Permanent record
RIR-3057 · Logged 14 October 2026
Where does gap-spotting enter a South African doctorate?
Published research questions in management are overwhelmingly framed as filling gaps in the literature rather than as challenges to underlying assumptions. Because this pattern has been established from finished texts, it is not known where in the doctoral and publication process a question changes form. The idea traces South African doctoral questions from proposal to thesis to journal article to locate that change and the actors and rules behind it.
In plain words
Many PhD students start with a doubt about something their field takes for granted, but their published papers usually just say they fill a gap. This study would find out where along the way that change happens, and who or what pushes it.
Primary research question
Across the proposal, thesis and journal-article versions of South African doctoral research in management, at which stages, and through which actors or rules, are research questions that challenge an assumption reframed as gap-spotting?
Knowledge gap
What remains worth asking
Sandberg and Alvesson (2011) found that published organisation-studies articles construct their questions by gap-spotting, but they analysed finished texts and note that texts cannot show how authors actually arrived at their questions. No study has traced the reframing of a question across a doctorate, and none in an African university system.
Potential contribution
Why it may matter
Knowing whether the shift comes from supervisors, proposal templates, examiners, journal reviewers or publication incentives would show where doctoral programmes could protect more ambitious questions.
Academic placement
Academic fields and topic tags
Study frame: South African business-school doctorates, comparing matched proposal, thesis and article texts, with interviews of candidates and supervisors. · Method signals: Document analysis, Semi-structured interviews, Comparative case study
Possible study pathways
One question, different levels
Research master’s
Compare the proposal and thesis questions of a small set of completed doctorates at one business school.
Doctoral
Trace matched proposal, thesis and article texts across several institutions and interview candidates and supervisors about each change.
- originality
- High
- methodology
- Moderate
- Data access
- Moderate
- ethics
- Moderate
Quality and audit
86/100 quality
Safeguard-based audit was not recorded under the prior standard.
- Turns the source's own text-only limitation into a testable question
- Specific population and setting
- Distinct from existing registry entries
This older record can be checked against the current standard on request. It changes only if every academic gate and independent safeguard passes.
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Research Idea curation
- DOI and bibliographic metadata independently resolved through Crossref
- The full text states that published texts cannot show how authors arrived at their questions
- The specific study design is an inferred direction, not one the authors propose
The public contributor code contains no name or account email.
APA 7 source
Sandberg, J., & Alvesson, M. (2011). Ways of constructing research questions: Gap-spotting or problematization? Organization, 18(1), 23–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508410372151
pp. 25 and 34, on the limits of analysing published texts
This is an AI-inferred direction. The source authors did not state it as a recommendation.
Open source ↗