Creating a Delicate Balance: the doctoral supervisor's dilemmas

Central to the problems facing supervisors of doctoral students is creating a delicate balance between dominating the student's research and neglecting it. Too much control threatens the originality of the PhD and the autonomy of the novice researcher; too little can delay completion and even lead to total failure. Here, supervisors reflect on their successes and failures in the management of that delicate balance. They frequently construct their accounts using contrasts between the past and the present: comparing their own experiences as students with how they supervise now, or comparing current practice with their own early experiences as a supervisor. Such individual accounts and their characteristic rhetorical formats reflect contemporary policy themes at a more general level within the academic profession.