Abstract:

During the past decades, significant changes in the formal status applying for doctoral students have been developed. In fact, since 2006, there is a Spanish statute for research people under formation (RD 63/2006, January 27) that converted traditional grants (with no labor relationship) into work contracts, at least for the last two of the four years corresponding to a habitual period of doctoral formation. This change in the legal regulation came from the adaptation of previous doctoral practices to the Bologna Process and the European Higher Education Area (EHEA).

As a consequence of the conversion of grants into work contracts, doctoral students have two roles: they are regular students (paying enrolment fees, being formed and assessed) and they are workers having the same rights than others (for example, the right of being represented by a labor union). This situation implies that during the doctoral formation period the employer figure must exist along with the employee nature of the students.

In this work, a series of processes has been graphically analysed in order to identify the connectivity between the roles of student and worker in the context of the doctoral formation. To this purpose, organizational aspects in the research groups are considered in order to clarify the limits between doctoral students being employees and/or stakeholders. At the same time, the nature of the profits produced by doctoral students is analysed, with a special attention on the identification of the beneficiaries. At the same time, the role of the senior researchers is considered with the aim of thinking of the compatibility between thesis supervising tasks and the employers’ duties. In fact, it is imperative to define people on which is delegated the labor responsibility acquired by public institutions when granting the doctoral formation.

Keywords:

Doctoral students, double role, thesis supervising tasks.