a process through which students struggle and many students do not succeed, serving as a stumbling block and obstacle to program completion and perpetual all but dissertated (ABD) status—more on this outcome below; and
a mechanism that faculty use to screen suitable colleagues for the academy—sort of as a rite of initiation into academic life.
As you can see, there is quite a dizzying array of ways to describe dissertations and a broad range of meaning in what we ascribe to dissertations. When we turn to specific events in the dissertation research process, we find just as many included terms. For example, with the “dissertation proposal” cover term, we frequently find the following definitions:
the first three chapters of the dissertation or the introduction, literature review, and methodology chapters on a dissertation study;
the starting point of a dissertation study in which research topic, problem, purpose, and questions are on display and subject to scrutiny of your advisor and committee;
a challenging set of activities that forces students to consult the empirical and conceptual literature to situate their original study in the broader trends in the field;
a program requirement that occurs after the qualifying exams and before institutional review board (IRB) protocol approval and data collection fieldwork;
a point of program departure for many students—an event in a proposal hearing and a product in a proposal that tend to serve as a point of stop-out for doctoral students who move into ABD status;
a set of conceptualization and design activities where your advisor expects to review and offer feedback on drafts and where committee members share comments ahead of or at the proposal hearing.
Do you see where this is going? The use of the terms dissertation and dissertation proposal forces us to unpack a lot of cultural meaning in our work. We could go on—how about dissertation defense? Just the cover term defense alone is loaded with meaning. What comes to mind for you when you think of defense?
As historically and socially constructed, dissertation research can be seen as a process grounded in cultural rituals of disciplinary, institutional, and departmental groups. These groups, historically comprised of faculty in colleges and universities in the United States and Europe and now constituted of faculty from around the world, operate within disciplinary associations, academic programs, and institutional structures that tend to inform what counts as scholarship and how systematic investigations—original research—can be carried out. Over time, beliefs about topical areas of interest, paradigmatic lenses, research designs, data collection and data analysis procedures, and interpretive approaches informed standards in the field and conventions of practice. These beliefs reflect deeply rooted value systems about what members of the academy see in their world: their ways of seeing (ontology), ways of knowing (epistemology), and ways of investigating (methodology). Add to their academic belief systems what they expect in terms of work products—research and book manuscripts, scholarly presentations, and more recently extramural funding—and you can see how academic groups reify cultural meaning in what they do and make as academics.
Socializing Into an Academic Field
As a graduate student, how you do learn doctoral dissertation rituals in your program? From program entry to degree completion, Baird (1995) suggests three stages of graduate student socialization. At each stage, students require unique—even if overlapping—guidance. Baird’s (pp. 26–28) suggestions for what students need—and what faculty advisors need to provide to students—are instructive. In the beginning stage, students need to
understand the structure of the field,
become acquainted with the language and approach of the field,
become acquainted with the people and emphases of the program,
find a group of peers,
find an appropriate faculty sponsor,
obtain sufficient financial assistance, and
deal with the specifics of program and university requirements.
In the final two stages, the middle and dissertation stages, Baird offers faculty advisors and students a more intense set of suggestions that relate to degree program completion, advanced career preparation, and dissertation development. Here, Baird (pp. 28–30) argues that students need to
master the language and approach of the field,
identify intellectual and professional interests,
choose a committee,
prepare for comprehensive examinations,
develop the idea and methods for the dissertation,
seek advice and guidance from a faculty advisor, and
find encouragement from a faculty advisor.
The behavior, language, and products of faculty at doctoral universities and master’s and baccalaureate universities favor dissertation research in various, sometimes diverging forms. Traditionally, the dissertation has taken the form of a book-length monograph—although length in a final dissertation is not a measure of how credible or valuable a study is. Informed by historical patterns of research productivity in the German research universities (Malone, 1981), faculty values related to how to socialize new members to the academy as research scientists framed approaches to dissertation research in Ph.D. programs in U.S. colleges and universities. Returning to the same two program handbooks mentioned earlier in Chapter 2 of this book, we see explicit cultural uses of dissertations as research artifacts of doctoral students. University of California, Los Angeles’s (UCLA) Department of Education handbook for the Department of Education in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies (GSEIS) says this about the dissertation associated with its Ph.D. degree program (2010, p. 5): “The dissertation . . . must embody the results of the student’s independent investigation, must contribute to the body of theoretical knowledge in education, and must draw on interrelations of education and the cognate discipline(s).” The Rutgers University Ph.D. program in criminal justice articulates a similar approach (p. 13): The doctorate requires . . . original research in the form of a doctoral dissertation. The dissertation is an investigation of a problem of significance that makes a unique contribution to the field. It must demonstrate that the candidate is capable of independent research and analysis, reported in accepted scholarly style, and that s/he has attained a high degree of scholarly competence” (Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, 2015). Even with these approaches to dissertation research codified in program structures—more conventional in nature—disciplinary groups and subgroups shape the organization and content of dissertation research through cultural meaning and interpretations.
Of course, the academy is not a single entity or monolithic group but comprised of many smaller, highly specialized groups of disciplinary members (Becher & Trowler, 2001), and these discrete groups tend to adapt approaches to meet the needs of their specific systems of values, beliefs, and traditions. In academic work and life, no single group generally maintains complete cultural hegemony over all others. Instead, academic groups and subgroups tend to be influenced by their closest cultural identity reference groups and work to maintain their own unique expectations for doctoral student research. Here, academic and research specialization and turf (Damrosch, 1995) over specific areas of scholarship frequently drive outcomes in how faculty train doctoral students. For example, reflecting a more applied approach, the same UCLA department records this about the dissertation in its Ed.D. program (GSEIS, 2010, p. 9): “The dissertation . . . must embody the results of the student’s independent investigation and must contribute to professional knowledge in education and the improvement of school practice.” Similarly, the California State University,