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Traversing the Doctorate pp 409–428Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Exploring the Transition Between Doctoral Student and Early Career Academic: A New Perspective on Activity Systems

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Education Research Methods ((PSERM))

Abstract

This chapter explores how the completion of a doctorate can be seen as a journey where similar landscapes, in terms of rules for completion, supervision and the like, are traversed in unique ways by individual doctoral students. These transversals are conceptualised via an ‘Activity Systems’ approach, as the author travels a unique path from a doctoral student to Early Career Academic (ECA). The various experiences of this journey form the ‘dataset’ for this chapter. As an initial position, Engestrom’s (1987) Activity Systems are used to situate the author in a university Community of Practice (CoP), with the notion of Active Subjectivities (Valsiner & Van Der Veer, 2002) used as a conceptual tool. This approach identifies an active subject, who chooses from a range of available roles (student, researcher, author, lecturer or colleague) in response to a range of intellectually disquieting discourses within a particular context. In investigating the transition from commencing doctoral student to ECA, it is suggested that the resolution of the tensions in an Activity System is a consequence of personal transformation whilst simultaneously acknowledging that individual agentic action in a CoP shapes this transformation at a more granular level than can solely be explained by Activity Systems. A new conceptual model, offering a relational approach to the individual and social dichotomy evident in workplaces (Billett, 2006), is proposed.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Kevin Larkin

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  1. Kevin Larkin
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Correspondence to Kevin Larkin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology and Counselling, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia

    Tanya M. Machin

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Lleida, Lleida, Spain

    Marc Clarà

  3. Faculty of Business, Education, Law and Arts, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia

    Patrick Alan Danaher

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Larkin, K. (2019). Exploring the Transition Between Doctoral Student and Early Career Academic: A New Perspective on Activity Systems. In: Machin, T.M., Clarà, M., Danaher, P.A. (eds) Traversing the Doctorate. Palgrave Studies in Education Research Methods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23731-8_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23731-8_23

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-23730-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-23731-8

  • eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)

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