On paper, at the end of any dissertation “all you need” are the signatures from 3-5 committee members who say that you passed the defense. But there are multiple steps that come before that point that you have to step through before you can get to the point of the signatures - you can’t just pick whatever you want, write about it and then go around soliciting people to sign the piece of paper so you can graduate.
Before you even embark on the dissertation itself, you have to write and present a dissertation prospectus, which is basically where you lay out what you plan to investigate and get it approved by your committee. One of the things your committee will evaluate you on is how your dissertation fits into the field of research in which you’ve purportedly studied for the last 4-5 years. And before you even get there, your advisor is guiding you into an area and giving you feedback the entire way.
Again, I am not arguing that someone couldn’t propose a dissertation related to criminal justice in some way in a management department (or organizational behavior). What I actually said was
- but I don’t think one could get a random management or marketing PhD and do criminal justice research unless that research was about how criminal justice is related to management or marketing or something.*.
Scobelic’s major book is described as this: “…Scoblic examines how Bush embraced regime change as a means of fighting evil and neglected to secure nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union, failed to prevent North Korea from reprocessing plutonium, rebuffed requests for negotiations from an Iranian regime that was, in 2003, willing to comply with the International Atomic Energy Agency, repeatedly ignored U.S. intelligence and pursued the war in Iraq. Scoblic illustrates how and why conservatism shaped the current administration and explains how it guided Bush’s good vs. evil morality.”
That is very clearly related to management - management in the political sense, but as you’ve pointed out, management is pretty broad.
This is a very fundamental misunderstanding of the way that academic departments and graduate committees work. You don’t just find 3 random faculty members; for one thing, your committee members have to be approved by the department. You can’t, say, pick a physics professor to sign your paper. Many departments have an approved list of mentors (even if the website “says” that you can pick a professor from a variety of departments; you may have to get special approval to do so outside of the list.) You have to defend your dissertation, too, and that often takes place in front of the entire department and not just your committee. But more importantly, most advisors aren’t really interested in irritating the entire rest of their department to the point of loathing just to let one doctoral student write an unrelated dissertation.
When academics interview for jobs, they present their past research and talk about their future research agenda in their job talk. I’m presuming that Dr. Akinola presented her prior research in the context of organizational behavior (because she has other prior work that’s closely related to that) and discussed how she planned to continue this research ALSO in the field of organizational behavior. She probably had some manuscripts already in progress by the time she applied to the program, proving that she planned to perform a research agenda related to organizational behavior. Obviously she could’ve said one thing and done something completely different, but that serves no one and is unlikely. And ‘not doing research related to anything in this department’ could be interpreted as cause; professors obviously want someone who is going to fit into the needs of their department and do research that serves the school and their goals.
tl;dr: Like I said in my earlier comment, I am not saying that someone in a business school absolutely cannot due criminal justice research. What I am saying is that that criminal justice research (or whatever field it is) has to be somehow related to the department in which they are studying.
And to be clear - and bring it back to the OP - a PhD in management or organizational behavior or business could be really awesome, very relevant and get you a lucrative career in the government or doing consulting work, if that’s what you wanted. But you would have to be at least tangentially interested in management or organizational behavior or business (broadly speaking) and willing to do CJ research that intersected that in some way.