The impact of the professional doctorate on managers’ professional practice

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2021.100461Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Achieving organizational impact from professional doctorate programmes is a complex and nuanced process.

  • Doctoral impact is socially constructed through negotiation between student, employer and professional networks.

  • Professional doctorate educators must encourage impact through graduates' situated practice outside the academy.

Abstract

This paper contributes a new perspective on the impact of professional doctorates. Professional doctorates offer a form of higher-level management education, which aims to contribute to professional practice as well as to academic knowledge. Although there is a growing literature identifying the personal benefits of undertaking a professional doctorate, the evidence of wider impact on the workplace remains limited. Drawing on interviews with 25 professional doctorate graduates working in managerial and professional roles in different parts of the criminal justice sector, this study explores the wider impact of the professional doctorate. The paper identifies impact dimensions, influencers and processes. It extends the processual approach by conceptualizing impact as an active and negotiated process operating over time and in changing contexts. The analysis shows impact construction to be a complex and nuanced process, involving interactions between graduates and significant others beyond the realm of the university. The analysis has important implications for the design and delivery of professional doctorate programmes in management and business and for extended engagement by educators, professional bodies and employers with the issues of impact.

Section snippets

The impact potential of the professional doctorate

Doctoral education has undergone substantial changes since the late 20th century (c.f. Scott, Brown, Lunt, & Thorne, 2004; Kehm 2006;Trafford & Leshem, 2009; Wellington, 2013;Baschung, 2016; Loxley & Kearns, 2018). During this time, there has also been a marked increase in the number of doctoral students and graduates. As this has occurred, professional doctorate programmes have been developed alongside other doctoral education programmes associated with the award of the Doctorate (Clarke, 2013

Impact beyond the doctoral programme

Studies into the personal and professional skill outcomes of doctoral education in general, and professional doctorate studies specifically have identified the importance of doctoral studies for individuals' self-actualisation, self-construction and increased capacity for self-reflection on existing professional practice. Research has also suggested that changes at the individual level are influenced by different motivations for undertaking doctoral study and students' personal and contextual

The research context

The focus of this study is two professional doctorate programmes at a UK University focused specifically on the emergent professional fields of criminal justice and security risk management. These professional doctorate programmes are appropriate for examination of the impact of the professional doctorate in business and management education as their focus is on professional education in emerging professional fields that operate in corporate and operational contexts (Muzio, Hodgson,

Findings

The analysis described in the previous section led to the identification of personal impact dimensions arising from doctoral education, professional impact influencers and second order impact construction processes (see Fig. 1).

Identity orientation and signaling

Our analysis indicates that both professional education and career intentions are important features of impact construction through identity orientation and signaling. Fulton et al. (2012) argue that professional doctorate programmes set out to provide the basis from which professionals can view their practice through a fresh lens and with enhanced intellectual agility. Such aspirations, however, present challenges in relation to both ‘territorialized knowledge’ (Fulton et al., 2012, p. 134)

Conclusion

Impact is an important concept for doctoral educators, policy makers and employers. Most attention, in HE policy and literature, focuses on the mechanisms through which doctoral education pedagogy and curricula lead to individual student level change in cognition, behaviour and academic self-confidence. However, it is graduates who construct impact in organizational and professional contexts that change over time. In giving ‘voice’ to the perspective and experiences of graduates the article

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.

Author statement

We confirm that this work is original, is not under consideration for potential publication elsewhere, and it has not been previously published. Both named authors have contributed in a meaningful way to the manuscript and are in agreement with the content of the manuscript. Institutional ethical scrutiny processes were completed and research participants were included based on informed consent. There are no financial support or other conflict of interest issues.

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