The Doctor of Social Sciences (DSocSci) program at Royal Roads University (RRU) is Canadaâs first applied research doctorate designed exclusively for working professionals. The program was developed in response to a growing demand nationally and internationally for scholar-practitioners who are leaders in their professional fields and who want to incorporate dedicated research and writing into their professional lives. Given the nature of the diversity of persons interested in the program, the DSocSci focuses on the interdisciplinary applications of the Social Sciences to researchable issues in the workplace and society, issues that have both local and global relevance. The program is designed to enable students to integrate professional experience and academic scholarship to produce policy-relevant research that is written in a widely accessible way. Our program is, in some ways, a response and an antidote to traditional doctoral programs that have been having a crisis of relevance and confidence (and possibly conscience) in the last few years.
It is now widely accepted that the market for doctoral graduates as âfuture professorsâ is very limited. In Canada, for example, a recent study by The University of British Columbia based on a survey of eight years of doctoral student concluded much of what many of us have already assumed about graduate studies: a minority percentage of all doctoral graduates (16â19 percent hold research intensive faculty positions-tenure track and 9% hold teaching intensive faculty positions) are employed as full-time university faculty. The majority are employed outside the permanent faculty world as tenure track opportunities decrease and term appointments increase. The Canadian Association of Graduate Studies (CAGS) , as a case in point, has organized the 2017 annual meeting around a theme of the PhD in the twenty-first century. Implicit in the call for contributions is the message that we need to rethink our conventional mandate that produces doctoral students for an ever-diminishing academic job market . The focus of the CAGS call is on the relationship between doctoral graduation and employment and the role of the university in occupational placement. While we do not want to belabor the point of doctoral education relevance, given the growing culture of uncertainty in universities and the abundance of current research devoted to doctoral education outcomes, suffice it so say that the relevance of doctoral education is now, more than ever, an ethical issue that demands a relatively quick resolution. And, certainly, part of that resolution is the education of scholar-practitioners who have professional experience, who meld their professional lives with their doctoral research, and who, in the end, become public intellectuals with a âcommon touch.â
A crisis of ethics may be occurring for doctoral education worldwide, especially if traditional doctoral programs continue to produce traditional academic scholars. The target profession for such scholars has been academia, especially in the context of tenure. The current reality is that universities continue to produce more and more doctorates as they produce fewer and fewer tenure track jobs . They are, in fact, creating scholars who will be employed (or not) in other sectors outside academia, and the nature of that scholarship is that it may not be terribly relevant on the outside.
The Doctor of Social Sciences Program at RRU is relatively new and very successful. This is due, in part, to the fact that we take a proactive approach to scholarship change and doctoral studies. We knew in creating the program that there was a demand from professionals working full-time to pursue applied scholarship within a doctoral credential framework and that studentsâ wishes were to be employed full-time and to be taking doctoral studies full-time. And, of course, the demand from such professionals includes relevant doctoral training that not only nurtures them as skilled researchers but also creates a capacity for them to do applied research , to communicate it in the most appropriate ways to a variety of audiences, and to produce networks of scholar/researchers who continue a lifetime of collaborative work.
The Scholarly Focus
This book is based on bringing together the writings of our first graduates of the Doctor of Social Sciences Program. The chapters describe, in general, the experiences of the contributors as they embarked on a rather unusual journey that focused on issues in the workplace from an interdisciplinary perspective. The chapters describe their experiences in framing and conducting research that was outside the boundaries of discipline-based research and that was driven by issues âon the ground.â We chose our contributors because they are all highly placed professionals who work within their organizations to produce cutting-edge research with foundational policy relevance .
We asked the contributors to focus on the following items as they developed their chapters. The framework we provided touches on what we feel are the fundamental issues in not only our program but also in the future evolution of doctoral education.
The Nature of Applied Interdisciplinary Research
Because this program is devoted to interdisciplinary work, the collegial interactions and discussions often take the students outside their original mind-sets and provide guidance that often gives their research unanticipated foci. The melding of ideas is, in part, the result of a diversity of global experience in our student bodyâmany of our students work in international settings, while others have little international experience but substantial local involvement. This kind of cross cultivation of ideas creates an evolving recognition for the students of the importance of epistemology to social sciences research and alternative ways of knowing. The outcome of intellectual cross-pollination is what we believe to be a new kind of thinking/curiosity that is borne of a relative humility about knowledge. The contributions herein discuss the importance of bringing disciplines together and the outcome that interdisciplinarity engenders not only for research, but also for personal intellectual development.
The Melding of the Professional and the Academic
One of the foundations of our program is the importance of doctoral research to the professional lives of our students. All of our students are conducting research relevant to their work worlds, and their research is a fundamental part of their professional world. And, often, the research focus is an outcome of work demand based on deficits of knowledge within the workplace. This has, for the most part, created a protracted awareness among the students that their research is not abstract. That it has a real-world relevance that cannot be ignored or given short shrift. Clearly, their research has profound implications for the workplace and for the larger community. Our contributors discuss the melding of the professional and the academic and illustrate the importance of communication in submitting their work to the world at large.
Lifelong Learning, Career Development, and Doctoral Research
Most of our students are mid- to late-career professionals and are devoted not only to lifelong learning but to another professional life after their immediate careers. This new professional life clearly involves a desire to pursue research either in a formal or informal capacity. Many of our students indicate that they wish to pursue research well past retirement and that the training and experience that they receive in their doctoral research are vehicles for them to prepare for this professional life stage either as part time continuing employees or as consultants . There is a clear symbiosis between their academic, curiosity-driven passion for research and the practical and financial demands of post-retirement. Their planning is also a logical response to a rapidly changing world of work. Very few of our students are so ensconced in their jobs that they do not see career change as inevitable. Their anticipations include doing a variety of future jobs, some of which include, part or full-time consulting, some form of freelance research/writing and part-time teaching in post-secondary education. In many ways, the doctoral education is an ideal vehicle for blending lifelong learning with the practicality of later-career job goals.
Networks of Learning, Interdisciplinarity, and Research Cross-Pollination
It is possible that the often-stated desire among our students to continue their âongoing roundtable of shared ideasâ stems from their intellectual isolation in the workplace. Despite the ostensible trend toward group work and collective thinking in the workplace, the reality for most professionalsâtypified by the contributors hereinâis that they often work alone in response to unanticipated demands that require immediate action and specific expertise. What they receive in the doctoral program is a protracted opportunity to share and discuss their ideas, and a place in which their ideas have an opportunity to evolve. It is interesting in this context of cross-fertilization that many of our students end up to some degree involved in issues of social and ecological justice, despite whether they started from a generic justice paradigm . Often, their new interests stem from discussions with their peers.
The obvious synergy among the students and their willingness to co-operate and not compete is a cornerstone not only of our program, but of mature scholarship. This is partly a function of professional maturity and partly a function of the studentsâ realization that there is an inherent strength in supporting each other in the development of their research projects. This is especially critical in an interdisciplinary program in which the students may be academic and professional specialists in some areas but not in all the areas that frame their research. The willingness to co-operate is also a function of the diversity in experience of our students. In short, it appears that interdisciplinarity creates an intellectual humility that by no means detracts from research development. In fact, this approach to intellectual work seems to create openness to new ideas and paradigms and awareness that knowledge acquisition is never a finished project. We present these propositions and ask them to respond.
Research Dissemination: Knowledge Mobilization
Debatably, traditional dissertations are/were rather insular documents, written in very scholarly styles that used academic language that ostensibly was the hallmark of scholarly excellence and rigor. That style and language has been, in fact, quite constraining but in many ways, it facilitated the completion of the written document. The predetermined framework, if followed carefully, almost guaranteed scholarly success, albeit in a narrow context. The presumption in this model of writing is that the people who are required to read the dissertation are familiar with the language and style and are receptive.
This paradigm of knowledge production is necessarily changing along with the changes in doctoral education . Doctoral scholar/practitioners can no longer afford to direct their work to an âinsideâ audience. Funders and other supporters of their work demand clarity and access. So, the issues of audience and accessibility are foundational to our doctoral program and to the success of our students.
Within the context of traditional writing, accessibility is firstly a function of clarity of writing and cognizance of audience. The skills required to write accessibly often come from feedback from outsiders. And, in many ways, all of the colleagues in this program are outsiders. The backgrounds and disciplines of our students vary widely and because of this, they are really outsiders/novices, as they hear and try to understand the work of their peers. And, it i...