No PhD Students Were Harmed in the Making of this Paper: A Care–Power Approach to Explain the Persistence of Suffering in Business Schools’ Doctoral Programs

This paper focuses on the mental health crisis among PhD students in business schools, a central yet under-studied issue in management education. Drawing on a critical collaborative autoethnography of a French business school’s PhD program facing a potential freeze in admissions, we mobilize Tronto’s (1993, 2013) ethics of care to analyze how organizational responses shape doctoral students’ lived experiences. We introduce “care for research” as a configuration in which care is directed toward research productivity rather than toward PhD students themselves. We identify two dynamics—privileged irresponsibility and misdirected care—through which organizational actors avoid addressing PhD students’ suffering, intensifying psychological stress, material precarity, and political marginalization. We extend the literature on PhD suffering by showing its structural bases, and contribute to the ethics of care literature by demonstrating how, when embedded in hierarchical academic structures, care practices may intertwine with power to perpetuate inequality. In practice, we propose reorganizing doctoral programs, and embedding care and responsibility in business schools. We make a call for more studies focusing on the systemic sources of PhD suffering in doctoral education.