This article focuses partly overlooked aspects regarding organisation and implementation of postgraduate education and more specifically, doctoral studies under collaborative projects with both research and development claims. The purpose of the article is that by the author's own experiences – both senior lecturers in education - contribute to increased knowledge of what it can mean to study for a doctorate in the field of educational science on these partly new conditions, and what implications it may have for the research and related scientific perspective which is thereby constituted. Previous research indicate that collaborative projects where different logics is to be integrated generally are held insolely positive and generative terms  (Danermark & Kullberg, 1999; Dahlstedt & Hertzberg, 2011; Öijen, 2013), while that type of complex arrangements may involve both challenges and possibilities when it comes to developing an independent and critical approach (Mendoza, 2010). The integration of different logics characterizing collaborative projects, and its partly dissimilar claims, will have significance for the research questions that will be asked and the results thus made possible.

If development has long been an imperative associated with various welfare efforts, the concept of collaboration during at least the last two decades has emerged as the rhetorical companion to it and a sort of key to success in this type of context. In several commission reports and policy documents with a bearing on the education sector, it is stated that there is a need for increased collaboration between universities and schools, and that educational research should be expanded to contribute to results, applicable to teacher training and educational professionals (Levinsson, 2013). The collaborative project which we during our doctoral studies were involved in, can be seen as an expression of such a rapprochement between research and school, a research structure not least a commission report from the late 1990s (SOU 1999: 63) is considered to have contributed to (Erixon Arreman, 2005; Levinsson, 2013; Öijen, 2014).

The increased emphasis on development and collaboration during the past two decades links to value shifts within the social scientific knowledge production in general. Concepts of Mode 1 and Mode 2 (Gibbons, 1994) describe, what researchers in the 1990s saw as an ongoing and partly desirable movement from an established and traditional view of science and research practice (Mode 1) with raised, elitist and less community oriented aims, to a more demand-driven, democracy-promoting, community-oriented science and research practice (Mode 2). Research on collaboration, however, has pointed out that "although collaboration is organised in order to solve problems, we must be aware that the interaction also generates problems that one have not previously had to contend with”(Danermark & Kullberg, 1999, p.10, our translation).

Collaborative projects imply the involvement of several stakeholders, which contribute to the complexity (Danermark & Kullberg, 1999). The complexity can be about more or less conditional, formal and temporary relationships between different sectors of society, agencies and professions, whose time limited frameworks, models and organisational conditions, partly differ (Danermark & Kullberg, 1999; Dahlstedt & Hertzberg, 2011; Mendoza, 2010). With reference to this complexity, research on collaboration, highlights that the participants are clear about and confident in their professions or professional affiliations. Based on this our research questions are:

What might it mean for aspiring or junior researchers in the field of educational science to build a critical scientific approach in the junction between the different logics that collaborative projects are characterized by?

What implications, in terms of potential challenges and possibilities, are at hand in such postgraduate arrangements and how do these converge to shifts and displacements of the role of educational research in general?

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