Intersectoral collaborations of doctoral researchers and generic skills acquisition : A critical realist inquiry

This dissertation aims to enrich the academic knowledge that can support policies around integration of doctoral graduates as a prominent group of knowledge workers, into industry and other non-academic career sectors in Europe. Positioned within the broader field of innovation systems, the dissertation contributes to the literature stream of university-industry relationships with a specific focus on the collaborative relations between doctoral researchers and industry. Given the observation that the number of doctoral graduates in Europe is continuously increasing while the opportunities for pursuing an academic career do not show a comparable trend, the importance of preparing doctoral candidates for a more diverse career prospect is evident. Furthermore, the drive for transitioning to a knowledge-based and innovative economy has meant for many European countries that knowledge sources in general, and universities in particular, have gained a more prominent position vis-à-vis the other sectors in their economy. Accordingly, there is an increasing space opening up across advanced economies for the employment of doctoral graduates in industry and public governance positions in order to absorb their knowledge and skills into those organizations. While this has provided doctoral graduates further potential for post-PhD employment, there has been concerns expressed by those non-academic employers regarding the mismatch between the skills sought by them and the skills acquired by PhD candidates during their doctoral training. The four papers included in this dissertation form together a stepwise inquiry into the rationale, quiddity, prevalence and immediate effects of collaborative doctoral programmes as a mechanism for addressing the above-mentioned concerns about doctoral education. As the overall underlying research paradigm, critical realism provides the framework for establishing a coherent inferential logic across the papers, in addition to supplying the meta-theory for comprehending the subject matter of the inquiry and interpreting the findings. The introductory chapter of the dissertation is partly dedicated to explicating the argument for choosing such a critical realist approach, which mainly stems from academic disciplines being conceived as harboring a generative mechanism that hypothetically exert the most significant influence on doctoral researchers’ opportunities for engaging in intersectoral collaboration. In fact, the theoretical core of the