educ Policy 17, 153–166 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.hep.8300048
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.hep.8300048