Operationalising University Excellence in Doctoral Education: The Case of Top-Ranked Russian Universities

Abstract Numerous countries have implemented excellence initiatives designed to establish world-class universities, boost research productivity, build up staff capacity, and thereby reform doctoral education systems as part of this agenda. To date, the relationship between excellence-driven initiatives and leading universities’ doctoral education enhancement remains understudied in Russia. This study seeks to examine how seven top-ranked Russian universities responded to the Excellence Initiatives (5-100 Project and Priority 2030) at the institutional strategy level from 2012 till 24 February 2022. To explore this relationship and change in research education, documentary research was applied to a corpus of institutional strategies for excellence accompanied with governmental texts. Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was adopted and complemented with analytical lenses to understand and examine how university excellence is recontextualised and operationalised in doctoral education structures across these strategies. This CDA was enhanced with theoretical lenses to research how multiple forces behind governmental policies for globalisation, innovation, and international competitiveness shape this change in Russian doctoral education in relation to global trends, national priorities, and local needs. The paper presents and discusses emergent processes (with mechanisms and practices) and the universities’ meaning-making behind the normative and performative ‘enhancement’ in doctoral education constructed with the state’s dominant understandings of university excellence.