Abstract
This article argues that the way in which research training is affected by national policies aiming at modernizing graduate education is shaped by the way in which national characteristics of state policies, academic institutions and disciplines interact. The argument is applied in an analysis of the consequences of policy changes and higher education reform in England, Norway and Sweden, focusing on how research training was shaped by reforms during the 1980s and 1990s. The article first presents the status before the reform period with an emphasis on the salient characteristics that affect research training and graduate education. Secondly, we briefly present the main lines of the reform policies and how they affected the higher education systems and careers to which researchers are supposedly trained. Finally, we focus on changes in research education and how the introduction of PhD training affected and was shaped by national system characteristics.
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Notes
In many ways the academic professions in England, Sweden and Norway may be considered not fully professionalized. In the literature on professions it is usually emphasized that in order to be useful as a concept, there should be some characteristic that distinguishes a ‘profession’ as an occupational group from other closely related groups. There must be some sort of cohesion between the members of the group. Usually groups such the Anglo-American professions of doctors and lawyers serve as master templates for what to look for: common educational background, autonomy in professional questions, protection through certification, a strong professional association and a common occupational ethos (Parsons, 1939; Wilensky, 1964; Johnson, 1982; Abbott, 1988). Compared to such classical professions as doctors and lawyers, the notion of an academic profession may be problematic (Clark, 1987). An academic profession must somehow be united across disciplinary boundaries and extra-mural professional obligations. However, professional, institutional and disciplinary allegiances may represent alternative points of identification for university teachers that impede the emergence of a specific academic profession. It is important to see this notion in our context more like an open question or a regulative idea for our investigation.
The others were non-tenured staff, technical staff and students.
An evaluation of the position of Norwegian department chairs from a British perspective was given in NAVF's evaluation of English studies. The evaluators concluded that ‘…there is a lack of good basis for leadership within the department given the short span of office’, and the function of the chair is often ‘…as a committee leader without much accepted authority’ whatsoever (NAVF, 1991, 42).
From 1966 a new sector of higher education was constructed in the UK led by the polytechnics governed by local councils and regulated by the CNAA. These were institutions in which the staff was not expected to do research (Becher and Kogan, 1992, 29–32), although it was not formally restricted. Similar developments came in Norway as professional colleges (teacher-training, nursing, social-work, etc.) were upgraded to higher education standards in the 1970s and early 1980s. A specific case is the new institutions of the district-colleges. These institutions were supposed to offer teaching at undergraduate level and not engage in research. Many of the academics in these institutions managed to do a considerable amount of research and gradually their terms of employment, i.e., their opportunity to do research became equal to those of the university academics (Jerdal, 1996). The line struck between teaching and research institutions thus became to some degree eroded, a development that has developed further during the rest of the 1990s and early 2000s (Bleiklie et al., 2000).
The possibility to take the license degree was reopened in the early 1980s, but it was not made compulsory.
Ståhle (1996, 311) claims that less than 50% of all graduate students complete their doctorate in Sweden, but he admits that these figures should be taken with a serious health warning.
Female applicants were disadvantaged in the assessment as well as those applicants, both male and female, who did not know anyone on the committee. The gender ‘handicap’ could be evened out by having the supervisor at the committee. Only extremely few women could rely solely upon their publication record to make the trick (Wennerås and Wold, 1997).
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Bleiklie, I., Høstaker, R. Modernizing Research Training-Education and Science Policy Between Profession, Discipline and Academic Institution. High Educ Policy 17, 221–236 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.hep.8300052
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.hep.8300052