Liminal transgressions, or where should the critical academy go from here? Reimagining the future of doctoral education to engender research sustainability

Abstract

Abstract Journal rankings are increasingly becoming institutionalized in business schools throughout the world. The logical outcome that has followed from this phenomenon is the proliferation of a set of institutional pressures cast on scholars to produce research that will be published in ‘journals that count’. One group that has been particularly implicated in the process are doctoral students—a group that is often situated in the most disempowered position within the academic hierarchy. Doctoral students habitually encounter myriad discursive and coercive forces, which encourage them to pursue scholarship within a certain assemblage of paradigmatic boundaries, methodological approaches, and research parameters. While members of this group will eventually become the future of their respective disciplines, their voices have been largely silenced in, or absent from, the ongoing conversation regarding the implications emerging from the current nature of institutional pressures for research output. Focusing on the area of critical research, this article identifies two trajectories by which to reimagine the future of critical doctoral education in business schools: i) reconstituting the role of senior professors in the field whose ontology and scholarship are inflected by a critical orientation, and, ii) pursuing concerted efforts to disengage with the mainstream.