Translating European narratives on doctoral education on the national level: The Portuguese case

Europe has been using knowledge as a political instrument to foster economic competitiveness and social cohesion based on the narratives of Knowledge society. Within a framework where knowledge works as a critical resource for economic growth, innovation, prosperity and competitiveness (Nerad, 2020), national governments have tackled higher education policies, at large, with a series of reforms, aiming at fostering its central role as a key provider of knowledge and human capital, a scenario in which doctoral education holds a crucial position (Freires, Santos & Cardoso, 2020; Balaban, 2020; Bernstein et al., 2014). National policies increasingly integrate European narratives on doctoral education in Higher Education and Science policies. In this sense, the mechanisms linking European narratives and national policy discourses and practices on doctoral education are not well documented. Drawing from the insights of Scandinavian neo-institutionalism (Czarniawska, 2012; Czarniawska-Joerges & Sevón, 1996; Røvik, 2016) and discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 2010) about the travelling and translation of ideas in specific national and organisational contexts, this paper investigates how European narratives on doctoral education are discursively translated into national policies, focusing on the Portuguese case. To trace the discursive translation processes, we ground our analysis resource on written texts both at the European and national central government levels. We focus on three sources of European documents – the Communiqués of the Bologna Process, as advanced by the European authorities; the three position papers of the EUA, focused on the Salzburg Principles and Recommendations (2005; 2010; 2016); and the relevant LERU publications on the scope of doctoral education – to identify the dominant European narratives on doctoral education. Following the analysis of European narratives policies, we conduct a comparative analysis to illuminate its translation into Portuguese national policy by developing content analysis of national relevant legislation for doctoral education, in the last eighteen years. Findings indicate that European narratives are appropriated by national policies but do not come together in a coherent order of discourse. While the influence of European narratives is clear in the frame of the policy context, it is less dominant in the process of organising doctoral education at the institutional level. At this level, the national policies emerge in an eclectic and fragmented manner. This may be connected to the traditional high autonomy of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Portugal, which may be acting as an obstacle for more coherent translation process at the national level. In the future, it will be important to assess how national political discourses on doctoral education are translated at the institutional (in HEIs documents) and at the individual level (in students discourses).