The aim of this research was twofold: firstly to highlight how the current “hybridisation” of the academic and industrial rationales exerts its influence over the new production of young scientists; secondly to compare, between five OECD countries (USA, France, Great Britain, Japan and Germany), the ways that PhDs and doctoral students are socialised within a specific -societal- set of institutional arrangements. The production of PhDs brings into play a multiplicity of institutions at various national or local levels and mobilises the various resources available to them. The interaction between them requires the agents to adopt a variety of different behaviours based on a diversity of animating principles. Thus in order to reveal the various - societal - modes of the construction of new scientific knowledge and competence, we were led to analyse simultaneously the socialisation of young scientists and the various institutional configurations. To this end, we attempted to analyse some of the essential elements that structure this process, such as the funding system, the nature of the contract between doctoral students and their supervising institutions, the rules governing the academic community, training-job transition, career paths etc.