Managerialist Approaches Changing Approaches to Doctoral Supervision During the Covid-19 Pandemic

This chapter reviews the ways in which the doctoral supervisor role changed during the pandemic. Previous research has emphasised the importance of the supervisor in doctoral pedagogy while the main apparent change was the rapid transition to online working and the use of platforms such as Zooms and Microsoft Teams to meet and mentor students, and other more incipient factors caused supervisors to question their autonomy as senior researchers. The supervisors in the study identified increased managerialism as creating issues for them and for their role—and suggested that the new regimes which had been adopted with lockdown were difficult to deal with—impacting on their well-being and sense of self. This included workload models, timesheets and increased weekly meetings both departmental and individually with the head of department, to identify readiness to work; the overall feeling was of institutional control which diminished and undermined professorial status, roles and values.