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Volume 4 Issue 1 November 2006
Proposals for Designing and Controlling a Doctoral Research Project in Management Sciences
Jacques Lauriol,
Groupe ESC Rouen, Mont-Saint Aignan Cedex, France
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Designing and controlling a doctoral research project in Strategic Management consists in leading a knowledge production process through the three following stages:
The construction of a “Positioning”, critical to the insertion of the project in a world of controversies, composed of theoretical and epistemological statements that can be more or less in competition
The management of the launching process for the research project: this second sequence is generally linked to the interaction between a researcher and their field; it frequently leads to new angles of questioning that are liable to consolidate or alternatively jeopardise the initial state of the project.
The final stage involves the “discursive structuration” (DERY. 1989) of the project and of its contributions to scientific knowledge. Here we are concerned with rendering intelligible the complex phenomena that are of interest to actors with differentiated expectations. Thus it is an issue of translation formulated by a central actor in this process (the researcher) who, having scrutinised the context and legitimacy of their analysis framework, proposes a problematisation of the observed facts and “states” the “discernible links between heterogeneous activities (or facts)” (CALLON. 1992.65).
The design and control of a research project also appears to involve the capacity to manage the dynamic construction process for a balance between two factors: that of “dissidence” on one side, and “conformity” on the other. Balance should here be understood as “a situation in which every individual does as much as they can for themselves, given…the institutional framework that defines the options open to individuals, and which binds their actions” (KREPS. 1990.6).
“Dissidence” probably constitutes the main factor in activating this tension, throughout the project’s running. It concerns an intellectual attitude or posture that aims to ask questions of “normal science”, to flush out sometimes implicitly normative theoretical postulations that are vehicles of paradigms or of schools of thought.
This posture implies the mobilisation of intellectual competencies based upon an excellent knowledge of the disciplinary field concerned by the project, as much as it does the capacities for dissociation and creative criticism that allow the forming of a pertinent project, for which legitimacy can be established. This dimension of the legitimacy of a project cannot be conceived without a certain “agreement in spirit” being expressed by an academic community (research as an institution). The gathering of self-confidence is necessarily constrained by a group of principles, rules and conventions specifying the production modes for scientific knowledge.
Quite clearly, the positioning of the researcher on this continuum between dissidence and conformity depends largely on that researcher’s post-thesis objectives. An orientation toward a University career, in a disciplinary field marked by a certain number of methodological principles and known theoretical orientations, should benefit from a utilitarian-type calculation that aims to maximise the result obtained. Conversely, a non-university orientation should allow a greater potential for dissidence in a researcher, with the proviso that they find a “consenting” research director.
Keywords:
Designing and controlling a research project, doctoral research in strategic management.
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