as unmanageable. Gradually a focus on something resembling
the much narrower final topic is reached. At this point there is
often an interregnum of methodological throat clearing, or a
chapter discussing some underbrush of other ‘confuser’ topics.
By now readers are often deep into the thesis, maybe three, four
or five chapters in. At last the author moves on to presenting
the substance of their own research, which normally concerns
only a small part of their initially sketched topic. These core
results sections come late on in the overall text. After the core
chapters there is often little space or time for authors to do
more than pull together a quick analysis chapter. Anyway most
of the possible theoretical interpretations relevant to the find-
ings have usually been exhaustively discussed already some-
where in the vast literature review zone at the beginning. So the
final chapter is typically scanty, making only brief links from
the author’s own findings or substantive contribution back to
the opening discussion of macro-themes.
The adverse effects of the focus down model on thesis
authors are difficult to overstate. Research students typically
spend far too long on their initial literature reviews or surveys,
trawling previous work, and often becoming engrossed in col-
lecting small argumentative angles or comprehensive refer-
ences. People can waste a great deal of time on gathering and
understanding information about subtopics which later get cut
out of the core focus of their PhD, or on appreciating contro-
versies and viewpoints which then turn out to be tangential to
their eventual research question. In the classical PhD model,
with a ‘big book’ thesis as end product, the efficiency of your
research effort can be measured by the proportion of your total
work that shows up in some form in the finished thesis. The
focus down model makes the normal ‘tip of the iceberg’ prob-
lem much worse, often to the extent of writing off much of a
year’s effort, or even 18 months’ work in extreme cases.
Of course there is often some kind of pedagogic or socializa-
tion rationale for making beginning students ‘cut their teeth’
on a literature review. But more commonly the insistence on a
focus down structure reflects supervisory or departmental
imperatives. Supervisors favour the approach because it allows
them to ‘read themselves in’ on their student’s new and differ-
ent topic more gradually. This way of doing things also has
56 ◆AUTHORING A PHD