Ph.D. Supervision as a House Divided: Implications for Policy

Abstract

This article examines the pastoral and academic implications of the inductive and deductive approaches to supervision described in the working paper: ‘Ph.D. supervision, a house divided?”. The observations are based on the writer’s several years’ experience of running a Ph.D. programme of some 40+ students. It concludes that, for a Commerce discipline such as Marketing, the deductive approach offers superior pastoral and academic outcomes. It then makes a series of policy recommendations.