Desperately seeking fixedness: Practitioners’ accounts of ‘becoming doctoral researchers’

Abstract

We draw upon the concept of liminality to explore the experiences of practitioners enrolled on a UK Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) programme. We analyse 20 practitioners’ reflective journals to detail how the Doctor of Business Administration liminal space was negotiated. More specifically, we describe how practitioners deal with their struggles of identity incoherence or ‘monsters of doubt’ which are amplified in the Doctor of Business Administration context owing to the complex nature of the separation phase of liminality. We identify three broad methods deployed in this endeavour – ‘scaffolding’, ‘putting the past to work’ and ‘bracketing’ – which evidence practitioners ‘desperately seeking fixedness’. We make three contributions. First, we provide empirical insights into the experiences of the increasingly significant, but still under-researched, Doctor of Business Administration student. Second, we develop our understandings of monsters of doubt through illustrating how these are negotiated for learning to progress. Finally, we contribute to wider discussions of ‘becoming’ to demonstrate the simultaneous and paradoxical importance of movement and fixedness in order to learn and become.