Doctoral education in the United States is nearing its 150^th anniversary and doctoral education in management is nearing its 75^th anniversary. Such milestones occasion an examination of the current state of doctoral education, particularly in management, and a determination as to whether any aspects of doctoral education need rethinking. Certainly, the organizational environment of today is dramatically different from that of the 1850s and 1930s. This changed environment has implications both for the nature of doctoral education and for the study of management at the doctoral level. This chapter will also explore current trends in doctoral education as well as briefly allude to the specific examples of a few university programs. The primary emphasis of the chapter will be to present the Doctor of Management degree at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) as a case study. The designers of this program endeavored to rethink all aspects of the traditional Ph.D. and, where necessary, make improvements. Atwell (1996) has called for multiple models of excellence, reflecting different but equally worthy educational missions. UMUC's intention is to develop a model that will become the benchmark doctoral degree for students who want to be scholarly practitioners rather than tenure-track faculty. If history is any predictor, models get "locked in" and are not easily changed in higher education; once such a model is formed it may influence doctoral education for over 100 years. The chapter will conclude with a series of ideas for exploration as educators continue to modify and improve doctoral education.

The Current State of Doctoral Education

Three primary criticisms of doctoral education are:

1. The mismatch between doctoral education and the preparation needed for both faculty and non-faculty jobs.

2. The onerous process of doctoral education and the high incompletion rates.

3. The dissertation process and lack of dissemination of doctoral work.

The Doctoral Education Mismatch

Jules LaPidus (1997), former President of the Council of Graduate Schools, has described the present state of doctoral education as a "classic mismatch, with the universities producing a highly specialized product that the employers don't want. " Over 40,000 doctorates are awarded each year (Syverson, 2001). Most of these heavily emphasize education in quantitative research, yet only a small percentage of these degree holders go into academia or similar research positions. In a large, comprehensive study, Golde and Dore (2001) found that

in today's doctoral programs, there is a three-way mismatch between student goals, training and actual careers. Despite a decade of attention, the mismatch between the purpose of doctoral education, aspirations of the students, and the realities of their careers - within and outside academia - continues. Doctoral students persist in pursuing careers as faculty members, and graduate programs persist in preparing them for careers at research universities, despite the well-publicized paucity of academic jobs and efforts to diversify the options available for doctorate-holders. The result: Students are not well prepared to assume the faculty positions that are available, nor do they have a clear concept of their suitability for work outside of research (p. 5).

The Ph.D. is a research degree. Ironically, although the degree is designed for those who will become faculty members, almost no doctoral programs (excluding Education degrees) have teaching requirements. Many students do get experience teaching, however, by way of a teaching assistantship that finances their educations. Yet, teaching assistantships and post-doctorates provide primarily on-the-job experience with little or no intentional mentoring and skill development.

Golde and Dore (2001) also found that even the stated objectives of developing research expertise in Ph.D. programs were not being achieved. Part of this difficulty may be the discord in higher education (David, 1997) that characterizes any discussion of alternative objectives for a doctoral program. Winter, Griffiths, and Green (2000) contend that both the content and research methods of doctoral programs, traditional and practice-based, are entangled in controversy about the value and foundations of knowledge. The lack of consensus about the needed fundamental changes may be solidifying the status quo.

The Onerous Process and High Incompletion Rates

One could argue that the mismatch described above results in an enormous waste of human capital. What might represent an even larger waste, though, is the number of years spent by students pursuing doctorates that are never completed. Bowen and Rudenstine (1992) report that fewer than half of all students entering doctoral programs finish; most of those who do not finish complete all requirements but the dissertation. Several factors contribute to the high incompletion rate. Students enter a doctoral program without a reasonable awareness of the time, money, clarity of purpose, and perseverance that doctoral education entails (Golde and Dore, 2001). Once enrolled, students still do not encounter mechanisms that easily increase their awareness about these matters. Many appear to receive little guidance about how to navigate the doctoral process. Critical success factors for doctoral education "remain murky to them throughout their time in graduate school" (p. 29).

These factors take many forms. Surprisingly, most programs do not have clear guidelines about how much time it will take to complete a degree and when exactly a student is eligible for graduation (Golde and Dore, 2001). The process of advisor selection is not explicit and the advising a student receives throughout a doctoral program is subject to the vagaries of the advisor. Ongoing financial support is an issue in many doctoral programs. Fellowships and assistantships may not be renewed in years when a university department is strapped for financial resources.

The Dissertation Process and Lack of Dissemination of Doctoral Work

The critique of the traditional dissertation requirement is so scathing in the literature that one wonders why immediate changes have not been made throughout the country. Typical comments include "the tenacious, unreflective commitment to the traditional rationale of the dissertation makes it one of academe's greatest monuments to non-thought" (Spriestersbach and Henry, 1978, p. 54) and the typical, traditional dissertation is "ill-suited to the task of training doctoral students in the communicative aspects of educational research, and is largely ineffectual as a means of contributing knowledge to the field" (Duke and Beck, 1999, p. 31).

Perhaps some of the ineffectiveness of the process stems from the fact that the conduct of any given dissertation committee appears to be idiosyncratic. One of the positive developments arising from the expanding number of practitioner-oriented doctorates is that dissertation examination procedures are now coming under study. Johnston (1997) discovered that "the examination process for doctoral theses seems to be based on assumptions which [sic] are largely untested and on understandings which [sic] are not necessarily open for discussion" (p. 334).

The traditional dissertation is a unique document. In the field of business and management it is almost never published in that form. As many as half of all dissertations are never disseminated through a presentation, article, or other means (Duke and Beck, 1999). If a doctoral student does not become a faculty member who needs to publish, a fantastic dissertation may be known only to the committee members and perhaps a family member of the student. Graduates speak of "mining" their dissertation or "extracting an article" from the document. Extracting an article from a dissertation is a non-trivial matter. It is not usually the case that large contiguous chunks of the dissertation can be put into an article. The process is closer in scope to taking ten percent from each page of a 200-page dissertation to create a 20-page article meeting the format and requirements of most journals.

Doctorates in Management Education

Doctoral programs in management are not as plagued by such issues, possibly because these degrees have less history. Doctorates in the field of management have existed only since the 1940s, although these have mostly been in business administration rather than management per se. Many of the early doctorates were DBAs (Doctors of Business Administration) rather than Ph.D.s, which also helped skirt some of the problems (graduation criteria, for example, tend to be much clearer). Management doctoral education has also avoided some problems because it has frequently been pursued on a part-time, rather than full-time basis (Miles, 1985). Business schools have typically preferred graduate students who have some career-oriented work experience. Consequently, many doctoral students start their degree programs later in life and continue to be employed full-time while they pursue the degree. It is common for many employers to subsidize the tuition expenses of masters students, and often even doctoral students, in management.

The Current Environment of Management and Organizations

The current organizational milieu has been described as "permanent white water" (Vaill, 1991). Doctoral students in business and management are faced with a subject matter that is turbulent, fuzzy, chaotic, ambiguous, and emergent. Not only do the students study an environment like this, but they also want to become better practitioners in such an environment. Successful practitioners and executives must be lifelong learners. They must excel at the skill of engaging a set of circumstances for which they have no prior education and experience, and quickly becoming effective in that set of circumstances. 

Such a scenario changes the nature of the type of learning that is most helpful. Relational learning, which occurs when individuals acquire skills, competencies, and/or perspectives in dialogue and connection with others (Boyatzis and Kram, 1999) has been shown to be effective in increasing managerial performance (McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison, 1988). Traditional learning is seen as a process of increasing individuation. Relational learning, on the other hand, deepens one's sense of interdependence.

Traditional learning is also seen primarily as an individual activity. However, today's practitioners and executives are increasingly operating in an environment in which they are functioning as part of a team whose basic activity is learning. Consequently, team-oriented learning activities should be part of any doctoral education in management. This form of learning is also important because research shows that much of what leaders do is sense-making, which occurs in a social context. It is in relationship that people test concepts, mutually adjust positions, learn as they communicate, experiment, and develop consensus (Weick, 1995).

Consider four actual situations in which a doctoral education can increase the effectiveness of the manager's response. Each of the four scenarios is followed by a discussion of the relevant aspects of a doctoral education.

1. The owner of a modest-sized business with little technical experience decides the business needs a corporate web presence. How does she choose from among a number of proposals that range in cost from $250,000 - $500,000 and promote different features?
   
   What criteria does she use to evaluate the proposals? How will the success of the web presence be measured?  Since the web-page developers will almost certainly overemphasize the technical aspects of the proposal, how does the business owner know to include the social, psychological, and cultural dimensions of a web presence (Dent, 1999)? These kinds of questions arise in a number of business settings aside from assessing web pages.
   
   

2. A CEO picks up a book in an airport bookstore. The [fictitious] subject is reengineering transformational scorecards. The book is filled with testimonials of success in comparable firms. Should the CEO institute reengineering transformational scorecards in his company?
   
   How does a CEO determine what will endure and what will fade away? What philosophical foundation is the CEO working from and what are the advantages and disadvantages of that perspective? Many organizations embraced Deming's TQM philosophy, for example, without realizing that, while it is a great model for a high-quality organization, the philosophy has no change process implicit within it. Is transformational leadership a fad? Is knowledge management? How does a senior executive know?
   
   

3. The CFO of a large company is evaluating a funding proposal for a deferred compensation plan for the CEO. The total sum involved exceeds $100 million over a period of many years. Although the CFO evaluates financial proposals every day, this transaction has some features that the CFO is not trained to evaluate. How should the CFO decide whether to accept the funding proposal?
   
   The author held an executive position in which he regularly witnessed this scenario firsthand. The CFOs with whom the author worked were typically brilliant individuals with MBAs from the top-ranked business schools in the world. Yet, it was not unusual to learn that the company had previously purchased such a financial contract and essentially had been "cheated" out of more than $10 million because the prior person/firm who sold it to them had pulled the wool over their eyes. How does a brilliant CFO get taken like that? How does she ensure she is taking a total systems perspective, including understanding a time horizon of over 20 years? How does she know what questions to ask about something even in her area (although on the periphery)?
   
   

4. A network engineer travels to Saudi Arabia to install the company's intranet at the Saudi site. He has read the cultural guidebook of "do's and dont's" his company provided for that country. He encounters a situation that seems most unorthodox. What should he do?
   
   Many people need a deeper understanding of the differences in culture as opposed to bits of advice such as not showing the sole of one's shoe in the Middle East or being prepared to endure "chit chat" before getting down to business in South America. Rather than learning do's and don'ts from a guidebook, a person who understands a Colombian perspective of time, or a Japanese perspective of communitarianism, is better equipped to deal with a variety of situations that may arise.
   

Implications for Management Education

What conclusions can be drawn from rethinking the environment of management and its implications for management education? Several changes seem to be in order. First, doctoral students in management need to be prepared for a turbulent environment in which senior people undertake new initiatives without roadmaps that could be drawn from prior experience. Second, critical thinking skills need to be enhanced so that doctoral students are comfortable taking a systems perspective and know the kinds of questions to ask in order to learn about areas outside their specialties. Although validity demonstrated by statistical analysis is important, doctoral students will need to know how to determine what constitutes reasonable evidence of validity in fuzzy situations that do not lend themselves to easy mathematical formulation. Finally, it is imperative for managers to understand interactions, quality of interfaces, and relationships as units of analysis. Such a shift implies an emphasis on teaming and interdependence both in the learning process and in the nature of what is learned. These changes were among others in the design of the Doctor of Management Program at University of Maryland University College.

The Doctor of Management at University of Maryland University College

University of Maryland University College (UMUC) is one of the 11 degree-granting institutions of the University System of Maryland. UMUC was founded in 1947 with a mission of providing degree coursework to working adults and is fully accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. In addition to fulfilling its mission in the state of Maryland, UMUC has been involved since shortly after its founding with providing such coursework in Europe and Asia, primarily to members of the military and their dependents (Hudgins, 2000). In 1978, UMUC instituted the Graduate School of Management, known today as the Graduate School since it now includes large programs in technology and education. In 2000, UMUC enrolled approximately 79,000 students, including 6,000 graduate students.  The philosophy of the Doctor of Management (DM) program, established in 2000, is heavily influenced by the culture and history of UMUC, so the latter will be briefly profiled here.

The leadership of UMUC has established a goal of having the university be one of the five premier worldwide institutions of higher education. Although an ambitious goal for a school that does not yet have a national reputation, UMUC has developed a set of competencies that are aligned with the external environment of the early 21^st century and consequently uniquely position the university to achieve this goal. Four competencies, in particular, will be highlighted here.

• UMUC fosters an interdisciplinary-minded faculty who approach curriculum development, for example, differently from discipline-specific faculty. UMUC's MBA program, for example, is an integrated set of courses that blurs disciplinary boundaries in the same way that the day-to-day business challenges of organizational are often fuzzy.
  
  

• UMUC has operated a large global, multi-campus operation since 1949, so its leadership and faculty do not have an American or Eurocentric perspective of higher education, students, or business operations.
  
  

• UMUC's mission has always focused on the working, adult learner.
  
  

• Although offering primarily face-to-face classes, UMUC has pioneered and created best practices in distance education.

Interdisciplinary Faculty

UMUC's faculty combine scholarly and practitioner expertise and accomplishments. Approximately 98 percent of the full-time Graduate School faculty have terminal degrees (nearly 90 percent including part-time faculty). At the same time, nearly all of the faculty have had substantial business experience. This blend means that the faculty have worked in environments without the traditional barriers between disciplines of strategy, technology, organizational behavior, and so forth. The managerial experience of the faculty allows them to see organizations and leadership more holistically. A faculty member at UMUC may have a Ph.D. in Finance, for example, yet her career may have evolved to the point that she had held a senior marketing position prior to academia. Consequently, she has developed not only appreciation for both disciplines, but also expertise in both.

Global Mindset

UMUC has had major international operations since 1949. Although it is true that most of the students have been Americans, thousands of students have attended from their respective home countries and all of the degree offerings have had to match the local cultures in certain respects. UMUC's major administrative offices have been in Heidelberg and Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany and in Tokyo, Japan. From these locations senior academic officers have managed degree programs in over 50 countries. In fact, for much of its history, UMUC had more students in Europe than in the United States.

UMUC presidents have typically lived and worked overseas. Benjamin Massey, president from 1978-1998, taught for several years in the European Division and later held positions both as director of the European Division and director of the Far East Division. Ray Ehrensberger, who led UMUC for 23 years [1952-1975], lived in Russia and Turkey among other countries, and traveled extensively for UMUC, often departing from the main campus for months at a time (Hudgins, 2000). The same is true of several of the deans and other top officers. Of the three major divisions - Europe, Asia, and North America - many of the faculty have served in at least two.

This experience and university culture have prepared UMUC and its leaders to operate effectively worldwide. The surge of enrollment in web-based courses means that a typical course may include students from eight to ten different time zones. UMUC has developed the administrative structure and the faculty expertise to excel in such an environment.

Working Adult Students

From its inception, UMUC's sole focus has been the working adult. Consequently, the issues associated with working adult students are central, not secondary, to the mission of the school. The university has maintained a very high level of rigor and quality, yet found ways to provide flexibility and service. The entire tenor of an institution is different when all of its resources are devoted to a single audience, the adult learner.

Finally, adult learners want a different kind of faculty member. They want faculty to have all of the expertise of traditional universities with at least two additional features. First, adult learners care about the quality of character of the faculty (Vaill, 1998). They will not respect a brilliant faculty member who is also arrogant or a renowned scholar who is insensitive to the needs of women. Second, UMUC faculty are passionate in their belief that adult education is something quite special. The faculty are expert at understanding the specific needs of adult learners and tailoring courses and degree programs accordingly.

Distance Education

UMUC offered its first course in distance education in 1959. Today, the worldwide web has become the predominant distance course delivery method. UMUC has pioneered in this area with its proprietary software product, WebTycho. UMUC's excellence and quality in distance education have been identified as "the best of the web" by Forbes magazine (Forbes, 2000). Although not enough studies have been conducted to draw conclusions, early indications are that web-based courses are as effective, if not more effective, than classroom-based courses for certain subjects and populations in higher education (Navarro and Shoemaker, 2000).

Introduction of the Doctor of Management Degree

One might think that a program aspiring to be the benchmark of its kind would have one or more "silver bullets" - features that no one else has discovered. But, the UMUC DM program lays claim to no such find. The program does combine, though, several leading-edge features that, taken as a whole, do seem to create, in synergistic fashion, an emergent feature that makes this program stand apart from other programs. These features include:

• Interdisciplinary design

• Applied and scholarly focus

• Partnership with employers

• Revised dissertation requirements

• Integration of the worldwide web
• Processes to assist in student degree completion

Interdisciplinary Design

Nearly every critique of higher education for at least the past 40 years has decried the rigid disciplinary focus of academia. The idea of integration of disciplines is praised roundly by academics in high places, yet a number of structural and historical factors reduce this praise mostly to lip service. Hybrid fields have a difficult time achieving equal status in the eyes of the academic community (Argenti, 1996), respected journals tend to be discipline specific, and faculty promotion criteria often encourage a young faculty member to focus on a narrow specialty.

The traditional Ph.D. has been the quintessential discipline-specific academic pursuit. Golde and Dore (2001) found that only 27.1% of doctoral students reported being prepared by their programs for interdisciplinary study even when it was allowed by their doctoral programs. Although many less traditional doctorates have an interdisciplinary component, this feature is enhanced at UMUC because of the interdisciplinary nature of its faculty members. Developing a global mindset is also an important element of the UMUC education. This perspective is achieved by requiring interdisciplinary study in the area of international operations as well as in the doctoral core seminars required of all students. Moreover, all courses are designed to include an international perspective. This view is further strengthened in distance education courses, which typically involve in any class students working in five or more different countries. Many courses require assignments in which students study local companies, so the class is enriched by examples from all over the world.

Thirty-six of the forty-eight minimum credit hours of coursework for the degree support an interdisciplinary foundation of learning. Eighteen credit hours are breadth courses ranging on topics ranging from behavioral sciences to technology. An additional 18 hours are in the doctoral core seminars which examine the philosophical underpinnings of topics such as inquiry, leadership, and social systems design. The comprehensive exam experience, then, is designed to evaluate the interdisciplinary rather than the discipline-specific portion of the degree program.

Applied and Scholarly Focus

The UMUC DM is avowedly an applied degree. Yet, it is possible for a degree program to be both practical and scholarly. In fact, it is apparent that epistemology is central to many of the actual scenarios provided earlier - how a senior executive knows which questions to ask, how validity of proposed change management programs are determined, how evidence of an effective technology is marshaled. An assumption and assertion of this program is that this form of learning will markedly increase the effectiveness of the mid-life (median age 47) professionals drawn to UMUC's program. This learning is primarily accomplished in the 18 credit hours of doctoral core seminars mentioned above.

Partnership with Employers

The applied nature of the DM program creates interesting opportunities for collaboration with employers. The partnership with employers manifests itself in several ways. An advisory panel of both academics and business leaders serves to guide the graduate school in the conduct of the program. A surprising note is how strongly the CEOs on the panel have emphasized the importance of the scholarly portion of the DM program. Various businesses have also created eponymous fellowships that support the students in their studies. These businesses are then open to having doctoral research performed within their organizations. Initial contacts with organizations have shown them to be very supportive of UMUC's DM program in these ways. UMUC's response has been similar to that of Thomas Leigh, director for the Coca-Cola Center for Marketing Studies at the University of Georgia, "doctoral students do fascinating work, and companies are realizing this. These students are tuned in to what's relevant and what's not" (James, 1999). Proctor & Gamble is considered a pioneer in directly supporting doctoral students, providing $10,000 every year to each of several doctoral students conducting research on topics relevant to P&G.

Dissertation committees in the DM program are encouraged to include a doctorally-qualified member from outside academia. Perhaps most novel, all dissertations are required to include, at an early stage, a concept paper and presentation, in lay person's terms, to a group of qualified practitioners. This group would then have an opportunity to provide input for the remaining design of the dissertation research.

Revised Dissertation Requirements

The dissertation requirements for the UMUC DM program represent an effort to streamline the dissertation process by removing tangential activity and focusing on the creation of pieces of research that can be widely disseminated. In this way, the student gets an audience for her work and the field gets a timely, accessible contribution. At all stages of the dissertation research process, DM students are encouraged to expand the boundaries of traditional thinking and scholarship, both in methodology and content. Therefore, specific dissertation approaches and formats for a doctoral student are not limited to the model presented here. In general, though, a dissertation will contain three stand-alone papers.

• A Concept Paper - The student writes, in lay person's terms, a general outline of the research proposal identifying the definition of the problem, a preliminary review of the literature, and a proposed methodology. The student also identifies a "stakeholder group" of practitioners who are interested in the outcome of this research. If the dissertation were an ethnographic case study of one organization, for example, the stakeholder group would be the organization's top management team. If the dissertation addresses a wider topic, such as the architecture of the internet, the stakeholder group may be experts drawn from a number of different organizations. The student delivers the paper to the stakeholder group and also makes an oral presentation. The student then has an opportunity to get feedback from a group of practitioners about all aspects of the proposal including its fidelity to real world conditions.
  
  

• A Knowledge Assessment Paper - This interdisciplinary paper consists of an extensive literature review relevant to the dissertation. The student prepares a paper that must be accepted by an acknowledged conference through a refereed review process. Requiring dissertation work to be presented is unusual. Although it presents somewhat of a hurdle to the student, there are now enough reputable conferences, and the turnaround times are short enough, that this expectation is not unreasonable. This requirement also means that reviewers external to the university have validated the student's work.
  
  

• A Publishable Journal Paper - The next chapter of the dissertation is a stand-alone paper describing the outcome of the student's research. This paper must be of a quality that the dissertation committee members deem to be publishable. All students are encouraged to submit their papers for publication. However, the vagaries of the journal acceptance process and the extensive time lags between submission and publication are such that requiring acceptance of the paper could unduly delay awarding the degree.

Integration of the Worldwide Web

Although all coursework can be taken in face-to-face classrooms, doctoral students who desire experience with web-based coursework can take as much as half of the coursework online. UMUC's online courses are designed to mirror the interactions of a workplace where people who may be working on the same project are not co-located. All face-to-face courses are also web-enhanced, using the WebTycho system. This allows classroom faculty to take advantage of some of the learning experiences only available in a virtual environment.

Processes to Assist in Student Degree Completion

Factors that have inhibited students from degree completion include their relationship with their advisor (Green, 1991) and their connectedness with other students (Kluever, 1997). The UMUC DM program has established a number of practices that work to connect the students with each other, with the faculty, and with the institution. Following Boyatzis and Kram (1999) the program includes relational learning by intentionally developing interdependencies among the students in the 18 credit hours of core doctoral seminars. Effective teaming is taught and employed in many of the other courses, including virtual teaming of students who may mostly or completely work on a project without meeting in person. Faculty working with doctoral students are all oriented to the importance of the student-faculty relationship in degree completion. In addition to the common interactions, UMUC offers well-attended brown bag lunches for faculty and students to discuss mutual interests. Dissertation committees are also required to meet collectively with the student three times per year so that the students can deal with the committee as a whole rather than getting individual advice that may conflict or at least not easily integrate with other advice.

Current Trends and Existing Degree Programs

For several reasons, it is exceedingly difficult to know how many doctoral programs there are in management and how many doctorates they award: some are offered in traditional business schools that do not separately report a sub-field; some DBAs have become primarily management degrees, but some emphasize other subjects, such as finance; some are offered as leadership degrees in schools of education (George Washington University); some are organizational change degrees in schools of education (Pepperdine University); some are doctorates in professional studies (Pace University); and many others have different degree designations such as Doctor of Management (University of Hertfordshire), Doctor of Science in Health Services Management (Tulane University), or Doctor of Strategic Leadership (Regent University).

The British system appears to have standardized around the DBA as the applied management doctoral degree. A wide variety of more practical doctorates are now in place that attempt to address the business challenges and the criticisms identified in this chapter. In a study of the content of 16 DBA programs in the U.K., Bareham, Bourner, and Stevens (2000) discovered the following intended audiences for these programs, in decreasing order of frequency: the management practitioner, those in or aspiring to senior management positions, and management consultants and educators.

The same study found the following stated intended learning outcomes: to appreciate the contribution of research to the work of senior managers, to develop research skills, to make an original contribution of knowledge in the field of management, to apply research findings to management practice within an organization, to increase skill in managing research and researchers, and to further personal development.

A few programs with this type of mission will now be briefly described. This review of existing programs is not intended to be either comprehensive or representative. Rather, four programs are profiled which are attempting to achieve objectives similar to that of UMUC's DM program. Moreover, the programs described here are all primarily part-time, designed for practitioner-oriented students, attracting mid-career professionals (average age at least 35), and attempting to break at least somewhat free of the traditional Ph.D. design criticisms. These programs also represent a range and variety in how they are rethinking objectives for doctoral programs in management. Table 1 provides a summary of these programs on the dimensions described above - interdisciplinary design, applied and scholarly focus, partnership with employers, revised dissertation requirements, integration of the worldwide web, and processes to assist students. In providing data about these dimensions, there is no assertion that a program is better for having or not having these qualities. The data are shown only as a basis of comparison for the primary case study of this chapter.

Table 1.
Design Elements of Selected Doctoral Programs in Management

Note:  

GWU - The George Washington University, School of Business and Public Management,Ph.D.
Case - Case Western Reserve Univ., Weatherhead School of Management, Executive D.M.
Cran - Cranfield University, Cranfield School of Management, D.B.A
Union - The Union Institute, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, Ph.D.

The George Washington University

The George Washington University has one of the largest management doctoral programs of AACSB-accredited schools, as well as offering the Executive Leadership Program in Human Resources Development (Ed.D.) alluded to above. The School of Business and Public Management offers a Ph.D. degree, but with several non-traditional elements. For example, students develop their own individually-customized plans of study, which may minimize coursework and heavily emphasize other efforts. Their marketing materials suggest that "students are encouraged to be imaginative and innovative in their study plans and not to confine planned activities to the classroom." The school has attempted to defuse the tension surrounding dissertation defenses by creating a "colloquium" option. If the full committee (including external reviewers) deems the student's final dissertation draft to be exemplary, a student is essentially "pre-approved" and is allowed to schedule a colloquium. In such situations, the student structures the final presentation more as a learning session for all in the room rather than a traditional defense.

Case Western Reserve University

Case describes its Executive DM program as "the first doctoral program in the world to integrate concept and practice within the context of today's emerging and pressing global issues. Although the program is offered by the Weatherhead School of Management, faculty are drawn from throughout the university including the law school and the university ethics center as well as the political science, anthropology, and psychology departments to provide a strong interdisciplinary emphasis to the program. The faculty all have an interest in the philosophy of science and a broad perspective on applied knowledge and inquiry, or practitioner-scholar research. Although the program only began in 1995, they have already modified their dissertation requirements in response to their experience thus far. The crux of the dissertation consists of three separate publishable-quality articles each written using a different research methodology (participant observation and ethnographic methods, qualitative research methods, and quantitative methods and survey research) and each written during a different year in the program.

Cranfield University

Cranfield created a DBA program in 1999 and differentiated it from its Ph.D. by designing a research based degree driven by a management issue or problem rather than an academic question. In addition to contributing to the body of knowledge, the outcome of the research is designed to provide valuable insights to the sponsoring organization because students use ongoing work roles as a basis for their research. Consistent with other doctoral programs in the British system, the program provides for very few structured courses. The bulk of the degree work consists of three research projects conducted under the supervision of three professors. The program takes four years to complete and the projects have fixed, eight-month timelines.

The Union Institute

This section will conclude with a brief overview of the different types of dissertation formats.  As discussed above, the traditional dissertation format and process has been heavily criticized. Also, as mentioned, many faculties have run into gridlock when attempting to change such requirements. At the same time, some schools have altered their dissertation requirements. A Council of Graduate Schools (1991) study of arts and sciences programs found that 19 percent had officially approved other options for the dissertation. In the management field, several programs have encouraged, at least informally, dissertation work that begins fairly early in the doctoral program. This way, elements of the dissertation are built in throughout the program, rather than having the student wait for the completion of comprehensive examinations before the bulk of the dissertation work commences. Other formats for the dissertation include: three major applied research projects, which are expected to be submitted for publication in appropriate professional journals; a Doctoral Project completed in four courses (designing project, appropriate research projects, doctoral writing, and creating the doctoral project) culminating in a publishable book-length manuscript that adds new thinking to the literature; a 50,000 word thesis (programs in the British system frequently specify the number of required words), which must produce at least one high quality journal article about innovations in management practice; a more practical dissertation consisting of designing, building and implementing a new organization or a major change initiative in an existing organization; or, creating a dissertation portfolio that may include a number of items, such as:

• a research study written in publishable form
• a research presentation to at least one professional meeting
• at least one literature review, suitable for publication in a review journal
• a detailed outline for a graduate course in the student's specialization area
• a review of current advanced textbooks at a publishable level

• the design, implementation, and evaluation of a curriculum unit or module

Final Considerations

This chapter suggests a number of ideas for educators to consider as they strive to modify and improve doctoral programs. Spriestersbach and Henry (1978) were certainly not the first to observe nearly 25 years ago that "the standards of Ph.D. education remain unexamined and the appropriateness of existing practices in Ph.D. education remain largely undemonstrated" (p. 54). It seems both clear and ironic that substantial research opportunities abound in the area of doctoral education. What exactly happens in the process of the acquisition of this education? What is learned and to what end? Most doctoral programs would benefit greatly from a wholesale introspection and rethinking of the goals and strategies of their programs. One response might be, "Whatever we are doing must be working because we receive a huge number of applications for our program every year." It may be that adequate student flow has, to date, undermined such an inquiry. Nonetheless, no researcher or educator would be satisfied with this answer in his field of study, so it should not be a satisfactory justification for failure to evaluate the design of doctoral programs.

Should doctoral programs be more standardized? The Association of Business Schools of the U.K. has made this suggestion for DBA curriculum. At the same time, the entrepreneurial nature of degree programs seems to be one of the sources of renewal in American higher education, so a standardized design may not be the answer. On the other hand, it does seem desirable to be able to determine the different forms in which management education is offered and the number of students to which it is offered. It would also be beneficial to have data about attrition rates, for example.

Should doctoral programs continue to be discipline specific? If people got together today to create higher education from scratch, would they, in today's environment create departments by discipline? Would they reestablish an "ivory tower" that essentially sits apart from other organizations? Are there forms of university/employer partnership that enhance the learning process (and, of course, help employers too)? Perhaps a general question in this area is, "what is the interaction of scholarship and practice that academia should foster" (David, 1997)?

A final area of inquiry deals more with the specifics of the programs. Paradoxically, although the Doctor of Philosophy is seen as the pinnacle of education, it has been argued that it is primarily a training degree (Heiss, 1970). Should the degree be focused mostly on quantitative research skills? Given that doctoral graduates infrequently enter jobs with this focus, should doctoral programs have other "tracks" that emphasize teaching or applied curricula? In any of these scenarios, what should constitute a dissertation, or is the notion of a dissertation an antiquated idea? A central challenge in this area is to ensure that management scholarship is germane to the managerial world yet systematic in its rigor.

At the dawn of the 21^st century, educators have an opportunity to refashion doctoral education to meet the needs of the New Economy. A mid-level manager (or higher) in the 1960s would likely have held a baccalaureate degree. By the 1980s, such a manager increasingly would have had an MBA or other type of masters degree. Education has historically been a differentiator for career progression in society (David, 1997). It would behoove academia to consider a scenario of unprecedented growth in interest in doctoral education by, say, 2020. Corporate "universities" are already positioning themselves to provide a level of education beyond the masters level. Yet, academic universities possess a degree of intellectual capital for educating at the doctoral level far beyond that which is currently available through corporations. The wise, intentional deployment of this intellectual capital will allow universities to stay at the forefront of doctoral education.

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