A Guide to Professional Doctorates in Business and Management

Lisa Anderson,Jeff Gold,Jim Stewart,Richard Thorpe

• Éditeur: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781473933422
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Business
• Sous-sujet: Formazione aziendale

*Shortlisted in the Management and Leadership Textbook Category at CMI Management Book of the Year Awards 2017* Are you undertaking (or thinking of doing) a Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) or other professional doctorate (PD) in business and management? Or perhaps you're supervising and delivering one of these programmes? This is your complete - and practical - guide to succeeding on this course.

A Guide to Professional Doctorates in Business and Management has been written by a team of experts with experience of the challenges faced in both studying for and supervising professional doctorates in business and management. Inside they address the key issues faced, in particular how these courses differ from a traditional PhD, and the different skills and approach needed for success.

Chapters explore the nature and importance of PDs as leading change in the professional world of practice, and how they need to differ from traditional forms of doctorate such as PhDs. The guide also offers practical guidance on researching in this particular mode, and through writing and publishing a thesis, making a valuable contribution to professional knowledge.

1 The dba and the move to professional doctorates in business and management

Richard Thorpe

Lisa Anderson

Jim Stewart

Jeff Gold

There has been a considerable debate about what exactly constitutes a professional doctorate. These debates have tended to focus either on tracing the historical development of the professional doctorate – for example, how they have grown in numbers and have crossed disciplinary boundaries (see Bourner and Lang, 2001) – or on issues of substance, for example, how they differ from the PhD, which in many institutions is still seen as the gold standard (Maxwell, 2003). This opening chapter takes a somewhat different approach. Following a brief overview of the genesis of the degree, we concentrate on important dimensions which we see as interconnected. Taken together, they offer an important contribution as to how professional doctorates might be defined of research conducted in the field of professional management: the learning outcomes of those individuals who study for a professional doctorate (in other words, why people should study and what they will gain from the process); and the nature of the original knowledge that it seeks to create. Taking this focus avoids a debate as to how the professional doctorate degree compares with the PhD and addresses issues of quality in its own terms, although we look at those arguments in Chapter 11. Rather than viewing the two degrees as competing with each other, we see them as being at either end of a continuum of practice that builds on the extent to which relevance, engagement and development are built into the degree in organisational and personal terms.

So, by focusing on the way the doctorate takes account of practice rather than by attempting to prescribe what in theory it ought to consist of, we believe this book can help both teachers and students consider how to include practice and engagement into their course at various stages. Philosophically, we also open up a number of new possibilities that might normally be the case in terms of the types of knowledge that is produced (ontology); how information/data might be collected and analysed (epistemology); how research might be designed and conducted so as to maximise engagement; how best findings might be disseminated; how change might be influenced or implemented; and how the participants’ professional practice as managers and professionals might be improved. The book offers many examples and varieties of approach, and what these might mean in practice in the conduct of doctoral study.

The Professional Doctorate in Business and Management – a degree whose time has come

It is becoming increasingly clear that many commentators see a crisis emerging within business schools. They are asking whether the current business model on which business schools are founded is even sustainable. These debates have been longstanding and widely discussed in the literature (Starkey and Tiratsoo, 2007; Khurana and Spender, 2012; Thorpe and Rawlinson, 2013). One critical area has been the lack of cross-disciplinary integration in the work of business schools, which has been exacerbated by the way schools are organised. All too often, disciplines operate in solo; yet within business and organisations more generally, problems are highly interconnected and often multi-disciplinary in nature. Although we recognise that knowledge resides within disciplines, we also recognise that management and business (unlike other areas of social sciences) is not a discipline as such. Rather, it is a field of study where problem solving often requires an integrative approach drawing on many disciplines, such as psychology, mathematics, history and so on. In addition, as the commentators point out, business schools are often poor at developing the mix of skills that are needed for achieving success and essential for managers and leaders to develop if they are to deal with business problems.

There is also regular criticism of the research conducted in business schools, mainly because academics fail to consider how findings from research might more easily diffuse into practice. A dynamic in business schools in recent years has been the way that academic ideas and findings have almost exclusively been disseminated through academic journals. Although we accept academic rigour is a necessary first step, we also see as important those particular skills and qualities to take academic ideas and translate them into practice – skills that are often in short supply. Many commentators have suggested that academic publishing has become an end in itself, with the test of rigour being the journal’s peer review process as opposed to the usefulness of the ideas being published or how they might be disseminated into practice. Even when dissemination does take place, it is often done through publications that have a strong academic flavour. These academic priorities often result in failure to help practitioners make use of the findings or to develop practical lessons and consider their wider implications.

The report of the Association of Business Schools (ABS) Task Force on Innovation in Business Schools (Thorpe and Rawlinson, 2013)suggested a number of reasons for this failure; a critical one is that academics lack the skills of the practitioner in key aspects of communication, which makes it difficult for them to develop insight into the problems that concern organisations and their managers. As a consequence, business schools often fail to use their power to disseminate the insights they are uniquely equipped to identify; or to help others commercialise innovative ideas and technologies. Within this context, we see professional doctorates as an opportunity to bridge this gap and get closer to what users want and what they do.

We are conscious that the success of many university business schools has become an obstacle to innovation and change. When universities have to face a range of challenges, business school deans may not welcome the idea of shaking up a faculty that is judged to be thriving, successful and profitable. However, this success could be viewed more positively as the platform on which the business schools can build and further broaden their mission. To achieve significant progress in this regard, including staff development, they will need to mobilise resources, and this will require collective leadership and the ability to seize the opportunity to bring about change. In carrying out this agenda, professional doctorates might also have a role to play.

Further, given the general shortage of qualified academics, the ability to attract new recruits into business schools and train them appropriately to fulfil a variety of different roles has become increasingly important. One way to attract individuals is to recruit them from industry and add to their understanding of contemporary practice by developing them academically. Again, the professional doctorate degree is one way to achieve this, thereby adding to the capacity of the faculty.

The DBA in management and business

The field or discipline with the highest number of professional doctorates is education (EdD), with business administration (DBA) following closely behind. The DBA is typically targeted at practising managers who wish to develop themselves and become better managers by considering an issue in detail and translating what they learn into practice. Reviewers (Bourner et al., 2000) have seen the development of the skills needed to reflect on practice as a recurring feature and key quality of a professional doctorate. Participants on DBAs usually enrol part time and continue to work. They conduct their research as insiders, their contribution to knowledge being both to the literature on management and business and to professional practice. The degree provides an opportunity for relatively senior managers, professionals and academics to conduct high-quality research while embedding or translating their research into practice within their own or another organisation. In programmes of this type there is an opportunity to get close to companies and to influence managers who can make change happen. This in turn, requires changes to doctoral education.

A cultural historical perspective of doctoral education

Doctoral, and by this we mean PhD, training in management and business studies came about in the United States in the 1950s as a consequence of criticisms levelled at the overall quality of business education there (Locke and Spender, 2011). There were suggestions, underpinned by a number of commissioned reports (most notably reports produced by the Carnegie Council [Pierson, 1959] and the Ford Foundation [Gordon and Howell, 1959]), that the provision should be changed and made more rigorous. The result was a move to develop and train managers differently; and to focus less on techniques and training and more on processes and academic underpinning, as happened in other practice-linked professions such as architecture and law. With the growth in economic activity following the Second World War, and as a consequence of the commissioned reports, those business schools that offered professional education in business began to develop a ‘more discipline orientated faculty properly trained in social science theorising’(Locke and Spender, 2011).

With these changes emerged a new curriculum, which included social science research methods, fieldwork and case studies. As Locke and Spender (2011) reported, over the following 30 years this approach became the blueprint for doctoral education in the United States and was widely copied across the world. In fact, so successful was it in some countries that even today those institutions who want to develop their faculty often send their academics to the USA to undertake their doctoral training.

Fast forwarding 30 years to 1988, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) – then the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business – commissioned another report to evaluate the progress that had been made during the intervening years. This study was conducted by Lyman Porter, a psychologist, and Lawrence McKibbin, a business school dean (1988). They found that, although there had been many changes for the better, within the general context of success were some worrying signs. One was that although the new structures had raised the levels of scholarship, they had eroded the schools’ connectedness with business. Interestingly, the ABS Task Force report (Thorpe and Rawlinson, 2013) also highlighted the fact that many British business schools derived a significant amount of their income from overseas postgraduate research students and that this, together with the pressure to publish, diverted their attention from the purpose of engaging fully with businesses. One of the report’s recommendations was that, for ch...