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Playing the game and trying not to lose myself: a doctoral student’s perspective on the institutional pressures for research output

Several management scholars have recently discussed the consequences that emerge from the institutional pressures for research output. While an important debate for the field, thus far, it has wholly neglected to account for the voices of doctoral students—arguably, the most disempowered constituents within the academy. Working from a doctoral student’s perspective, the aim of this article is to integrate anecdotal evidence with Foucault’s idea of the panopticon gaze so as to illuminate how such institutional pressures become discursively codified. As argued, one especially poignant implication that materializes from the reification of these institutional pressures is intellectual inertia. This article concludes with some consideration of how our discipline can more fruitfully serve doctoral students by holistically embracing the concept of ‘ontological empathy’ and by redefining the meaning of ‘success’. Realization of ontological empathy and the redefinition of success will provide a constructive way to move beyond the orthodoxy of how research output is currently being defined and valued.