Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

INTERDISCIPLINARY CONVERSATIONS

Stanford University Press

Contents

1 Why Study Interdisciplinary Conversations?...........................................................12 The Calls for More Interdisciplinarity...............................................................113 Difficult Dialogues: Talking Across Cultures.........................................................314 Being in One's Comfort Zone: The Case of Ethics......................................................505 Two Cultures Revisited...............................................................................726 Interdisciplinary Dialogue Within a Broad Field: The Case of the Social Sciences.....................927 Leadership: The Key to Success.......................................................................1178 Outcomes of the Conversations........................................................................1329 Talking Across Disciplines...........................................................................153Appendix: Details of the Study.........................................................................167Notes..................................................................................................173Bibliography...........................................................................................193Index..................................................................................................203Acknowledgments........................................................................................218

Chapter One

SOME YEARS AGO, A COLLEAGUE AND I HAD A RESEARCH project that combined history and economics to explain how and why elementary school teaching became a woman's occupation in the United States. Midway through the project, at a team meeting, his research assistants and mine both presented analyses. His students were excited. They had found several diaries, which they used to understand teachers' reasons for entering the profession. They brought the diaries to the meeting and handled them lovingly. But my students were dismissive. Trained as quantitative researchers who use large data sets, they felt the diaries were unreliable and biased sources, representative only of those teachers who happened to write diaries.

Later in the meeting, the tables were turned. My students had large piles of computer output, complex statistical regressions on economic and educational data from several states. The history students argued that the quality of these nineteenth-century data was poor and said they didn't trust them. And besides, the regressions explained only 50 percent of the variance. Could you really think you'd explained something when half the explanation was still unknown?

My historian colleague and I explained (again) that by using both quantitative and qualitative methods we were developing a richer understanding of the feminization process, that while we agreed that both methodologies had flaws, each contributed something of value to solving the puzzle. It was a hard sell.

The questions raised by this story are at the heart of this book. What makes interdisciplinary conversations so difficult? What makes them fruitful?

The debate about barriers to interdisciplinarity is currently highly polarized. Columbia religion professor Mark C. Taylor maintains that disciplinary departments fatally impede interdisciplinarity. His solution? Abolish departments. Sharply countering this view, sociologist Jerry Jacobs of the University of Pennsylvania contends that universities are doing a fine job in accommodating the flow of ideas across disciplines and need put in place little more than what already exists.

Taylor and Jacobs are both wrong. We should not abolish departments and the disciplinary training they provide. But to nurture interdisciplinarity, faculty and administrators could go much further than they currently do.

The extraordinary complexity of knowledge in today's world creates a paradox. Its sheer volume and intricacy demand disciplinary specialization, even subspecialization. Innovative research and scholarship increasingly require immersion in the details of one's disciplinary dialogue, and departments are ideal settings for helping faculty to do this. However, departments limit the ability of academics to tackle problems that transcend disciplinary boundaries. The difficult task for faculty and administrators is to retain the benefits of disciplinary specialization while at the same time fostering interdisciplinary collaboration.

Most discussions about barriers to interdisciplinarity are about funding, the academic reward system, and the difficulties of evaluating research from multiple disciplines. This book is about different barriers, barriers that are rarely recognized let alone discussed: disciplinary habits of mind, disciplinary cultures, and interpersonal dynamics. It is also about what faculty members and administrators can do to overcome these barriers to create productive interdisciplinary conversations.

Objectives of the Book

The book analyzes six complex and sometimes stormy faculty seminars at three research universities that sought to use the seminars to foster conversations across disciplines. The account provides a sober reality check for those interested in doing, encouraging, and funding interdisciplinary work.

In 1990, in the conclusion to her landmark book Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice, Julie Thompson Klein noted our limited understanding of interdisciplinary work and the need for "compiling narratives in order to understand how interdisciplinary work is actually done." In the two decades since her book was published, there have been only a handful of such hands- on studies. In its 2005 report on facilitating interdisciplinarity, the National Academy of Sciences repeated what Klein said earlier: "Social-science research has not yet fully elucidated the complex social and intellectual processes that make for successful IDR [interdisciplinary research]. A deeper understanding of these processes will further enhance the prospects for creation and management of successful IDR projects." This book adds to our understanding of the processes by which faculty talk to one another across disciplines.

However, despite the rich data provided about interdisciplinary interactions, this study is limited, as are all case studies, by the relatively small number of faculty interviewed, the small number of seminars studied, and reliance on self-reports. Moreover, all six seminars took place at three private research universities in the United States, not necessarily representative even of private American research universities, let alone of other types of institutions in the United States or elsewhere.

Yet all faculty everywhere are captives of their disciplinary cultures and habits, which, while they permit focus and access to deep knowledge, constrain interactions with colleagues from other fields. This close reading of the pleasures and pitfalls of interdisciplinary exchange will resonate with faculty and administrators at all types of institutions worldwide.

In this book, I do not test a theory. Rather, I engage in an exploratory investigation of events in interdisciplinary conversations,...