Chapter 2 Alienation and the Problem of Work in Doctoral Education

In: Doctoral Education as If People Matter
Author:
Alistair McCulloch
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Abstract

In recent decades, Karl Marx has had something of a bad rap. The fall of the Soviet empire in 1990 coupled with a self-confident neo-liberal international economic system delivering seemingly unlimited benefits to the victors of the Cold War seemed capable of bringing an end to both ideology and history. More recently some of the tarnish has come off this new economic system and its associated philosophies and Marx has received a degree of reinstatement in the halls of academe through the work of scholars such as Eagleton (2011) and Wright (2010). Much of this work has focused on the macro-level socio-economic system and contributes to the ongoing development of what can be termed a scholarship of the future intended to steer the planet and its various intertwined economies in a more sustainable direction. The initial rejection of Marx and its newfound focus, however, has allowed us to ignore one of the philosopher’s most enduring areas of work, and to my mind, one of his most significant contributions to the social sciences, that concerning the importance of work to human beings, and our ‘true’ nature, and the implications of the way in which work is positioned for how it is experienced. This chapter draws on this element of Marx’s work arguing that current tendencies in both higher education generally, and more specifically doctoral education and the doctorate, risk the very creativity upon which the doctorate’s defining characteristic of ‘an original contribution to knowledge’ is based. It begins with a few comments on contemporary doctoral education.

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