Authoring a PhD

The contents page typically shows two, three or even four literature review chapters (sometimes even more followed by a pretty boring or predictable methods chapter then only three to four chapters of detailed substantive, applied or empirical work and last a very brief concluding chapter. A rather cruel précis of the subtext message this pattern conveys to readers would go like this:
Hi – this is the story of what I did during my doctorate.
When I began I was a bit confused about what topic to pick.
So I undertook a really big, broad literature review in order to bring myself and my supervisor up to speed on afield of possible topics. I wrote this up as along chapter to get me through assessment by my department at the end of the first year. After that I narrowed the topic down a lot more and did an exhaustive literature review on a bit of the field where I thought I could do better than previous authors.
Next I worked a great deal on my research methodology or whatever ‘techy’ bits the research involved – for instance, I did a lot of searching for and accessing archives / I collected a lot of numbers / I translated a big text / I devised a framework for doing a content analysis / etc.].
At last, midway through my second or in my third year
I went out into the field and got my hands dirty doing empirical research or it maybe, I went and satin foreign libraries or an archive fora year / I analysed my numerical data over and over / I interviewed a lot of people / I did experiments in the labs. At this point I discovered that things in the outside world or, the archive documents the library materials / the interview tapes / the computer databases / the test tubes are pretty confusing and hard to make sense of. The results I got did not really support what
I had expected to find, or sometimes, did not seem to have any recognizable pattern at all. Because I was puzzled, and a bit at a loss, I wrote several long chapters setting out in raw detail much of what I’d actually discovered, and trying to make preliminary sense of these findings.
By now I’d almost used up my word limit, my PhD
finances were running low, and I was becoming jumpy that
I’d never make it into the academic job market. So I pushed AUTHORING AP H D

ahead to get things finished up somehow. My last chapter contains the little bit of post hoc rationalization of my results or rethinking of my opening perspective that I managed to scrape together during a very rushed final drafting stage.
There are multiple reasons why this kind of disappointingly familiar storyline recurs so frequently and predictably with doctorates. One of the most important of these influences is that many people in the humanities and social sciences regard the
‘focus down model of how a doctorate should be structured as either a natural or desirable or inevitable way to do things.
Figure 3.2 shows the kind of sequence adopted by nine out often research students doing big book theses in Europe in these disciplines, and often demanded by their supervisors. The order of material is shown along the horizontal axis from left to right,
and the horizontal width of each block shows the weight of words assigned to that chunk of the thesis. The vertical size for each block shows the scope of the material or topics (the breadth of coverage) being considered at that stage.
The focus down model starts with a very broad literature review that progressively gets winnowed down as it goes on. A set of related big themes are raised initially, discussed superficially but then often set to the side one by one, or discarded
P LAN NI N GA NI NT E GRATED THESIS More review,
methods and setup materials
Analysis
Large literature review

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