Synonyms

Cross-disciplinarity; Multidisciplinarity

Introduction

From the beginning the discourse on interdisciplinarity (ID) was “a discourse on innovation in knowledge production” (Weingart 2000: 30). Its basic objective has been to make science and higher education more responsive to the complexity of life-world problems and more relevant for the public good and the legitimate needs of the society. The criticism leveled in the name of ID against the disciplinary organization of the traditional universities was summarized under the oft-cited catchphrase “Communities have problems, universities departments” (CERI 1982: 127).

The term interdisciplinarity or interdisciplinary research (ID) can be defined in two distinct but intersecting ways: interdisciplinarity means either the collaboration of researchers trained in different fields of knowledge or the integration of different concepts, methods, and data from two or more different disciplines, no matter if this interdisciplinary integration is achieved by an interdisciplinary research group or by a single researcher.

However, an interdisciplinary integration of different knowledge fields requires at the same time new divisions of knowledge, since the definition of specialized topics between disciplinary knowledge fields is essential as interdisciplinary foci for any collaborative research across disciplinary boundaries (Weingart 2000: 36). The dream of an all-encompassing unity of knowledge belongs to the past, an ID integration of different knowledge claims can be reached only in a variety of local syntheses between research findings of carefully selected disciplines.

History of the Concept

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was in the 1970s one of the first organizations promoting interdisciplinarity with the aim to strengthen universities “which in the future ought not be the servant but the conscience, the analytical mind and the driving force in society” (Briggs et al. 1972: 288). Scientific research should become more relevant for the economic as well as the societal development of modern societies. It was the time of the starting discourse about “knowledge societies,” which found 1973 its prominent advocate in Daniel Bell’s book “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting” (Bell 1973).

Nevertheless, the concept of interdisciplinarity itself was from the beginning about the nuts and bolts of the day-to-day research in industrial laboratories and at universities. In contrast to the discourses on knowledge societies (Bell 1973), Mode-2 research (Gibbons et al. 1994; Nowotny et al. 2001), the Triple Helix Model (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 2000), and on Quadruple Helix Innovation Systems (Carayannis and Campbell 2012), the discourse on ID research does not presuppose any macro theories about societal developments or all-encompassing speculations about historical developments. Although to make a well-founded case for doing ID research, ID supporters are often relying on one of these theoretical forecasts and analyses of modern society. The concept of ID itself just asserts that for the solving of certain societal problems, researchers have to transgress disciplinary boundaries and engage in ID collaborations. The competence to engage in ID research is seen as an indispensable craft for modern societies: if someone wants to cope with the complexity of the modern world, the competence for ID research is a vital skill to be learned. Therefore, ID is basically a discourse on the how-to-do of successful disciplinary-boundaries-transcending scientific research (Arnold 2009).

As a matter of fact the term interdisciplinarity became since the 1980s a prominent key tender term in many newly established research funds aiming at more social or environmentally relevant scientific research (cf. Hackett 2000; Krull and Krull 2000). Soon ID was implemented in university curricula as well, teaching students – with an eye to their prospective field of work and to their role as responsible citizens in a modern democracy – to tackle with complex life-problems by the use of different scientific methodologies in a professional way (Kockelmans 1979; Frodeman et al. 2010: 345–403).

In 2004, the EU research Advisory Board circulated recommendations for interdisciplinarity in research (EU Research Advisory Board 2004), in 2005 the Finnish Academy of Science followed with a study promoting ID (Bruun et al. 2005), whereas in the USA the National Academy of Sciences together with the National Academy of Engineering issued a report evaluating past achievements of ID research and recommending ID as an important and successful way for innovations, stating that:

“many of the great research triumphs are products of interdisciplinary inquiry and collaboration: discovery of the structure of DNA, magnetic resonance imaging, the Manhattan Project, laser eye surgery, radar, human genome sequencing, the ‘green revolution,’ and manned space flight.” (Committee on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research et al. 2005: 17)

Furthermore – as the report adds (ibidem) – many of today’s “hot” research topics are interdisciplinary like nanotechnology, genomics, bioinformatics, neuroscience, conflict, and terrorism, as well as research in areas like disease prevention, economic development, social inequality, and global climate change.

Aims and Limits of Disciplinary Research

The First Obstacle for ID: The Disciplinary Organization of Science

Although the term disciplina was used as early as in the Middle Ages for the ordering of knowledge within universities, the invention of the modern scientific discipline (here and in that which follows including humanities and the social sciences) dates back to the nineteenth century and the invention of the modern research university in Berlin. Since then, disciplines are the basic units of differentiation within the system of science and the higher education system as well. They were established together with the emergence of modern scientific communities and the first scientific journals with their standardized ways of scientific communication with colleagues and specialized readers only. Amateur scientists, which were in the eighteenth century as educated public still an accepted part of the scientific community, became now excluded (Stichweh 1984, 1992). It was the arrival of what Thomas Kuhn later famously called “normal science.” Its chief characteristic is its close alignment to approved “paradigms” (or what Kuhn later called “disciplinary matrix”), setting narrow limits for new methods and research questions:

“Perhaps the most striking feature of the normal research problems […] is how little they aim to produce major novelties, conceptual or phenomenal. […] To scientists, at least, the results gained in normal research are significant because they add to the scope and precision with which the paradigm can be applied.” (Kuhn 1970: 35 f.)

“Normal science” is nothing more or less than a kind of “puzzle-solving,” since each paradigm identifies perplexing puzzles, suggests paths to their solution, and reassures that not scientific genius but the hard work of scientific practitioners will be sufficient for success (Kuhn 1970: 179). In other words, paradigm-led normal science is aiming at perfection, that is, incremental innovations, to find better answers to existing questions. Radical innovations, like paradigm shifts, are within the disciplinary organization of the sciences the exception and not the rule.

The Second Obstacle for ID: The Variety of Epistemic Cultures

However, it is not merely the disciplinary orientation of normal science which impedes ID collaborations. Even, should the need for an ID collaboration be acknowledged by scientists, cooperation may become difficult since different epistemic cultures are often in conflict when it comes to questions like: What are sound methods? How to measure quality, but also more subtle differences like differences in social values making day-to-day collaboration within interdisciplinary teams again and again vulnerable to conflict and fundamental misunderstandings (Arnold 2004; Becher 1993; Knorr-Cetina 1999)? Furthermore, different disciplines are often not considered as of equal rank and status within the disciplinary system:

“[T]he interdisciplinary team is an open rather than a closed system. […] Interdisciplinary teams in this respect are status systems that reflect external hierarchies and disciplinary chauvinism. […] [T]he status system of a team will tend to follow the status system of the world outside the team if there is no strong alternative organization, though even a strong organization cannot eliminate status ambiguity and clashes in career goals, professional styles, and epistemologies.” (Klein 1990: 127, cf. Lamont 2009)

The different disciplinary contributions by themselves, therefore, often do not add up to a coherent whole, that is, to an integrated research result, since they adhere to quite different epistemological principles or are the product of diverse research routines.

The Third Obstacle for ID: The Claims of Professional Jurisdiction

For experts (inside and outside the universities) to accept that other experts can contribute with their methods and disciplinary knowledge as much as oneself to the solution of a problem implies in the end to give up one’s own disciplinary claim for exclusive professional jurisdiction over this problem field. Hence, interdisciplinary cooperation can conflict with professional aspirations to prevent competing scientific communities and professions from interfering in one’s own field of expertise:

“A jurisdictional claim made before the public is generally a claim for the legitimate control of a particular kind of work. This control means first and foremost a right to perform the work as professionals see fit. Along with the right to perform the work as it wishes, a profession normally also claims rights to exclude other workers as deemed necessary, to dominate public definitions of the tasks concerned, and indeed to impose professional definitions of the tasks on competing professions. Public jurisdiction, in short, is a claim of both social and cultural authority.” (Abbott 1988: 60)

For that reason the demand for ID cooperation is seen especially by dominant disciplines and professions as infringement of their jurisdictional claims for exclusive responsibility; to admit the relevance of the expertise of other disciplines for a particular research project is like accepting a kind of defeat inevitably undermining the social and cultural authority of one’s own disciplinary knowledge and expertise. The authority of jurisdictional claims is important for disciplines not least because jurisdictional claims, when acknowledged as legitimate, are directly translatable in further research funding and job opportunities on the labor market for their graduates (Turner 2000).

Innovations: Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries

Trading Zones: The Value of Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Although multidisciplinarity is not ID as such, since a multidisciplinary perspective on an issue is per definition not aiming at an ID integration of the different perspectives, multidisciplinarity can become an important, if only preliminary stage in the process of designing ID projects and research programs. Putting a multiplicity of disciplinary approaches together can provide a multifaceted outlook revealing the complexity of real-world problems pointing out the need for a truly interdisciplinary solution.

Peter Galison developed the concept of disciplinary “trading zones” in his attempt to describe the requirements of a difficult, but in the end successful multidisciplinary collaboration between engineers and physicists with different theoretical background in the development of particle detectors and radars (Galison 1997: 781–844; Gorman 2002). These different groups had not only to find an agreement over those objectives, the design of the particle detector had to achieve: to communicate their ideas they had to invent a common (“creole”) language transcending their disciplinary idioms to explain their research programs and to share their disciplinary expertise commonly.

“The point is that these distinct groups, with their different approaches to instruments and their characteristic forms of argumentation, can nonetheless coordinate their approaches around specific practices. […] Note that here, as in any exchange, the two subcultures may altogether disagree about the implications of the equivalences established, the nature of the information exchanged, or the epistemic status of the coordination.” (Galison 1997: 806)

Unlike ID, which aims at a comprehensive integration of disciplinary knowledge domains and shared epistemological models, multidisciplinary co-operations can differ about theories and their understanding of the collaboration, since they do not necessarily need unanimity and a common perspective.

Such “trading zones” between different scientific and societal groups are public spaces where the need for certain interdisciplinary co-operations and projects can become pressing and where innovations through brokering of ideas, methods, and theories are becoming more likely to emerge. Therefore, as Lester and Priore have argued, certain institutional and organizational arrangements to encourage this kind of brokering and trading of multidisciplinary information with the help of public domains have to be established and maintained within an innovation system. Particularly the modern research university with its diversity of scientific disciplines under one organizational roof is well-designed for this special purpose: to provide a kind of “sheltered space” that can sustain public conversations between a variety of scientific specialists and societal stakeholders:

“To a much greater degree than in business firms, the disciplines dominate [within the university] the conversations; but the diversity of perspectives is greater than in firms because academic discussions draw in a broader range of participants […]. Even accounting for the restrictive influence of the disciplines, a university, far more than a firm, is a public space.” (Lester and Priore 2004: 166 f.)

These multidisciplinary public conversations within the universities (and at other places) give rise to “interpretative communities” enabling actors with different backgrounds to establish common definitions of societal problems and research questions, which are the indispensable precondition for the design of ID research programs and research co-operations.

Interactional Expertise: Communicating Across Disciplinary Boundaries

The competence necessary to build ID research co-operations within these “trading zones” is what Collins and Evans have called “interactional expertise” (in contrast to “contributory expertise”), that is, an expertise in understanding and communicating knowledge across the boundaries of disciplinary communities and specialized fields of expertise:

“mastery of interactional expertise […] is the medium of interchange within large-scale science projects, where […] not everyone can be a contributor to everyone else’s narrow specialism; it is, a forteriori, the medium of interchange in properly interdisciplinary, as opposed to multidisciplinary, research.” (Collins and Evans 2007: 31 f.; cf. Collins and Evans 2002)

To cooperate successfully with other disciplines it is necessary to understand their problems, methods, and results, so one can talk with members of this scientific community about their research questions and findings on a certain level of expertise without becoming a member of this community by oneself. Obtaining this level of understanding is possible only with the help of insiders, who are willing to explain their work. Cultivating interactional expertise for an interdisciplinary cooperation requires an ongoing effort to make disciplinary knowledge accessible to a wider public, in other words by participating in efforts of “popularization” which itself is usually aligned with innovation and interdisciplinarity:

“In modern science innovation, especially radical or revolutionary innovation is regularly coupled to interdisciplinarity as a mechanism of hybridization of scientific knowledge. And popularization is often based on interdisciplinary combinations of knowledge which sometimes are audacious. Therefore, there is a significant innovation potential in popularization […]. Doing popularization is […] an opportunity for experimenting with a level of intellectual risk which is not readily accepted in everyday scientific practice.” (Stichweh 2003: 215)

Communicating scientific knowledge successfully beyond the confines of its disciplinary community is only possible if this knowledge is placed within a wider context: its relations to other sources of knowledge – how they match or mismatch with one another – as well as its societal relevance have to be explained, helping to understand the significance of this knowledge and why it should be considered as relevant in the context of certain research questions. Furthermore, concentrating on the relevance of scientific knowledge for societal problems is an effective way to connect disciplinary expertise to the expertise of other disciplines, to relate scientific findings to everyday knowledge and to widely hold cultural beliefs – in preparation for the development of ID epistemological models.

Interdisciplinary Epistemology: The Need for ID Models

For the integration of different disciplinary knowledge fields one is in need of a theory or an epistemological model of the relations between these different knowledge claims. For example, how can someone best analyze a historical period or – more generally – the “cultural” practices of a societal group: the evidence of social sciences based on statistical numbers is different from the evidence of historical scholarship based on archival sources. And both are different from the evidence of literary and media studies based on an interpretation of a novel or a film. However, each of these knowledge domains can provide a substantial contribution for the understanding of someone’s “culture.” Only a combination of these different disciplinary results, governed by a theoretical model of the epistemological relations between their methods and sources, can give an interdisciplinary perspective on the distinctive cultural features of someone’s way of life, that is, a detailed explanation of one’s culture.

Therefore, when the French historian Fernand Braudel proposed (together with the members of the so-called Annales School) a research program aiming to show how geography and economy have shaped societies and historical events in particular, he had to integrate findings from disciplines as diverse as geography, economy, and history within a theoretical model. Since these

“systems of explanation vary infinitely according to the temperament, calculations, and aims of those using them: simple or complex, qualitative or quantitative, static or dynamic, mechanical or statistical. […] In my opinion, before establishing a common program for the social sciences, the crucial thing is to define the function and limits of models, the scope of which some undertakings seem to be in danger of enlarging inordinately.” (Braudel 1980: 40)

Braudel’s epistemological reflections on the different disciplinary systems of explanations made him aware of what he called the longue durée (the long term) in contrast to the short-term events which lie in the traditional focus of the historians. To integrate these different levels of explanations, he established his famous distinction between three levels of time: (1) the geographical time of the natural environment, where change is very slow and almost imperceptible for human actors, (2) the long-term developments of the economic, social, and cultural history, and (3) the time of the historians dominated by short-term events and the actions of individuals, including those of politicians and soldiers. Only then could Braudel begin to integrate the diverse disciplinary findings within a methodological sound historical framework, as he did, for example, in his influential The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949).

Another example is an ID model developed by the interdisciplinary Birmingham School of Cultural Studies to understand innovation in the “culture industry” analyzing, as an example, the invention of the Sony Walkman. Introducing the model of the “circuit of culture” they have tried to understand the interactions between five different cultural processes: the production of goods, the consumption, different kinds of regulations, the cultural representations within mass media, and the construction of social identities. In other words, how an electronic device “is represented, what social identities are associated with it, how it is produced and consumed, and what mechanisms regulate its distribution and use.” (Gay et al. 1997: 3). The ID model is necessary to combine diverse types of knowledge about an electronic device such as the Sony Walkman. Only then is it possible to understand how every product is participating in various economic, social, and cultural processes: why success and failure of an innovation are always depending on the interaction of these processes, which are often mistakenly seen as autonomous and for that reason usually analyzed by separate scientific disciplines.

A theoretical model of the ID relations between different knowledge domains helps to understand how someone can integrate different disciplinary findings in a methodological sound way.

Organizing Interdisciplinary Research Teams

Each discipline or research area has to develop and care for its own epistemic culture. Therefore, it is important, which scientific disciplines should be integrated within an interdisciplinary project. Different methods, different kinds of argumentation and evidence, as well as different social arrangements of inner-disciplinary co-operations require customized solutions for every single ID-research project (cf. Piaget et al. 1972; Piaget 1973; Becher 1993; Klein 1996; Arnold 2009). But also the host institutions can differ regarding the type of ID research that they are supporting. There are on the one hand ID institutions with changing research topics and temporary research groups, such as the German Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung, University of Bielefeld), founded in 1968 (Frodeman et al. 2010: 292 f.), or on the other hand institutions with long-lasting ID research teams institutionalized in departments staffed with both permanent and temporary researchers, such as at the Austrian Faculty for Interdisciplinary Studies (IFF, Fakultät für interdisziplinäre Forschung und Fortbildung, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), with predecessor organizations dating back to its first formation in 1979 (Arnold and Dressel 2009). In the former case ID is seen as driven by changing scientific interests, in the latter ID is organized around societal problems, which require steadfast attention over many years if they ever should be solved.

Nevertheless, there are also some characteristics, which most ID research projects have in common. For example, to create an ID research team out of a multidisciplinary group of researchers, where at least one of the research participants has to think interdisciplinarily, working deliberately on the integration of the different methods and research findings (Parthey 1999). Much time has to be designated for periodic team meetings (not least at the beginning, but during the project as well), to elaborate not only a common understanding, but also to address personal irritations and conflicts between team members face-to-face. Since learning from other disciplines is an important element of ID projects, a successful ID research process can be seen as fostering a type of societal learning, where scientists share their different knowledge and expertise aiming to create a common understanding of the problems and the solutions, with the result that every team member has to acquire and adopt this knowledge during the research process (Arnold 2009).

However, ID depends on the individual researcher’s competence and personal ability to cooperate with others in ID research teams. Studies suggest that there are certain character traits which many effective ID researchers have in common like “a high degree of ego strength, a tolerance for ambiguity, considerable initiative and assertiveness, a broad education, and a sense of dissatisfaction with monodisciplinary constraints” (Klein 1990: 183).

Evaluating Interdisciplinary Research

As Heinrich Parthey showed, a good indicator for ID is the percentage of researchers within a research group who formulate their own guiding research problem in concepts spanning across disciplinary boundaries. Because thinking from an ID perspective means to formulate and justify the guiding research problem on a different theoretical level and with different theoretical concepts than the methods with which these interdisciplinary problems are approached afterward by the participating disciplines. In addition, a second important indicator for ID research is the interdisciplinary character of the methods applied to the problem: when scientists borrow methods across disciplinary boundaries, for example, by transfer of methods from other specialist fields of research (Parthey 2011). Both traits have to be encouraged within research teams and both are valuable indicators for the evaluation of the “interdisciplinarity” of an ID research project.

But one main problem in evaluating the quality of ID remains: Who is able to judge about the quality of ID research? Disciplines have their standards and their peers, but ID projects are by definition transcending disciplinary boundaries:

“Since interdisciplinary research is a new synthesis of expertise, peers in the strong sense of the word do not exist. When new combinations of knowledge are tried in interdisciplinary projects, no one but those conducting the work are competent in all aspects of that combination.” (Laudel 2006: 57)

Furthermore, empirical research suggests a bias against ID in peer review since peers tend to favor proposals belonging to their own field of study (Laudel 2006) and are falling back on traditional disciplinary standards of the disciplines involved so that in the aggregate all too often an ID research proposal has to meet more quality criteria than disciplinary proposals, increasing the likelihood of getting rejected by research funds (Lamont 2009: 208–211, Mansilla 2006: 25, Huutoniemi 2010: 312 f.).

As already said above (Sect. The First Obstacle for ID: The Disciplinary Organization of Science), paradigm-led disciplinary science is aiming at perfection, that is, incremental innovations, to find better answers to existing questions. Disciplinary evaluations, therefore, endorse those projects which are “sound” and “mature” according to the existing disciplinary standards, they are looking for inaccuracies. However, innovations are per definition not “mature” and in the beginning not “sound” (as defined by disciplinary-oriented evaluators) as well. Since competing quality standards of different disciplines are often one of the reasons why disciplines cannot agree to cooperate in a common research project, ID research has often to develop and justify its own methodological standards, which are appropriate for its special research questions and its carefully selected new research objectives.

Conclusion and Future Directions

Creating an innovation and ID-friendly research environment will remain an important objective for the near future. Since despite critics who are still claiming that ID is nothing but a passing science policy fad: as long as modern research and teaching is primarily organized within disciplinary boundaries, ID research will assert its rank as one of the most important paths to innovation. Its major aim will remain to counterbalance the conservative and inward-looking character of strictly disciplinary research organizations, of their research questions and evaluations. For that reason the distinct quality of ID has to be recognized for the funding of research and the management of research organizations as well. Traditional quality indicators like publications in disciplinary journals can contradict the very intentions of ID-research: stipulating that the results should be published in different (disciplinary) journals forces research teams at the end of their project to dissolve the already achieved level of ID knowledge integration again into its disciplinary parts. By insinuating that disciplinary audiences are the only legitimate judges about the outcomes of ID research, ID is against its principal objective treated as nothing but a loosely connected “multidisciplinary” synopsis of disciplinary research questions and findings.

Hence, the assessment of ID should not solely consist of a post hoc addition of individual expert opinions, but of the deliberate attempt to integrate different disciplinary perspectives with the help of the consolidated judgment of an ID expert group, amenable to reason and time-consuming deliberations. Only a disciplinary-boundaries-bridging group of experts is able to appreciate the specific merits of ID research such as developing new research questions and research programs beyond well-trodden disciplinary paths.

Furthermore, since ID is not only aiming for innovations but also on social relevance, combining interdisciplinary research with participatory transdisciplinary research (TD) is a highly successful method to ensure within an ID research project both the non-disciplinary character and the social relevance of the research questions. Thus, proceeding from life-world problems and integrating not only knowledge of different scientific disciplines, but in addition also non-scientific expertise as well, can be seen as one of the most promising research strategies for the future of ID.

Cross-References

Mode 1, Mode 2, and Innovation

Transdisciplinary Research (Transdisciplinarity)