SUMMARY In 2011, the Québec government launched the Charbonneau Commission, a monumental public inquiry tasked with getting to the bottom of a major collusion and corruption scandal involving elected officials, municipal employees, and construction industry contractors. The scandal concerned the awarding of municipal contracts that led to a significant waste of public funds. Yet, at the time, all municipal sector organizations involved were regulated by several controls, particularly in the granting of public contracts. How could the situation deteriorate to the point where collusion became the “usual” way of managing public contracts, particularly in the City of Montréal? The objective of this article is to better understand how deviance became the “norm,” such that the social actors involved came to adopt a deviant identity rather than obeying socially accepted rules. Conceptually inspired by the work of Becker (1963), Foucault (1977), and Giddens (1991), this article is based on the in-depth testimonies of two key actors in the collusion scheme. Our aim is to better understand the process leading to the adoption of deviant behavior and the often illusory character of organizational and regulatory controls.

Purpose This study aims to better understand how academics-in-the-making construe doctoral performance and the impacts of this construal on their positioning in relation to doctoral performance expectations. Design/methodology/approach This study is based on 25 semi-structured interviews with PhD students from Canadian, Dutch, Scottish and Australian business schools. Findings Based on Decoteau’s (2016) concept of reflexive habitus, this study highlights how doctoral students’ construal is influenced by their previous experiences and by expectations from other adjacent fields in which they simultaneously gravitate. This leads them to adopt a position oscillating between resistance and compliance in relation to their understanding of doctoral performance expectations promoted in the academic field. Research limitations/implications The concept of reflexivity, as understood by Decoteau (2016), is found to be pivotal when an individual integrates into a new field. Practical implications This study encourages business schools to review expectations regarding doctoral performance. These expectations should be clear, but they should also leave room for PhD students to preserve their academic aspirations. Originality/value It is beneficial to empirically clarify the influence of performance expectations in academia on the reflexivity of PhD students, as the majority of studies exploring this topic mainly leverage auto-ethnographic data.

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