Unpacking the Process of Socialization of Doctorate Holders in Social Science: A Critical Analysis of the Case of Chile

• In Event: Doctoral Education in the Global South: A Critical Analysis From Chile and South Africa

Abstract

With the goal of participating in the so-called knowledge economy, Chile implemented several policy reforms to increase the number of doctorate holders in the last decade. From 2008 to 2022, the country has funded more than 11,000 fellowships to study doctoral programs in Chilean and foreign universities, which is equivalent to the number of doctorate holders who were living in the country in 2014 (CONICYT, 2018).

Higher education literature in Chile has analysed the expansion of doctoral education, paying special attention to the working conditions of doctorate holders (González & Jiménez, 2014), mainly in the academic sector (Chiappa and Perez Mejias, 2019; Chiappa, 2020; Labraña et al., 2021). Another line of research has looked at the quality of doctoral programs (Baeza, 2017; Celis & Veliz, 2020), and the research outputs generated by the new generation of scholars. This paper contributes to this body of research but from a different angle. It conducts a qualitative analysis of the main instances of socialisation through which doctorate holders in social science learn to become independent researchers in Chilean universities located in the northern part of the country (eight existing doctoral programs). The north of Chile is one of the least populated areas in the country; has a high concentration of the wealth due to mining companies located in these regions, but high levels of inequality.

Theoretical framework
We utilise social realism (Archer, 1995, Bhaskar, 2013) as an analytical tool to explore the structures, agencies and cultures that underlie the process of socialisation of doctorate holders in social science in universities located in the north of Chile.

A social realist analysis differentiate from others analyses by its efforts to understand how the interplay between structures of different types (global forces, Chilean class inequality, accreditation policies), agencies (individuals professor, students, administrators), and cultures (disciplinary, institutional, and doctoral) configure a particular phenomena; in this case, the doctoral socialisation of PhD scholars who studied a social science PhD in the north of Chile.

Methods and data collection techniques
Our research design is a comparative qualitative case study (Merriam, 2009) about the socialisation models used to educate the next generation of doctorate holders in four social science doctoral programs in the north of Chile. Our data includes institutional documents, accreditations reports and semi-structured interviews (at least 30) with faculty, doctoral students and administrators to elucidate the factors that are shaping doctoral formation in social science in the north part of Chile.

Preliminary findings
All doctoral programs in this study demonstrated a similar model of socialisation, that combines a set of courses and seminars with a more unstructured part where doctoral students are completely responsible for their research. The declared vision in most of the programs shows an explicit interest in connecting with the respective territories which is frequently challenged by the global pressure of participating in the knowledge economy and internal and external quality assurance processes.

Authors

• Roxana Chiappa, Universidad de Tarapaca
  Presenting Author

• Julio Labraña
  Presenting Author