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A sociocultural view of doctoral students' relationships and agency
Nick Hopwood
a
a
Centre for Research in Learning and Change, University of Technology, Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Online publication date: 22 July 2010
To cite this Article Hopwood, Nick(2010) 'A sociocultural view of doctoral students' relationships and agency', Studies in
Continuing Education, 32: 2, 103 117
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/0158037X.2010.487482
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A sociocultural view of doctoral students relationships and agency
Nick Hopwood*
Centre for Research in Learning and Change, University of Technology, Sydney, Sydney,
Australia
Existing literature suggests that doctoral students learning and experience are
significantly influenced by their relationships with a wide range of people within
and beyond academic settings. However, there has been little theoretical work
focused on these issues, and questions of agency in doctoral study are in need of
further attention. This paper draws on sociocultural theory in the analysis of
interviews conducted with 33 doctoral students across four UK research-intensive
universities. It focuses on agency and frames others as mediating students
experiences whether as embodied or represented in material, or imaginary form.
Keywords: doctoral education; relationships; agency
Introduction
Despite growing recognition that doctoral education is a shared responsibility among
many participants, there is a persistent administrative and conceptual defaulting to the
one-to-one relationship [of supervision]. (Lee and Green 2009, 616)
This paper explicitly addresses the conceptual gap pointed to the above by
offering a distinctive theorisation of doctoral students relationships. That doctoral
students engage with a wide range of others is well established in the literature, but
there have been few attempts to theorise these issues. The theoretical work
undertaken here focuses on relationships as mediators of learning and experience,
offering an agentic counter-narrative to structural accounts that have been subject to
critique in higher education literature more generally.
Constellations of others in doctoral experience
The doctorate is often formally centred on a narrow range of relationships with
single/dual supervision or advisory committees forming the primary pedagogic
relation. However, a substantial body of evidence suggests an important role for a
much wider range of people, with students positioning themselves at the centre of a
constellation of others, assembling resources to meet particular learning needs
(Cullen et al. 1994, 41). Baker and Lattuca (forthcoming) encapsulate the message
emerging from their review of relevant literature:
*Email: nick.hopwood@uts.edu.au
Studies in Continuing Education
Vol. 32, No. 2, July 2010, 103117
ISSN 0158-037X print/ISSN 1470-126X online
# 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/0158037X.2010.487482
http://www.informaworld.com
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An exclusive focus on dyadic relationships is limited. . . . The constellation of individuals
assisting a particular doctoral student typically includes a number of people advisors,
instructors, peers, family members and friends.
Wright (2003) argues that we must move beyond a focus on the supervisor and
seek to understand the student in a sociocultural context in which other relationships
are seen as significant, including those with friends and family. The study reported
here builds on what is already known that doctoral students engage with many
different kinds of others and takes up calls to bring these others into our theorising
of the doctorate.
Green (2009, 239) notes:
Congruent with the emergence of what Castells (1996) calls the network society has
been the accelerated opening up of new, dynamic sociotechnical spaces of flows of
knowledge, and new global networks of research and education.
The range of interactions between doctoral students and others reflects the use of
technologies which traverse space, although these may not be particularly new (as
with the telephone) or experienced as new by students (as with those for whom email
and other digital technologies have been an established part of their lives for
considerable time prior to their doctoral study). Francis (2007) suggests doctoral
learning practices are supported by the fostering of links via a range of media
to globally distributed funds of living knowledge (211). Such constellations are
also indicative of the growing role of personal assemblages of people adapted to
particular contexts and purposes rather than pre-defined, enduring communities or
teams (Nardi, Whittaker and Schwarz 2002).
These wider relationships remain poorly theorised. Exceptions include studies by
Baker Sweitzer (2009), Baker and Lattuca (forthcoming) and Pilbeam and Denyer
(2009), all of which draw on social network theory. This approach comes out of
organisational studies and offers a means to quantify, measure and characterise
students networks, referring to qualities of density and diversity. While useful, social
network theory tells us little of how relationships are formed (and perhaps ended),
the work done in maintaining them, the nature of interactions, practices of
subversion or resistance in relationships, or difficulties experienced by students in
interaction (or the lack thereof) with others. This papers sociocultural approach and
its focus on agency engage directly with these issues.
Agency in relationships
The need for an agentic view of doctoral students
Relatively few accounts of doctoral education present students as agentically shaping
their own learning, practices or wider social environments. Surveys have tended to
position students as a population subject to rather than co-constructing or resisting
structures. Socialisation theory, commonly adopted in literature from the United
States (e.g., Austin 2002; Gardner 2008; Golde 2000; Nettles and Millet 2006) tends
towards an essentially reproductive and at times conservative notion of doctoral
education, casting a strong role for shaping by disciplinary cultures, norms and
practices.
104 N. Hopwood
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Accounts of supervisory relationships have begun the work of theorising the
dynamics of student-supervisor interactions, opening up notions of such spaces as
infused with power, desire and tensions, constructed and contested by both student
and supervisor (Grant 2003; Manathunga and Goozee 2007). Others have shown
how doctoral candidates may find ways to accommodate supervisory difficulties or
limitations, learn to do without, seek help from others, or teach themselves (Acker,
Hill and Black 1994; Hopwood and Sutherland 2009; Lee and Williams 1999; Li and
Seale 2007).
Cullen et al. (1994) construe students as self-organising agents of varying
effectiveness (41), directly pointing to but not fully developing the idea of student
agency. Adopting a sociocultural perspective, Francis (2007) describes ways in which
students engage in practices of creating, building and nurturing (213) personal
networks. He follows Nardi, Whittaker and Schwarz (2002) in shifting the focus of
attention to particular individuals and the assemblage of people they are connected
to. This highlights the importance of understanding of relationships in the context of
the particular situations that students find themselves in.
Boud and Lee (2005) argue the importance of doctoral students capacity to draw
on a wide range of sources, noting that students differ in this regard. They add that
support networks are often not part of pedagogic design, nor are they passively
inherited from wider social or institutional structures. Student agency in contexts
outside supervision has been pointed to (Hopwood forthcoming; McAlpine and
Amundsen 2007), but has rarely been the explicit focus of empirical or theoretical
attention, particularly with respect to the complex sets of relationships that are so
often described. This lacuna is all the more remarkable in the light of the common
but contestable notions of autonomy and agency that lie at the heart of what
distinguishes a successful doctoral candidate.
Agency, person and context
Working within critical realism Archer (2007) offers one theoretical basis for the
critique of structural determinism within higher education research. She has
challenged those (such as Anthony Giddens) who regard structure and agency
as analytically inseparable, instead proposing a dualism in which they are recognised
as interdependent but analytically separable. This enables us to empirically account
for the contexts of peoples actions as causally influencing as well as being influenced
by those actions.
There are parallels between these broader debates and notions of agency in
sociocultural theory, with clear differences between those who espouse inseparability
(e.g., Rogoff 1998) from those who argue in favour of analytic dualisms (e.g., Valsiner
1998). Sawyer (2002) rejects strong forms of both stance and proposes an analytic
dualism that examines two-way causal relationships between the individual and the
social. Daniels (2009) attempt to develop such an approach focuses on mediation,
which is a central theme in the analysis which follows.
This paper adopts the view that agency is implied in a persons way of being in,
seeing and responding to the world (Edwards 2000) and in the notion of purposeful
human activity that what people do is (at least partly) shaped by their intentions.
As agents with their own intentions and feelings, people reinterpret norms and
expectations (Lawrence and Valsiner 2003, 728). In this view, struggle with
Studies in Continuing Education 105
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imbalances of power is seen as a form of agency, and what may appear to be an
individual powerlessness in the face of wider institutional or social structures is
interpreted as a situation in which agentic internalisations of, responses to and
perhaps appropriations of such conditions may arise.
Language, concepts, material artefacts and relationships with others mediate such
processes (see Wertsch 2007). Mediation occurs as individuals incorporate signs,
meanings or tools fromthe external environment and change their thoughts or actions
as a result. However, Daniels (2006) points out that such mediators are not neutral
givens, but reflect in themselves complex social, cultural and historical processes. This
applies to the notion of relationships as mediators that develop in particular social,
cultural and historical contexts and may evolve as those contexts change.
A window on doctoral students relationships
Generating relevant accounts of doctoral experience
One-to-one interviews were conductedwith 33 doctoral students in two phases of data
generation. In the first, students across several social science departments and
interdisciplinary research centres in two UK research-intensive universities were
invited to participate. Of 32 who completed demographic questionnaires and
structured logs of experience (not drawn upon here), 19 agreed to be interviewed.
Preliminary analysis suggested that the resulting accounts of doctoral experience were
less revealing of problematic or challenging experiences than the literature would lead
one to expect. The initial respondents may have self-selected as a group enjoying
relatively straightforward and problem-free passage through their doctorates.
A second recruitment process was undertaken, this time explicitly inviting
students who wished to discuss difficulties or frustrations they had experienced.
Invitations were similarly focused on social science departments or research centres,
leading to interviews with 14 additional students, some in one of the original
institutions, and some from a third (again UK research intensive) university. The
data analysed in this paper thus comprise interviews with 33 doctoral students
(1914) spread across three universities, representing a wide range of disciplines
and inter-disciplinary research centres. Participants ranged in age from 23 to 62, 20
were female and 13 male, 11 UK nationals and 22 international students. All were
registered on a full-time basis. Interviews typically lasted between 60 and 90 minutes,
and involved students describing particular experiences in detail.
Direct evidence of interactions between people was not gathered, nor were the
perspectives of the various others documented. Interviews were treated as contexts in
which students presented a particular kind of narrative about their experience to a
researcher. While this approach has limitations, it also offers a means to explore
interactions from the past and over considerable distances, which would be difficult to
investigate from the perspectives of both the student and the other, or to observe
directly.
Interpreting and analysing those accounts
The first phase of analysis focused on 12 randomly selected transcripts. For each
student a list was created of all the people mentioned in their interview. The next
106 N. Hopwood
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stage involved identifying all data relating to a particular person and producing a
written summary of the relationship between them and the doctoral student (when
and how it began, what role it played, whether interactions were in person, online,
etc.). The issue of student agency emerged as of importance in understanding the
different ways in which relationships with other people mediate doctoral experience.
The second analytic phase thus focused on agency, and involved multiple
readings of all 33 transcripts. Again a list of people referred to was drawn up for each
student, and through iterative analytical processes a number of themes were
identified, with the help of ongoing critical feedback from a second research team
member. Readers may notice the lack of direct quotes from transcripts in the
paragraphs that follow. This reflects a difficulty using short excerpts to capture issues
which were often only evidenced through the whole account offered by a student,
and which became apparent through the process of interpreting particular relation-
ships in their full complexity rather than as represented in single utterances.
A sociocultural perspective on doctoral relationships
The variety of kinds of people mentioned is conveyed through Table 1, which also
indicates variation in the spatial nature and historical context of relationships. These
relationships are conceptually framed below, pointing to the issues of agency that
arise and are then discussed in greater detail later. The final part of this section
briefly discusses ways in which students described relationships as making a
difference to them. While the purpose of the paper is not to theorise impacts, it is
nonetheless important to establish their significance in order to situate the discussion
of agency that follows.
Relationships in time and space
As Table 1 shows, many of the relationships which participants described had their
origins well before students began their doctoral work childhood friends,
undergraduate tutors, colleagues from former workplaces. The current literature
tends to focus on relationships grounded in encounters that take place during
doctoral study, only incidentally acknowledging those that may predate the doctoral
experience in references to the role of friends and family.
History is placed at the centre of sociocultural understandings that suggest that
actions and meanings in the present are always mediated by the personal and cultural
past (Edwards 2000). Framing relationships in this way is not merely a matter of
recognising that some relationships predate doctoral experience and are carried
forward into it. The history of relationships leads us to questions of agency in their
initial formation and their maintenance over time as contexts and circumstances
change.
Table 1 also points to the spatial dimension of doctoral relationships, from the
intimacy of the unborn baby embodied in the womb to the dislocated relationships
that are maintained over large distances as when students engage with overseas
family or global disciplinary communities. In between these extremes we can see
relationships conducted in the context of confined places (the office, the home), or
more dispersed geographical locations (fieldwork sites, non-academic work settings).
Some of the relationships described in Table 1 evoke Francis (2007) notion of
Studies in Continuing Education 107
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students accessing globally distributed sources of knowledge and support, and
resonate with Greens (2009) notion of dynamic sociotechnical spaces, flows of
knowledge and global networks.
Table 1. An overview of doctoral relationships.
Friends Academics
Examples Location History Examples Location History
Non students
Other students
Room
mates
From
childhood
Current
supervisor(s)
Office mates
Home
Prior study
From start
Drug buddies
Rock band
members
Church
members
Home
institution
Other
cities
Overseas
From past
study
From
doctoral
study
Prior
supervisor(s)
Masters
supervisor(s)
Other
academic
staff
institution
Other
institution
of PhD
Through
PhD
End of PhD
Family Professional colleagues and contacts
Examples Location History Examples Location History
Parents
Spouse/
partner
Children,
siblings
Grandparents
Uncles, aunts,
in-laws
At home
In distant
places
Embodied
Passed
away
Exes
Ongoing
living
relationship
Unborn
Research-
related
Teaching-
related
Taught
students
Supervisees
Home
department
Home
institution
Other
institution
Non-academic
Non-academic
setting
Pre-doctoral
career
During PhD
Gatekeepers and participants Disembodied relationships
Examples Location History Examples Location History
Clinicians,
curators
In work
place
Former
colleagues
Artists,
Comic writers
Represented
in text
Culturally
inherited
Government
officials
Immigrants,
Musicians
NGO staff
Rural
communities
Social workers
Underground
activists
In distant
places
Globally
dispersed
Contacted
for
research
Authors of
books
Black rights
activists
Disciplinary
academics
Maritime
pirates
Nobel Prize
winners
The man on
the street
Wile E Coyote
Represented
in ideas
Particular
bodies
Material
(cuddly toy)
Digital/visual
media
Contemporary
media
108 N. Hopwood
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The spatiality of relationships points to the distributed nature of the sources of
knowledge and other support with which doctoral students engage (Boreham and
Morgan 2004; Cole and Engestro m 1997; Vygotsky 1978). It also begs questions of
agency in coping with embodied being in one place while intellectual, emotional and
pragmatic connections stretch relationships over distance. These issues will be
addressed in greater depth later.
Embodied, material or imaginary mediators of experience
Each relationship described by a doctoral student may be understood as mediating
their learning and experience. Many of those listed in Table 1 point to an embodied
other, encountered in direct interaction, or remote but live connections (e.g.,
telephone, skype). However, some interactions featured materially represented others
encountered in symbolic form through texts (e.g., books, emails), while other
relationships were grounded wholly or partly in students imaginations (see
disembodied relationships in Table 1).
One student spoke of writing as involving a passion shared with artists over the
ages who have felt the excitement and reward of creative achievement. He felt a sense
of commonality with figures from the past that provided a crucial source of
motivation and inspiration as he took on the challenge of writing a thesis. He
engaged with the cultural symbols of artists and creativity, here in the ideal
1
form of
his imagination. This was not entirely his own creation, but was learned through his
existence in a broader social setting that presented him with artists as mythical
cultural personages (Cole 1996). These mediated his experience of writing. The
agency exercised by many of the students who used materially or ideally represented
others to change their learning or experience forms an important theme in the
following discussion.
The impact of relationships
An important part of the scoping of this analysis relates to the inclusion of
experiences not directly related to the thesis or academic work itself. Students
described many aspects of their lives that unfolded alongside and were closely
entangled with their doctorates. The data suggest relationships make a difference (at
times negative as well as positive) in three realms: the academic, the personal and the
professional. These are crude analytic distinctions that should be held lightly. The
first relates to doctoral research, the thesis, and the postgraduate learning endeavour
writ large. The second highlights aspects of family and domestic life, friendships,
pastimes and physical well-being. The third refers to the many instances in which
students maintained professional identities and commitments, often sourced in their
prior working lives.
Cutting across these realms were different impacts of relationships, including
intellectual, pragmatic, and emotional (again a rough conceptual separation). Within
the academic realm, for example, relationships might make a difference to students
conceptual understanding (intellectual), the material and financial conditions of
their work (pragmatic), and/or their affective response to the challenges of doctoral
study (emotional).
Studies in Continuing Education 109
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Particular relationships were rarely confined to one realm or to a particular kind
of impact. Rather, as descriptions of each relationship were constructed based on
holistic readings of each transcript, it became apparent that a student might engage
with another person in a range of ways, about a range of matters, and with a range of
outcomes. This sometimes reflects longer historical trajectories; for example students
gradually built relationships of friendship and trust with supervisors, coming to draw
on them for emotional support and feeling comfortable asking for help with issues
other than those focused on the intellectual challenge of the thesis.
Relational dynamics also operated more rapidly and fleetingly, and often their
impacts were represented in the narratives in complex ways in which multiple impacts
applied inseparably across several realms. For example, one student experienced a
strong emotional reaction when an energy company refused to grant her access to
one of their projects as a fieldwork site. Her response reflected not only the pragmatic
difficulty this posed for her research, but also raised issues of her identity as a student
and former professional in an energy-related field. Thus the distinctions above serve
only to highlight the scope of relational impacts; they do not reflect separations that
always remain robust in the ways students account for and make sense of their
experiences.
The issues of agency discussed below should be understood in the context of
these multiple and complex impacts. There is no suggestion of uni-modal relation-
ships in which encounters with a particular person consistently have similar
outcomes. Rather, as the situation of the student changes, so does the role of a
particular relationship in mediating their response to it.
Unpacking agency in doctoral student relationships
Issues of agency are implied in the notions of historicised, spatially varied and
variously mediated relationships discussed above. Four themes were developed in
order to conceptualise the agency exercised by students in these contexts. These are
not mutually exclusive, but offer an analytic distillation of different properties that
were evident in the data. The following sections take each theme in turn, building on
sociocultural notions of agency and mediation.
Agency in the context of authentic needs
Cullen et al. (1994) and Francis (2007) point to constellations of relationships being
assembled to meet particular learning needs, illustrating the wider social practice of
constituting networks for specific, changing purposes described by Nardi, Whittaker
and Schwarz (2002). This needs-focused approach situates the expression of agency
in relation to what people are attempting to achieve (intentionality) and their social
and cultural milieu.
Many students in the current study demonstrated agency by using relationships
in the context of particular needs relating to learning, but also practical and
emotional support. Students engaged with others when seeking specific information
or advice; for example contacting admissions offices for forms, supervisors for
suggested readings and other students about what happens in a viva. They also
engaged friends for suggestions on dealing with financial problems or coping with
failure, and family for advice on living through pregnancy and caring for small
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children. The seeking of empathetic responses was crucial for many students,
requiring them to help others understand a situation from their perspective.
In some cases, particularly where relationships were not pre-existing or grounded
in a structural offering of assistance, students had to negotiate with or persuade
others to help them. This was common in the context of securing access to fieldwork
sites and dealing with gatekeepers (see Table 1), and when students approached
potential supervisors, convincing them they had a topic worth pursuing.
Agency was also evident when the boundaries of relationships were stretched
either beyond what was conventionally assumed to be normal in a particular context
(such as supervision) or beyond the historical limits of a relationship. Students asked
former professional colleagues for assistance with aspects of their doctoral research
such as granting access to research sites. Many felt that their supervisors inclination
was to maintain boundaries in their discussions focusing on the thesis but were
able to extend the relationship into one in which supervisors helped them with
teaching or revealed personal insecurities about academic work more generally.
Others stretched informal relations as they engaged with parents, partners and
friends in aspects of their doctoral work.
The agentic work done in such contexts has also been highlighted theoretically by
Edwards (2005) who describes the capacity to recognise that another person may be a
resource, arguing that work must be done to elicit or negotiate the use of that
resource
2
. Students intentions lie at the heart of their relationships, and agency of
different forms is evident as the specific features of their purposeful engagement in
the world requires different actions, forms and sources of support.
Relationships as the focus of attention
In the examples above, students used relationships as means to help them achieve
particular ends. In other cases the focus of their explicit attention and intention was
on relationships in themselves. Students accounts clearly conveyed the conscious
work done and effort involved in cultivating and nurturing relationships. Often a
subsequent purpose or value was attached to these, but this does not negate the
agency exercised in their inception and development.
Students worked hard to secure the confidence and trust of gatekeepers and
participants in their research (reflecting the focus on social sciences in the sample).
Time and energy were invested in developing close friendships with peers,
particularly those in which students came to share each others work, ask for help
and feedback, or openly discuss difficulties and emotions. There was also evidence of
students deliberately making contacts for the purpose of developing a professional
network, seeking to get to know and become known to academics in their discipline.
Relationships with a pre-doctoral history also required active work as changes in
circumstance often placed them under strain. Living at a distance from partners,
children or parents presented challenges, prompting negotiations and leading
students to find means to deal with physical separation. Some adapted study
routines in the face of changing domestic arrangements (including childbirth), while
others had to persuade wives, husbands and children to live and act differently
(sometimes dealing with reduced income) while they pursued their doctorates.
Without agency, it is hard to account for how relationships come into being,
develop and mature, and are maintained as contexts change. This theme highlights
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the importance of understanding how relationships are reconfigured in light of
shifting situations, and how these processes involve explicit work on relationships in
themselves.
Relationships as a tool to work on oneself
A key notion developed by Vygotsky (1978) relates to the dialectic relationships
between tool and tool user in processes of mediated activity. As people develop or
use tools (language, material artefacts, ideas, other people) in the process of
purposeful activity, these tools work back on them. Relationships may be understood
in terms of these ideas and the previously discussed notion of others as embodied, or
represented in material or imaginary form. Doctoral students sometimes intention-
ally used relationships with others to influence, regulate or change their own
learning, emotions or behaviour.
Students described using their fear of going to supervisory meetings with half-
baked ideas or unfinished writing to make themselves perform certain kinds of work
by scheduling supervisions before they felt fully ready, creating an interim build-up
time in which they moved their work forward. Their choice of examiners may often
be interpreted in this way too, as they picked academics whom they hoped would
challenge them and help them develop their ideas. Some deliberately spent time with
people outside their discipline or academia altogether as these interactions helped
them recontextualise their academic work or exposed them to different forms of
questioning and critique.
In other cases, direct encounters from the past were used to mediate current
activity. Students spoke of role models mothers, adults recalled from childhood,
academics, public figures (see Table 1) people they rarely met but who often
featured in their thoughts and whom they sought to follow in their development as
academics or people. In these cases students prior social interactions are brought
into the present and internalised through their reconstruction as symbolic artefacts
in students memories that mediate their thoughts and actions.
A third variant within this theme concerns students use of relationships to work
back on the self in contexts where the two parties never meet or directly interact. One
student referred to the author of an online PhD-focused comic as a major person in
her life. Her encounters were him were conducted through the material artefacts of
the comics he published. These became part of her imagination, and when struggling
or feeling down she would recall his work or try to think how he might see the
humour in a difficult situation and to remind herself she was not alone in
experiencing difficulty. One student developed the practice of re-reading a reference
letter written by her head of department (full of praise reified in paper form) to help
cope when she felt unworthy or undervalued, the thought of the senior figure
expressing approval and confidence inspiring her to carry on.
Such practices even extended to entirely fictional characters. One student idolised
Wile E Coyote (a cartoon character who displays resilience in his ever-failing
endeavours), and piloted her questionnaire on him in her head. She also used his
material depiction cuddly toys, on DVDs as a means to comfort herself when
she felt depressed or lonely. Several students referred to hypothetical encounters with
the man on the street that they had thought through in the process of their work.
112 N. Hopwood
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Some students thus engage in what Lawrence and Valsiner (2003) call imagined
personal dialogues with specific or generalised others.
Cole draws on Wartofskys (1973) hierarchy, suggesting that mythical cultural
personages may be conceived as primary artefacts. Secondary artefacts consist of
representations of primary ones, while the third level comprises relatively autono-
mous, non-practical, rule independent artefacts which may then shape how we
see the actual world and provide tools for changing it (for example of free play or
game activity). It appears that artefacts in doctoral students relationships span all
three levels, from the man on the street as mythical cultural personage, through Wile
E Coyote embodied in material (cuddly) form, to the playfulness of the world of
online PhD comics.
Management, resistance and struggle
Agency was evident in the way students limited the scope of relationships, resisted
what others suggested, or managed the degree of interaction between themselves and
(potentially counterproductive) others. Boundary maintenance was often crucial to
ensuring that relationships were not unduly stressed and that interactions remained
comfortable and appropriate. Some students decided not to become friends with
their supervisors and avoided talking about personal (often emotional) problems
with members of staff or discussing study-related issues with friends and family.
Judgements as to appropriate boundaries reflect personal views of particular
individuals, but also are shaped by cultural norms, institutional expectations, and
the history of encounters either with that person or people in similar social or
cultural contexts.
At times, students exercised agency by selecting which suggestions to follow and
which to ignore. These might be from friends, parents, spouses or supervisors. This
was not an easy course of action to follow, particularly when there were structural
power differences inherent in relationships, as with supervision. The two-way
encounter in the supervisory dyad is shaped by wider institutional norms that invest
the supervisor and student with different symbolic status and power. The agency in
resisting a supervisors advice is thus a partial product of this context, itself produced
through the social institution (Lawrence and Valsiner 2003).
A similar form of resistive agency was apparent when students behaved in ways
that went not against individual advice, but against broader cultural conventions and
practices. Some sought to change institutional practices, particularly regarding the
treatment of doctoral students, regimes of surveillance, and time to completion
pressures. For others, the very fact of pursuing higher education constituted a
break from family or community traditions, sometimes leading to difficulties in
maintaining relationships but also underpinning feelings of emancipation. Others
resisted more distant or imagined others, forging distinctive academic paths that
worked against the grain of disciplinary norms, refusing to reproduce culturally
expected stereotypes (anthropologist, mother, ambitious student), dis-identifying
with commonly valued role models (Nobel prize winners).
Some struggles were more embodied: several mothers of newborn babies spoke of
the dependency of their children and the need to prioritise them and their needs
above everything else. This often required adopting counter-hegemonic practices in
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the contexts of their academic institutions persuading others of the need for
flexibility, fighting against ill-fitting administrative processes and structures.
Agency also finds expression in the context of relationships when people limit
interactions. Students avoided others for a range of reasons finding young student
cultures conflicted with their mature (married, adult, professional) identities,
avoiding becoming stretched thinly over too many academic communities, not
seeking new friendships among what they know will be transient cohorts.
As has been shown, relationships are mediated by but also are an important
mediator of agency. It does not follow that agentic students always satisfy their
intention in the way they initially hoped. The act of struggle is in itself an expression
and site of agency, even if the asymmetry of mediating relationships ultimately
frustrates students. Agency was thus also apparent in students resilience, resource-
fulness and capacity to change tack or break away.
Several felt ostracised by or rejected from communities in their department (both
among peers and academics) or in which they hoped to conduct fieldwork. Formerly
close friends and family were described as cooling off when students broke
with historical community or family norms or physically separated themselves through
their doctoral study. For many, these difficulties were eroded over time through
practices described in the second theme above (working directly on relationships
themselves). There were several instances in which students broke away from difficult
relationships as with those who found new supervisors to replace ones with whom they
had problems, left research groups, or split up with their partners.
Students sometimes responded agentically to struggles in engaging in particular
interactions themselves. Supervisors cancelled or postponed meetings, participants
failed to turn up for interviews or were difficult to find. Often the response was not
resigned but rather resilient (see Hopwood and Sutherland 2009), as students would
find other people to help them if their supervisor was not available, or would plug
away at problems themselves; they would persist by trying new approaches to
recruitment, or find ways around non-participation in their research.
Conclusions
This paper sets out to offer a distinctive sociocultural theorisation of doctoral
students relationships and to present an account that counters dominant views by
explicitly focusing on student agency.
An understanding of relationships requires an understanding of their history.
Although existing literature points to the role of relationships that predate doctoral
experience, the historicity of relationships has not previously been captured
theoretically, nor has it been linked to the forms of agency evident in their creation,
nurturing and maintenance. Even as new relationships are formed, this process
happens in the context of the history of other relationships a particular student has
had with different people, and in the context of social and cultural norms that flow
from the past although they are of course, dynamic and subject to reshaping.
While the notion of constellations is well established, they have not previously
been unpacked as in part reflecting the fluid construction of shifting relationships
according to situated needs, as was shown in the first theme above. As features of the
ways in which students act and struggle to act on their intentions, relationships may
114 N. Hopwood
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be conceived as mediators of agency in themselves. They are also the focus of
intentional work as students develop and reconstitute relationships over time.
Sociocultural notions of artefact and mediation are useful in theorising the varied
nature of relationships and ways in which others from distant places or times may
still play a role in the present for a doctoral student. Others may be embodied,
represented materially, or imaginary. Notions of mediation are helpful in under-
standing how students use other people as tools to work back on themselves
regulating or changing their own learning or experience by creating contexts for
interaction with others, whether in direct embodied modes, remotely, or through
personal dialogues.
This paper follows existing work in stressing the need to account for a wide range
of relationships in our understanding of doctoral learning and experience. It offers a
distinctive conceptualisation grounded in sociocultural notions of mediation and
agency. This enables us to situate relationships in time and space, to grapple with
their embodied, material and ideal form, and to understand them in relation to
students as intentional, agentic beings with the capacity to shape their own
experience.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the referees for their helpful comments on the first draft of this paper,
Lynn McAlpine for her ongoing feedback and support through the analysis and writing,
Alison Lee for her comments on agency, and Russell Francis for the many conversations about
sociocultural theory. I also wish to acknowledge the rich pedagogic environment provided by
the Oxford Centre for Sociocultural and Activity Theory Research (OSAT). The research
reported here was conducted at the Centre for Excellence in Preparing for Academic Practice
(University of Oxford), with data collected by myself and other members of the Next
Generation of Social Scientists research team: Lynn McAlpine, David Mills, Gill Turner,
Patrick Alexander, Susan Harris-Huemmert and Julia Paulson. The study was funded by the
Higher Education Funding Council for England (through the CETL initiative), the OUP John
Fell Fund, and the Oxford Learning Institute.
Notes
1. Ideal or idealised in this context refers to non-materiality or imagined form, rather than to
ideal in the sense of something being appropriate or perfect.
2. Edwards (2005) concept of relational agency specically refers to instances whereby the
seeking and giving of assistance leads to the notion of the problem being worked on
(object) being understood differently and the person seeking help aligning their (new)
interpretations with those of the people helping them. It does not, therefore, include all
examples in which students ask for help from others (e.g., when someone asks for help and
their ideas of what they want help with remain unchanged). However, the forms of agency
Edwards highlights in her development and discussion of the concept are more generally
relevant to the current analysis.
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