Supervising PhD behind bars breaks new ground in research

Every PhD has its own unique challenges. But when your student is incarcerated on the other side of the Atlantic, the barriers might seem insurmountable.

As it happens, such a collaboration has offered remarkable insider’s insight into white-collar crime.

The supervisor, William Harvey (pictured below), a professor of management at the University of Exeter, was approached by potential PhD candidate Navdeep Arora back in July 2016. Although Mr Arora had had a very successful career, including 16 years as a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, what soon emerged was that he had also been indicted for wire fraud earlier in 2016. He would plead guilty, and begin 18 months in an American prison in March 2018.

Nevertheless, Professor Harvey agreed to take on Mr Arora, and the initial plan was for Mr Arora to look at reputation building within digital start-ups and to work on a literature review and methodology while in prison, with fieldwork to follow after release.

Conditions were hardly ideal, since Mr Arora shared a cell with three others, had little access to computers and was required to do six hours’ teaching a day. Supervision was complicated by the fact that phone calls could not last more than 15 minutes and emails had to go through a secure system that didn’t allow Professor Harvey to use attachments to supply reading material.

What Professor Harvey suddenly realised, however, was that Mr Arora’s access to a group of men convicted of white-collar crimes also offered a golden opportunity for an innovative form of research.

When he approached his fellow inmates about interviewing them, Mr Arora told Times Higher Education, “many were suspicious or worried they would be identified by name. Some even wanted to consult their lawyers.” They also needed to be reassured that he was not planning to write a book and so make money out of the research.

Yet 70 of around 110 prisoners Mr Arora approached eventually agreed to be interviewed, won over by the fact that he was “willing to listen, not judgemental and in the same shoes as they were, and also trying to peel the onion about what drove all of us to where we were”. Though he “started with a semi-structured questionnaire, the first round of interviews was very unstructured – a massive emotional outpouring lasting an average of two-and-a-half or three hours. But increasingly, in further rounds and especially in focus-group discussions, it became clearer to them and to us what we were trying to understand.

“There were three fundamental questions: what drives well-educated, successful people into professional misconduct? How do such professionals think about rebuilding their identities and reputations after such devastating reputation loss? And how do people make sense of the stigma associated with white-collar crime and deal with it upon their release?”

The fact that Mr Arora was “a peer and fellow inmate”, Professor Harvey argued, had not only given him access but allowed him to generate “a richness of data it would have been hard to achieve otherwise”. The lack of any kind of “power differential” between him and his interviewees meant that they would “say things they are not going to say to you or me, because we wouldn’t gain that kind of trust or rapport”.

Asked where he felt the research had broken new ground, Professor Harvey pointed to two areas. One was in illuminating how “the way people fall has a big impact on their ability to climb out again and rebuild their reputation”. The other was in revealing the importance of both “organisational culture, expectation and norms” and “the wider environmental context” and so challenging the “popular and simplistic explanation” that white-collar crime and professional misconduct can be explained solely in terms of greed. Along seminars and conference papers, he and Mr Arora have been asked to share their insights with the UK’s Ministry of Justice.

Despite the technical challenges of remaining in contact, the circumstances led to a particularly intense form of the relationship between supervisor and student.

“Ninety-nine per cent of my social and professional circle had collapsed,” recalled Mr Arora. “I had support from [only] two-thirds of my family and it has got worse over time.” So he was deeply grateful that Professor Harvey gave him “the sense that someone is willing to believe in me, put their arms around me and help me”. He was able to “find ground under my feet” in “being able to associate myself with the University of Exeter and take on the identity of a PhD researcher. It was as if I was drowning and somebody had thrown me a rope.”

The pair’s collaboration is the subject of a joint article in the Journal of Management Inquiry. When Mr Arora has completed his PhD at the end of the year, he hopes to find work in the academy combining his prior “practitioner skills” and his new understanding of research.

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com