The growing complexity of doing a PhD necessarily demands candidates to robustly exercise their agency in navigating the doctoral journey. However, the conceptualisation of how students use their agency across multiple facets of their studies has yet to receive due scholarly attention. Drawing on the subject-centred sociocultural view on agency, this study analysed life story interviews conducted with 16 doctoral students in Hong Kong. Findings show that participants’ agency was manifested both in socially and collectively organised enterprises (proactive engagement in a wide array of developmental opportunities, responsiveness to situational research problems, contestation against unsupportive institutional cultures) and as individual-level strategic perspectives and actions (self-management of everyday emotions, imaginative construction of post-graduation prospects). Concurrently, the results shed light on the inextricable and complex linkages between the enactment of agency and the personal, relational, institutional, and broader higher education conditions delimiting students’ lived experiences of candidature. Implications for educational practices and future research beneficial to develop doctoral agency are discussed. Copyright © 2022 Informa UK Limited.

Viewed through the lens of narrative inquiry, this study explored the doctoral experiences of a language teacher educator and examined how he constructed and reconstructed his identities through learning and research experiences in the higher education environment of Hong Kong. Grounded in the notions of "communities of practice" while using "identity" as an analytic lens, the present study examined how a doctoral student negotiated his participation and membership in his situated academic community. The case study provides in-depth understanding of major challenges for a doctoral student to negotiate competence, identities, and power relations in the academic community. These dimensions were vital to gain recognition as a legitimate old-timer in an academic community. A sense of agency was necessary to cross boundaries and shape his own learning and participation in the academic community. However, identity construction is complex in nature, influenced not only by situated experiences within an institutional setting, but also a broader societal academic community. Pedagogical implications for doctoral education were discussed. Copyright ©Routledge.

This qualitative case study investigates two early-stage doctoral students' developing conceptions of research in their situated context. Drawing on data collected from in-depth interviews and informal conversations with the participants over two years, the study showed that the participants' research conceptions were in a symbiotic relationship with their research activities. Also, their developing research conceptions were influenced by their past academic experience and future goals, interaction with significant others in their community, and disciplinary and institutional practices, which acted to change or sustain their perceptions and engagement as an emerging academic. The findings indicate that reflection can be useful for doctoral students to manage their own conceptions of research and for supervisors to adjust practice to enhance doctoral education. Implications for universities regarding how institutional practice and discourse may dominate and foster doctoral students’ research conceptions are provided. Copyright © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This study focuses on doctoral students' professionalisation as future academics across academic disciplines, using a Hong Kong research-oriented university as a case study. Doctoral students acquire the norms, knowledge/skills, and values required for the academic profession through their learning experiences. The study aims to explore how doctoral students perceive their professional competences and what are the major factors of learning experiences influencing perceived competencies among them. Data collection of the study is based on a questionnaire designed by international team members in a previous project entitled A Comparative Study of Doctoral Education in Asian Flagship Universities. Drawing on data from 490 respondents in Hong Kong, the current study uses descriptive and regression analyses to examine and compare the factors influencing doctoral students' perceived competencies in terms of tasks, ideas and attitudes. The results show that the competencies of doctoral students are influenced by various factors, such as curricula, supervision style and learning culture. Overall, the study suggests that the formal and informal learning experiences of doctoral students must be carefully designed and implemented to foster the development of their professional knowledge, skills and values.
[Copyright of Asia Pacific Education Review is the property of Springer. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12564-018-9530-0]

This article examines the existing training that a group of supervisors in Hong Kong provide for their PhD students in helping them publish during their doctoral studies, and preparing them for the publishing demands in the early phase of their academic careers. The supervisors were interviewed about the types of training they provided for their students in handling project publishing. The types of training they described were examined in terms of five domains of competence: (1) in conceiving publishable projects, (2) in project/output management, (3) in research communication, (4) in handling reviewers' comments, and (5) in thesis-publication alignment/transfers. Findings reveal that training was heavily weighted towards research communication and mostly directed at manuscripts-in-progress. Advice on how to handle reviewers' comments was also reported in some of the interviews, making it the second most frequent type of coaching described. Pedagogical implications for the universities in the context under investigation will be discussed.
[Copyright of Studies in Higher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.576755]