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The purpose of this chapter, which is a response to calls to examine students’ perspectives of the doctoral experience, is to investigate the notion that doctoral education facilitates developing nodes in leading networks of knowledge for leader and leadership development – a theme that has not been examined.

Using data generated from in-depth interviews embedded with excerpts of personal life stories and the questionnaire, this qualitative study analyses the views of some African students about their experiences of doctoral study in the United Kingdom.

The study discovered that doctoral education is perceived as: acquisition of knowledge and capabilities for professional leadership trajectories; creator of learning communities, networks and relationship resources; developing nodes in leading knowledge networks; progression from the self to the relational and to the collective; and action learning, all for leader and leadership development.

Drawing on the findings, the chapter argues for the novel notion of doctoral education as developing nodes within leading networks of knowledge for leader and leadership development.

Although, the research is a qualitative study that focused on a small group of students in one university, and as a result, its findings cannot be generalised, its implication for doctoral agendas worldwide and Africa and its Agenda 2063, in particular, need consideration.

Internationalisation is one of the significant manifestations of the ongoing transformation of doctoral education. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the perspectives of Portuguese universities and doctoral students regarding the importance of internationalisation and the strategies to achieve it in doctoral education.

A sample of 118 doctoral programme websites from 27 universities (15 public, 12 private) served as the data source of university perspectives of internationalisation. Doctoral students’ perspectives on the same topic were collected through 31 interviews, 27 conducted in seven focus groups and four individually, with first-year doctoral students from three Portuguese public universities. Content analysis was performed on the two sets of data.

According to university and doctoral students’ perspectives, internationalisation assumes an important role in Portuguese doctoral education and is being integrated through specific strategies. Strategies for attracting and recruiting international students appear to take a back seat compared to strategies which offer students international experience through immersion in international environments in their home institutions. While expressing the potential impediments, undesirable side effects and conditions that internationalisation must meet, students seem to take a critical stance towards it and towards the institutional strategies designed to promote it.

This paper addresses a topic which does not appear to receive much attention in doctoral education research and, to this extent, advances knowledge on the internationalisation of doctoral education.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the development and challenges of doctoral education in Korea. In particular, it focusses on the differences between overseas and domestic doctorates in terms of training, supply and demand in the academic workforce, their academic entry-level jobs and employment status.

This study applied document analysis to mainly secondary data sources. The data were drawn from the Statistical Yearbooks of Education, Annual Science and Technology Statistics, the Database for Overseas Doctorates Registration and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The findings indicate that the doctoral education system in Korea, in terms of both size and quality, has demonstrated significant development for last four decades. However, the results also show that overseas doctorates have relative advantages for their academic job entry over domestic doctorates, and the major research universities are more likely to hire those with overseas doctorates than domestic doctorates.

This study presents the evolution of the doctoral education system in Korea, which has not yet been considered in the international research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role and the scope of knowledge management (KM) in doctoral education, in the emerging knowledge economy (KE) context, and the recommendation of a framework for KM in doctoral education.

An extended literature analysis was contacted to elaborate the role and the scope of KM in universities and research institutions in the context of global KE, and the role of knowledge workers, including doctoral students, as well as, the current directions for doctoral education. Literature analysis is followed by synthesis of the proposed framework for KM in doctoral education toward KE.

A framework for KM in doctoral education is proposed, which could be used to enhance quality of doctoral studies and could lead to research optimization and innovation growth. Finally, proposals are recommended for enhancing KM in doctoral education and utilize doctoral students as knowledge workers and change factors toward the notion of global KE.

The paper is an effort to start filling the literature gap in the emerging but under-researched subject of KM regarding doctoral education in the context of KE, with the purpose to enhance quality of doctoral studies and capture the socio-economic development advantages that come from training such a highly skilled workforce.

The higher education sector in Sweden has, over decades, faced increasing demands in terms of efficiency rates in research, as well as increasing demands in the international competition for external revenue. These demands have influenced academic career trajectories and postdoctoral tracks as well as the everyday work of doctoral students. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how doctoral students express and challenge subjectivity in the present context of research education.

The authors depart from the overall understanding that doctoral students’ lines of actions in research education depend on and form assemblages and, thus, define an academic institution. By re-analysing eight in-depth interviews, they illustrate how doctoral students from different milieus not only comply but also challenge, use border-crossings and change directions in research education.

The results show that some of these doctoral students try to act as loyal and satisfied, especially in regard to their supervisors, whereas others use coping strategies and resistance. It is illustrated that when some of the students use “unsecure” molecular lines, they appear more open to redefining possibilities and change, in comparison with those on more stable molar lines. Those acting on molar lines sometimes express a lack of emotional (productive) engagement, even though this particular group tend to more often get access to rewarded assemblages. These patterns are partly gender-related.

The tension between finding more stable lines and spaces for change is apparent in doctoral students’ subjectivity, but also how this tension is related to gender. The women doctoral students appear not only more mobile but also in a sense more alert than their men peers. This offers insights in how actions define and redefine not only academic institutions but also different subjectivities.

In the present, given the manifold demands on academic institutions, new insights and methodological approaches are necessary to illustrate how contemporary changes affect research education and the everyday life of doctoral students.

As online education proliferates, little attention has been given to understanding non-cognitive success factors, such as wellness, in online graduate student success. To begin to address this gap in understanding, this paper aims to explore the experiences of doctoral student wellness within the context of online distance education. Doctoral students, and their instructor, in an advanced qualitative research course sought to use collective autoethnography to address the following questions: How do the authors perceive the wellness as doctoral students engaged in distance education, and how do the authors understand the influence of the doctoral program cultures on the perceptions of the own wellness?

This paper emerged from a 12 week advanced qualitative research course where students opted to engage in a poetic arts-based collective autoethnography to reflect on and analyze their experience of wellness as doctoral students taking online courses. Data collection included the use of reflective journaling, creation of “My Wellness Is” poetry, and weekly group debriefing. Journals and poems were analyzed individually, then collectively. First and second cycle coding techniques were used, with the first cycle including process and descriptive coding and second round coding involving pattern coding.

Through first and second round coding, three primary themes emerged: positionality as an element of wellness, the role of community in maintaining wellness and awareness and action regarding wellness.

Due to the inherent nature of qualitative research, and specifically autoethnographic methods, the findings of this study may be difficult to generalize to the broader online graduate student population. Future research on this topic may use the experiences explored in this study as a basis for the development of future quantitative studies to measure the extent of these findings in the broader population.

This paper includes implications for the development of interventions that may support wellness in graduate students in online environments including support interventions from faculty advisors, leveraging academic curriculum to promote wellness, and suggestions for building community among online graduate students.

As technology advances, online education is quickly becoming a leading mechanism for obtaining a graduate education. Scholarship in this discipline has primarily focused on academic outcomes of online students and has largely focused on undergraduate populations. This paper broadens the conversation about online education by illustrating a non-cognitive dimension of the student experience, i.e. wellness, through the perspective of graduate students.

This paper addresses a gap in the current understanding of online graduate student experiences and outcomes using methods that provide vivid illustrations of the nuanced experience of online doctoral students.

The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretically-informed analysis of an exploratory study which included a focus on postdoctoral researchers' views of their training needs.

The wider mixed-methods study was focused on post-doctoral career trajectories at a time of ongoing policy interest in doctoral education. Bernstein's theoretical perspectives are used to illuminate the data, particularly his concepts of classification and regionalisation.

Respondents' reflections on their doctoral training showed a much stronger appreciation of training which was based in disciplinary practices, even if these were subject to regionalisation, as opposed to more generic professional skills training.

The small scale and exploratory nature of the study is recognised, as well as the need for more independent research in this area.

The study has implications for the nature of the training provided as part of doctoral education. First, it is argued that this should include more explicit discussion of policy shifts relating to doctoral education. Second, rather than being glossed over in the imposition of generic competency frameworks (conceptualised through Bernstein as a generic performance mode), researcher training should attend closely to the social and cultural base of the skills and practices of different regions of knowledge production, at the same time as recognising these to be fluid and dynamic.

Overall, while recognised as exploratory, the study aims to contribute insights on doctoral graduates' perspectives on researcher training as well as suggesting the usefulness of Bernstein's theoretical framework for understanding the reconstruction of doctoral education in the UK.

This chapter provides a retrospective and prospective exploration of some of the challenges faced by doctoral education, specifically as they relate to advanced studies of educational administration (EA).

It applies a critical stance to the current status of knowledge in the ‘leadership field’ and the intellectual underpinnings that inform the studies available as reference for doctoral students.

Nested within wider changing conditions for university and doctoral education, it is argued that the published field as currently constituted suffers from both banal and ‘non-wicked’ leadership orthodoxies that might lead to doctoral stagnation.

Reasons are suggested and prospects considered for revitalising scholarship for the upcoming generation of EA alumni, scholars and practitioners.

In this paper, we take up an autoethnographic review of literature on doctoral programs in order to engage notions of doctoral subjects. While the paper basically proceeds by taking up and entwining these methods, it is neither/both an autoethnography nor/and a literature review. Rather, this work – like many spaces of a doctoral seminar – emerges as an uncontainable, unpredictable monster. We have also placed a kind of “I” at the center of this project, and yet use a posthuman reading of what this “I” might be. We search for a preconfigured “I” in the literature and create an “I/we” of doctoral experiences that never quite exists and yet moves and haunts us. We take up a tentative (post-)monstrous position that recognizes our cruel attachment to the “good” doctoral student, a subject that remains the inevitable (im)possibility of graduate school. Reviewing literature as an ethnographic practice and looking at ethnography as textual helps us smash these methods together. Yet, at any moment, we defy our methods – ignoring findings in the literature and possibly making up autoethnographic stories that never happened to us. Rather than sloppy academic work, this move intends to focus on thinkable and intelligible experiences as those belonging to doctoral students/studies/school instead of focusing on “authentic” experiences of well defined “researchers.” We hope our project provides space to question the very categories and credentials built into doctoral studies by decentering the “doctoral student” subject.

This chapter proposes authentic leadership as a generic competence and an integral part of doctoral education regardless of field of study. The authors explore its potential to enhance the development of doctoral candidates and academics and search for answers to the questions: Can and should authentic leadership be developed as a generic competence in doctoral education? How can it be designed and implemented in a doctoral training module? What would its learning outcomes be? The authors address these questions in the context of doctoral education. They assert that authentic leadership training should be mandatory for all doctoral candidates, and that supervisors should be actively engaged in the development of this underappreciated transferrable skill.