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The Professional Doctorate: Its Relativity to the Ph.D. and Relevance for the Knowledge Economy
Open accessAbstract
The Professional Doctorate (ProfDoc) is attracting increasing attention because of its perceived greater than the Doctor of Philosophy's (Ph.D.'s) focus on meeting the needs of the knowledge economy.The paper examines the nature of the ProfDoc vis-a-vis the Ph.D. and identifies significant characteristics of the ProfDoc, especially in respect of relevance and performativity.It then analyses these characteristics in the context of the professional Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) in Information Systems (IS) at an Australian university.An ethnographic approach is used to examine the internal (university) and external (student) environments of the DBA(IS).Recommendations are made to increase its effectiveness for the knowledge economy, including moving to a greater student and industry centred approach.Finally, conclusions are drawn to determine its relevance to the knowledge economy.
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“Though we could not differentiate the transfer pathway from the direct entry pathway in our findings, the transfer pathway is more common than the direct entry pathway, at least at for PhD programs (the same is not true for professional doctorates, like a Juris doctor or medical doctor which can be accessed from a bachelor's degree (University of Toronto, 2022) and is designed to train students”
From PhD Pathways in Canada: Sociodemographic and Disciplinary Influences That Impact Pathway, Duration, and Outcomes (2026) · cites this paper as Fink, 2006
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Research works printed but not linked: 11
- Lee, A., Green, B. & Brennan, M. (2000). Organisational knowledge, professional practice and the profes- sional doctorate at work. In J. Garrick & C. Rhodes (Eds.), Research knowledge at Qork. London: Routledge.
- Lockhart, J.C., & Stablein, R.E. (2002). Spanning the academy -practice divide with doctoral education in business. Higher Education Research & Development, 21(2), 191-202.
- Lyotard, J.F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Manchester: Manchester Univer- sity Press.
- Lytras, D. (2005). An interview with Tom Davenport. Quarterly Bulletin of AIS Special Interest Group on Semantic Web and Information Systems, 2 (2). Retrieved 1 May 2005 from www.sigsemis.org
- Malfroy, J., & Yates, L. (2003). Knowledge in action: Doctoral programmes forging new identities. Jour- nal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 25(2), 119-129.
- Perry, C., & Cavaya, A. (2004). Australian universities' examination criteria for DBA dissertations. Inter- national Journal of Organisational Behaviour, 7(5), 411-421.
- Phillips, E. (1992). The Ph.D. -assessing quality at different stages of development. In O. Zuber-Skerritt (Ed.), Starting research -supervision and training. Tertiary Education Institute, University of Queen- sland, Brisbane.
- Remenyi, D., Williams, B., Money, A., & Swartz, E. (1998). Doing Business Research in Business and Management. London: Sage Publications.
- Sarros, J.C., Willis, R.J., & Palmer, G. (2005). The nature and purpose of the DBA -a case for clarity and quality control. Education & Training, 47(1), 40-52.
- Tennant, M. (2004). Doctoring the knowledge worker. Studies in Continuing Education, 26(3), 431-441.
- Usher, R. (2002). A diversity of doctorates: fitness for the knowledge economy. Higher Education Re- search & Development, 21(2), 143-153.
Cited by
Nelson, J., Walters, D., Jones, A., & Jacobs, S. (2026) · International Journal of Higher Education · doi:10.5430/ijhe.v15n1p34
Metadata
- Authors
- Fink, D.
- Affiliations
- Edith Cowan University (AU)
- Corresponding author
- Fink, Dieter
- Venue
- International Journal of Doctoral Studies
- Publisher
- Informing Science Institute
- Published
- 2006
- Volume
- 1
- Pages
- 035-044
- ISSN
- 1556-8865 (ISSN-L)
- 1556-8881
- 1556-8873
- DOI
- 10.28945/59
- OpenAlex
- W2123040156
- Cited by
- 76
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 6 · 2013: 2 · 2012: 3
- FWCI
- 3.21
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- International journal of doctoral studies (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- Australasian Journal of Paramedicine (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Education › Doctoral Education Challenges and Solutions
- Social Sciences › Education › Professional Masters Programs Analysis
- Social Sciences › Education › Higher Education and Employability
- Keywords
- professional doctorate, doctoral education, knowledge economy
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- Fink, D. (2006). The Professional Doctorate: Its Relativity to the Ph.D. and Relevance for the Knowledge Economy. International Journal of Doctoral Studies. https://doi.org/10.28945/59
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
