Considering Interdisciplinarity

To the untrained eye the world is interdisciplinary — or, more accurately, nondisciplinary. In Western society our attempts to understand it, however, are often discipline-based. In Cartesian fashion we use our analytic skills to divide the world into smaller and smaller units, hoping that in understanding the parts we will eventually understand the whole. Our colleges and universities, and to a lesser extent our elementary and secondary schools, teach us by word and deed that knowledge is divided into academic disciplines. The more schooling we have, the more entrenched our sense of disciplinarity can become; we are introduced to disciplines in elementary school and learn to live by them in high school and college.

Disciplines provide the rationale for the departmental structure of U.S. colleges and universities and strongly influence faculty appointments; hiring, promotion, and tenure practices; teaching assignments; student recruitment and enrollment; and even accounting practices. Those structural and operational realities link the fortunes of interdisciplinary research and teaching to the disciplines. Moreover, despite increases in interdisciplinary activity in postsecondary education, disciplinary frameworks still organize most faculty members' understandings and interpretations of information and experience. The extent to which this assumption will hold true in the future, of course, is open to debate as more and more faculty question the foundations of the disciplines and seek alternative ways of knowing.

Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, scholars could take for granted the role of academic disciplines in college and university life. Most did not think much about how disciplines influenced the daily work life of college and university faculty and shaped their views of how knowledge is created and advanced. Academic departments that followed disciplinary lines provided a seemingly logical arrangement of scholarly activity. Disciplinary associations served to connect scholars to one another and to advance their given disciplines. Over time, however, it became clear that departments and disciplines had some drawbacks. The exponential growth of knowledge in the twentieth century revealed how disciplinary cultures and perspectives could discourage inquiries and explanations that spanned disciplinary boundaries. Disciplines, it now seems clear, are powerful but constraining ways of knowing. As conceptual frames, they delimit the range of research questions that are asked, the kinds of methods that are used to investigate phenomena, and the types of answers that are considered legitimate (see, for example, Becher 1989, and Kuhn 1970, 1977). Research generally supports this conceptualization, demonstrating close ties among the attitudes, cognitive styles, and behaviors of groups of faculty within disciplines and the character of the knowledge domains in which they work (see Becher 1989; Biglan 1973a, 1973b; Donald 1983, 1990; Jacobson 1981; Lodahl and Gordon 1972; Price 1970; and Shinn, 1982).

As disciplines grow, they also become more complex. Today most disciplines are comprised of smaller communities of scholars who coalesce around shared interests and/or methods of inquiry. In some cases these specializations substantially resemble their parent fields, but as the number and variety of specializations grow, academic specialties can estrange faculty from their colleagues (Becher 1987a). Our nostalgic view of the disciplines is that they are tightly knit communities in which everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Like local parents keeping the neighborhood kids in line, members of the community observe and cement disciplinary norms through conversations across the backyard fence. As the disciplines have grown larger and more diverse, the neighborhood community, however, has been replaced by more distal connections. Scholars in a specialization may have a disciplinary home, but they often travel elsewhere to work. Where once everyone knew all the folks on the block, perhaps even in the town, they now wave from their driveways but rarely invite the neighbors in. The growth of specializations parallels the decline of the front porch from which everyone could survey their territory. Now the more private world of the backyard deck excludes all but a select few.

It is no longer safe to assume that faculty within particular disciplines share areas of interest, methods, or even epistemological perspectives. The field of economics is unusual among disciplines because it enjoys considerable consensus on subject matter and methods. However, in the disciplines of anthropology, art, literature, and sociology, to name a few, there is extraordinary variation in content, methods, and epistemologies. Furthermore the gaps between those who adhere to traditional approaches to knowledge and those who argue that these approaches are misguided and misleading is widening. The qualitative-quantitative cross currents in the social sciences and the increased use of poststructuralist theories in the humanities and social sciences are two obvious examples of how differences in perspectives can disrupt disciplinary relations.

It is difficult to separate the willingness to question conventional disciplinary perspectives from the growth of knowledge in the past century; each drives and is driven, at least in part, by the other. Both developments, however, have moved interdisciplinarity from the academic periphery to a more central scholarly location. The border crossing of early interdisciplinarians was largely instrumental, that is, it was motivated by the need to solve a given problem using borrowed theories, concepts, or methods. Early interdisciplinarians were also fewer in number and generally acted as trespassers, not warring parties; they crossed disciplinary boundaries, but they rarely tried to demolish them. Many of today's interdisciplinary scholars are more revolutionary in their ideas and ideals and are eager to interrupt disciplinary discourse and to challenge traditional notions of knowledge and scholarship. In the sciences and related professional fields, such as engineering and medicine, interdisciplinarity is still largely instrumental. There is also a good deal of instrumental interdisciplinary work in the social sciences and humanities and in professional fields such as education, business, and social work. However, an increasing number of faculty in the humanities and social sciences pursue interdisciplinary work with the intent of deconstructing disciplinary knowledge and boundaries.

In the past when interdisciplinarity was criticized for not being "disciplined," the charge was a presumed lack...