Desperately seeking fixedness: Practitioners’ accounts of ‘becoming doctoral researchers’

We draw upon the concept of liminality to explore the experiences of practitioners enrolled on a UK Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) programme. We suggest that the DBA student occupies a liminal space where the competent practitioner ‘self’ travels between the more familiar workplace context and the less familiar classroom context. This liminal passage is especially challenging since the student travels in and out of the classroom over an extended period of time which amplifies struggles of incoherence associated with liminality. We draw on twenty practitioners’ ‘written up’ reflective journals, submitted as one of two final programme assessments, to detail how the liminal space is negotiated to allow them to move forwards and thus to learn and ‘become’. More specifically, we describe how practitioners deal with their ‘monsters of doubt’ which arise from moments of being stuck or what have been termed ‘threshold concepts’ to move forwards and become researchers. We identify three broad methods depl...