Scholars assert that, worldwide as well as in Europe, doctoral provision is increasingly characterised by accelerated scales of production, competitive research grants, centralised administration, and interdisciplinary, cohort-based training (Bao et al. 2018, Nerad 2020). This is associated with increased state interest and policy interventions that seek to heighten the contribution of doctorates within the knowledge economy, as well as concerns within higher education institutions (HEIs) around efficiency, cost savings, and differential access to funding (Thune et al. 2012). The situation in the UK appears to mirror this picture on the whole (McGloin and Wynn 2015, Harrison et al. 2016), but scholars have long noted that national settings mediate the forms that broader trends take, due in part to the differing degrees of organisational autonomy and status hierarchies that prevail within countries (Hüther and Krücken 2016, Powell et al. 2016). Both of these are relatively pronounced in the UK’s university sector (Evans et al. 2019), and this paper specifically examines the provision of doctorates in the social sciences within that.  

Doctorates in this area have – as other fields – experienced significant growth and a range of policy changes (McGloin and Wynn 2015). Some doctoral-related policies are directed towards UK higher education as a whole, but one – the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Doctoral Training Centres/Partnerships (DTCs/DTPs) implemented from 2010 – targets the social sciences in particular. The most striking feature of a DTC/DTP is the creation of an interdepartmental and often inter-institutional unit to coordinate ESRC-funded doctorates and training. These are based on a model that initially emerged to support equipment sharing in science and engineering disciplines, but it has since been transferred to other areas and now proliferates across UK higher education (Lunt et al. 2014). A secondary impact of the ESRC policy was an instant halving of the number of HEIs receiving state funding for social science PhDs; the group of recipients was expanded in 2016 when the policy was renewed, but not to pre-2010 levels. There is some research which documents the not entirely easy experiences of those who retained ESRC patronage (Lunt et al. 2014, Deem et al. 2015), but there is little work analysing how other kinds of universities fared where doctoral numbers have continued to rise.

To unpick this further, we invoked the notion of institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell 1983), a conceptual framework which asserts how convergence in organisational sectors can be driven by different factors, namely coercion (policy), mimesis (imitation), normativity (taken for granted activity) and rationalisation (calculated optimisation). Isomorphism has been used fruitfully in higher education by a number of scholars interested in convergence and organisational behaviour (McQuarrie and Kondra 2016, Meyer and Powell 2020, Shin and Chung 2020). Applying this to how different universities operated in the social science doctoral space – and, crucially, why – allows us to take a closer look at the extent to which convergence is actually taking place, but also with a view to understanding any potential diversity. Given the manifestly uneven impact of the DTC/DTP policy, and also the markedly hierarchical nature of UK higher education, it might be expected that isomorphism will only be partial. Examining this more closely not only extends the literature in this specific area, but also provides insights into how organisations’ individual positioning and history may have implications for how they are able to behave in policy contexts.

To be precise, our research question here is as follows:

To what extent is convergence occurring in UK social science doctoral provision, and what isomorphic processes promote or hinder it?

We recruited a non-representative but purposive sample of 32 senior academics and research directors who had responsibilities associated with their social science doctorates. Seeking to ensure a varied sample, based on the literature-informed expectation that their histories, experiences, and approaches to doctoral provision might differ, they were drawn from a range of HEIs from all four countries of the UK. Although the ESRC is not the only source of social science state funding in the UK, it is the main actor in this specific space, and were therefore used eligibility for its funding over time as an indicative proxy of the profile (i.e. size/history) of an HEI’s doctoral provision. This allowed us to observe that most of the 120 UK HEIs who offered postgraduate research in the social sciences could be divided into three distinct groups: - Insiders: older, higher status HEIs who retained access to ESRC funding - Leavers: Mid-range research-intensive HEIs or former polytechnics who lost ESRC funding - Outsiders: Newer, more teaching-oriented HEIs who never had access to ESRC funding Following ethical approval, data was collected through semi-structured discussions that ranged across participants’ views of the broader policy context around doctoral provision and their institution’s specific actions and rationales related to this. The data was coded and analysed, using NviVo software, according to a coding scheme which was constructed in part a priori according to the doctoral activities undertaken (growth, organisation, cohort models) and their underpinning rationales – i.e. the isomorphic processes – with emergent subcategories. This allowed us to examine the within- and between-group differences around how and why HEIs were active around their social science research degrees.

Across all three groups we saw evidence of considerable dynamism – and anxiety – around their social science doctorates. Participants invariably described their HEI as actively implementing significant changes, but this was most pronounced in the Leaver group, those who had at least temporarily lost ESRC patronage. There were similarities between the groups, but also important differences in how they sought to – or were able to – achieve their goals. This was to a certain extent driven by the influence and interaction of the isomorphic processes, some of which exerted the same kind of pressure across all three groups, while others were more specific to particular kinds of institutions. What mattered overall was not only which processes were at play, but also their strength and whether they operated in concert or in tension and this in particular differed between the groups. So while there was a degree of convergence, a variety of factors also impeded uniformity. In other words, starting points matter greatly because policies here operate in such a way that those in the lead maintain their advantage and those furthest back are the most impeded from catching up. This work reiterates that attention needs to be paid to the national idiosyncrasies of higher education policy spaces in order to establish if – or how – broader trends are replicated or refracted and what mediates that. What we have shown here is that, in a sector where status differences are pronounced and HEI profiles varied, policies interact with a range of factors that to some extent encourage isomorphism but at the same time can reinforce heterogeneity when they penalise ‘weaker’ players. In the interests of equity, policy models should ameliorate these detrimental effects and support all universities in their development rather than reinforcing entrenched sectoral hierarchies.

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