Intersectoral Engagements of Doctoral Candidates: Regime Discrepancy Between Academic Territories

Abstract

The paper aims to analyse whether and to what extent collaborations of doctoral researchers with the non-academic sectors is determined by their disciplinary affiliation. For this purpose, the paper uses data collected from a survey of doctoral researchers at four universities from three Scandinavian countries. Relying on a critical realist research paradigm, the paper assesses the explanatory power of the Academic Tribes and Territories (ATT) thesis in terms of the relation between disciplinary groups and prevalence of intersectoral research collaborations for doctoral candidates. ATT thesis puts forward, throughout its development over time, two opposing perspectives around the degree of essentiality of disciplines in determining the professional behaviour of academic researchers. The collected survey data is analysed in the paper using a logit regression model. The results from the analysis show that different regimes can be applied to explain the essentiality of different “academic territories” in terms of influencing the intersectoral collaborations of doctoral candidates. On the one hand, for the hard-pure and soft-applied categories of disciplines in Becher-Biglan’s typology, the epistemological essentialism proves strongly capable of explaining the prevalence of intersectoral collaborations of doctoral students. On the other hand, in case of the hard-applied and soft-pure disciplines, the contextual factor represented by the country and university variables proves significant, leading to the predominance of social-practice-based understanding of intersectoral research collaboration within those fields.