Transforming Doctoral Studies: Competencies and Artistry

This article examines the effects of recent attempts, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences, to make doctoral studies in the United Kingdom more efficient and effective and to produce the sorts of skilled researchers the economy is thought to need. It draws on the literature about the transformational effects of current state managerialism on the public services and on the nature of education for the professions to look specifically at the situation of the greatly increased numbers of research students. It also uses insights from feminist scholarship on the ''projects of masculinity'' embedded in late-modernist thinking to suggest that a general repositioning of the academic profession is occurring, and of women academics specifically, and that there are deleterious consequences for intellectual creativity from over-stressing certain ''masculine values''.