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Projectification of Doctoral Training? How Research Fields Respond to a New Funding Regime

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Abstract

Funding is an important mechanism for exercising influence over ever more parts of academic systems. In order to do so, funding agencies attempt to export their functional and normative prerequisites for financing to new fields. One essential requirement for fundees is then to construct research processes in the form of a project beforehand, one that is limited in time, scope and content. This article demonstrates how the public funding of doctoral programs expands this model of project research from experienced academics to the socialization process for the new academic generation. This process of “projectification” underlies funding-driven institutional changes in doctoral training. A multi-level comparative study of German policies, funding mechanisms and organizational frameworks for doctoral training demonstrates the emergence of a specific model of predefined PhD projects. The investigation of doctoral training practices reveals that socio-epistemic preconditions regulate whether research fields adopted or rejected this demanding model. This result contradicts widespread claims about a radical change in doctoral training and suggests focusing on the actual practices of field-specific doctoral research.

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Notes

  1. In 2014, 77% academics at universities and 93% early career researchers were on fixed-term contracts and the ratio between external and institutional funding increased from 22% to 38% between 2000 and 2014 (BUWIN 2017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Berlin, Germany

    Marc Torka

  2. Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt University, Frankfurt, Germany

    Marc Torka

  3. Department of Sociology, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Marc Torka

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  1. Marc Torka
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Torka, M. Projectification of Doctoral Training? How Research Fields Respond to a New Funding Regime. Minerva 56, 59–83 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-018-9342-8

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