Contesting Institutional Hegemony in Today’s Business Schools: Doctoral Students Speak Out(Critical Management Studies)

Considering the tangible implications the present focus on research output poses for early career researchers, it is strange that perspectives from this group are rarely, if ever, included in the ongoing debates in the field. This book aims to put these views on record. By bringing together a group of critically-orientated early career researchers from global business schools it investigates a series of timely questions pertaining to the impact that institutional pressures have on junior academics – particularly those who conduct ‘critical’ or non-mainstream research. What is the nature of the institutional pressure that is placed upon doctoral students to publish in certain journals or to conduct positivist research? How do students with a critical orientation resist these pressures – or why do they succumb to them? What are the implications on critical scholars for resisting or acquiescing to these pressures and what does this mean for scholarship more broadly? Taking a narrative approach, this book will be required reading for all doctoral students as well as all those in academia dissatisfied with the current intellectual hegemony in business schools.

Review :
"Studying towards a doctoral qualification, at least in my experience and those of the students I have supervised and taught over the years, is a unique experience, and one that more often than not is profoundly stressful, seemingly endless and beset by numerous competing, even incompatible demands. The twelve contributors to this book offer rich, scholarly and carefully crafted accounts of the process from different parts of the world. As importantly, though, the book provides a much needed first person testament to the fact that the life of a doctoral student is intellectually, emotionally, politically and economically precarious. An exceptionally important collection which deserves to be read by academics at all career stages.” To address the 50% attrition rate of business PhD students in the US, Prasad offers the academic community some direct representation of the diverse voices of students navigating through the complexity of the doctoral programs. Students and recent graduates of doctoral programs express what holds meaning for them. He coordinated to avoid potential redundancies across the accounts. Within the overall themes of negotiating professional and personal lives, institutional pressure and its implications, and managing the day-to-day, they present such perspectives as triple role conflict: the teacher, the student, the parent; early career reflections on discursive pressures in business schools, playing the game and trying not to lose myself: a doctoral student's perspective on the institutional pressures for research output, the language of an impostor, and stuck in an in-between state: exploring the PhD student experience through ambivalence.