especially those who have carried out overextended literature
searches, somehow lapse into thinking that at doctoral level
they must cover allpossible interpretative positions, even if
they are very numerous. In fact this option is neither feasible
nor desirable in an argumentative approach. A doctorate is basi-
cally a monograph, treating a single subject intensively. It is not
a textbook, still less a work of reference. Trying to show how
four or five perspectives would handle a particular problem or
interpret the same set of phenomena will quickly become very
repetitive. Carried through at any decent level, such an enter-
prise can also consume a large amount of your wordage limit.
You need to configure your thesis question, and set up any ini-
tial literature review which you do, so that you can legitimately
restrict your work to considering only two, or at most three,
main lines of argument.
Another problem with an argumentative approach is that it
may not sit very comfortably in disciplines which adopt a ‘nor-
mal science’ approach, those with a hegemonic ‘mainstream’
view built up by the careful cumulation of work within a single,
accepted paradigm. Argumentatively structured theses can be
unattractive for students from more consensual societies (such
as Japan), where overt disagreements can seem somewhat
vulgar or wrong-headed. And since scholars often tend to self-
select themselves into groupings of like-minded people, it will
sometimes be hard to stand up and treat as credible a view con-
sidered ‘deviant’ by your local department’s orthodoxy, perhaps
even anathema to it. Finally it can be difficult to identify and
develop an effective argumentative approach which is close-
fitting around your thesis question at an early stage of your
research. At the start of your effort you may tend to focus on
disputes that are too broadly drawn or too conventionally spec-
ified, again a tendency that is exaggerated where people author
long introductory literature reviews, rather than snappy
focused ones.
Matrix patterns
To get more articulated organizational structures for neatly
organizing eight or so chapters, you can combine any of the
72 ◆AUTHORING A PHD