PhD or DBA ? Capital Conversion and the Boundaries of Doctoral Legitimacy in China and the UK

This article examines how institutional boundaries shape the positioning and legitimacy of business and management doctorates in China and the United Kingdom. Existing research has often treated doctoral reform, professional doctorates and doctoral capital as separate concerns; less is known about how degree type and national context jointly condition the recognition and convertibility of doctoral resources. Drawing on Bourdieu, the study compares 40 programmes across four positions—UK PhD, UK DBA, China PhD and China DBA—using programme, institutional, regulatory and accreditation documents. It develops a three‐level analytical model of institutional rule‐setting, programmatic formation and evaluative recognition. The findings show that UK programmes articulate doctoral legitimacy primarily through research originality and peer‐recognisable standards, whereas Chinese programmes more explicitly connect academic rigour to national‐development and innovation priorities. PhDs primarily emphasise academic‐capital accumulation, whereas DBAs seek to translate managerial experience and organisational knowledge into academically recognisable research contributions. Evaluation, accreditation and institutional prestige provide additional sources of symbolic recognition without necessarily establishing equivalent institutional standing. The resulting pattern is one of constrained hybridisation rather than convergence: academic, practical and political forms of capital increasingly intersect, but their conversion remains conditioned by institutional rules and research‐legible standards. Doctoral legitimacy is thus understood as an institutionally bounded process of capital conversion, rather than an inherent property of degree types.