Interdisciplinarity: A Critical Assessment · PDF fileANRV381-SO35-03 ARI 17 March 2009 22:6 R...

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Interdisciplinarity:A Critical AssessmentJerry A. Jacobs1 and Scott Frickel21Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104;email: [email protected] of Sociology, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington 99164;email: [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2009. 35:43–65

The Annual Review of Sociology is online atsoc.annualreviews.org

This article’s doi:10.1146/annurev-soc-070308-115954

Copyright c© 2009 by Annual Reviews.All rights reserved

0360-0572/09/0811-0043$20.00

Key Words

academic disciplines, interdisciplinary research, cross-disciplinarycommunication, knowledge diffusion, knowledge integration

AbstractThis article draws together disparate research and theorizing on inter-disciplinarity. We first describe widespread efforts to promote interdis-ciplinarity in U.S. universities and critically examine the assumptionsunderlying these initiatives. Next, we present a cross-sectional view ofinterdisciplinary communication, knowledge diffusion, research assess-ment, and interdisciplinary research centers. We then describe researchand theories that provide historical perspectives on the disciplinary sys-tem, interdiscipline formation, applied and professional fields, and in-stitutional fragmentation. We present original findings on the preva-lence of research centers, faculty hiring patterns in hybrid fields, andthe diffusion of research across disciplines in the humanities and socialsciences. The review concludes with a critical summary and suggestionsfor future research.

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Review in Advance first posted online on April 2, 2009. (Minor changes may still occur before final publication online and in print.)

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INTRODUCTION

In this article, we critically examine the statusof claims underlying recent efforts to promoteinterdisciplinarity, which we define as commu-nication and collaboration across academic dis-ciplines. In recent years, numerous efforts topromote interdisciplinary scholarship and re-search have been advanced by academics anduniversity administrators. For example, therehave been calls for more interdisciplinary schol-arship in such diverse social policy arenas asinternational migration (Boomes & Morawska2005), leisure studies (Mair 2006), obesity(Tiffin et al. 2006), poverty (Hulme & Toye2006), and public health (von Lengerke 2006),as well as emerging natural science research ar-eas such as nanotechnology (Schummer 2004)and neurosciences (Toescu 2005).

The literature invoking interdisciplinarityas a topic for theory, research, education, andpolicy is vast. The breadth of this intellectualterrain is suggested by the forthcoming OxfordHandbook on Interdisciplinarity (Frodeman et al.2009). This hefty volume, which promises 42stand-alone chapters ranging from the physicaland life sciences to ethics and design, confirmsthe premise that academic interest in interdis-ciplinarity is broad based. The literature is top-ically diverse as well, with discussions rangingfrom interdisciplinary pedagogy (Lattuca 2001,Mansilla & Duraising 2007) to interdisciplinaryknowledge practices (Galison & Stump 1996,Weingart & Stehr 2000) and interdisciplinaryepistemologies and formal theory construction(Faber & Schepper 1997, Fuller 2004), as well asobservations on interdisciplinarity as a histori-cal, political, and economic subject (e.g., Klein1990, Nowotny et al. 2001, Shinn 1999; seealso Weingart 2000, Klein 2000, Hackett 2000,Kockelmans 1979, Newell 1998, Berkenkotter1995).

Among sociologists, interdisciplinarity islauded as an ideal, scorned as a threat, and em-braced as a practice. Scholars have commentedon and mapped sociology’s historical relation-ships with neighboring disciplines (Calhoun1996, Camic 1995), chronicled the mounting

insularity of the discipline with the rise ofsociological positivism in the 1950s (Steinmetz2007), and charted more recent sociologicalcontributions to interdisciplinary scholarshipacross a wide range of areas of inquiry (Smelser2003, Collins 2007). Reviews that have ap-peared in the Annual Review of Sociology havetouched on issues related to interdisciplinaritybut have not tackled this topic directly. Essayson the sociology of knowledge (Swidler &Arditi 1994) and scientific knowledge (Shapin1995), the knowledge economy (Powell &Snellman 2004), and the nature of social andcultural boundaries (Lamont & Molnar 2002)bear on the topic of interdisciplinarity andits implications for sociological research, yetnone attend explicitly to interdisciplinarityas such. Instead, these essays provide discus-sions of phenomena presumably constitutiveof interdisciplinarity—such as hybridity orboundary crossing—but without drawing closeconnections to the broader set of processes thatproduce and transform relationships amongacademic disciplines.

The widespread attention that administra-tors, funders, and faculty alike are giving tointerdisciplinarity—and the intensity of the de-bates that attention has generated—is strikinggiven the fact that relatively little research onmany of the underlying issues has been con-ducted. As a result, we are skeptical of a numberof the assumptions advanced by advocates of in-terdisciplinarity, and we caution against a majorreorganization of academic fields without a sub-stantially stronger case being made on both the-oretical and empirical grounds. We point out anumber of areas where the critique of existingdisciplines is not consistent with the availableresearch and point to many topics that warrantfurther inquiry.

This review is organized into four mainparts. First, we highlight current interdisci-plinary research and scholarship initiatives andidentify the major assumptions that underliethose initiatives. Next, we take a contemporaryor cross-sectional view of the connectionsbetween disciplines, assessing the empiricalcase for interdisciplinarity as it relates to

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communication and knowledge diffusionpatterns, the assessment of interdisciplinaryresearch, and the institutionalizing role ofinterdisciplinary research centers. The thirdpart introduces a set of longer-term historicalperspectives and questions that focus on thedisciplinary system, interdiscipline formation,the rise of applied and professional fields,and institutional fragmentation. The fourthpart draws together these findings and chartsa research agenda on the determinants andconsequences of interdisciplinarity.

This review focuses primarily on issues re-lated to academic interdisciplinary research andtouches on issues of undergraduate educationand cultural practices of scientific work onlytangentially. Given the breadth of the poten-tially relevant literatures, our treatment of theseissues is necessarily selective. Our review doesnot cover the substance of interdisciplinary re-search studies undertaken by sociologists—forexample, we do not review sociobiological workthat combines genetics and social demographicor health data (e.g., Bearman et al. 2008) or re-search by environmental sociologists on cou-pled human and natural systems (e.g., Dietzet al. 2009). We also largely set aside questionsof interorganizational research collaborations(e.g., Powell et al. 2005).

The literature we review is characterized byconsiderable terminological ambiguity. Somescholars draw clear distinctions between re-search that is cross-disciplinary or multidis-ciplinary (contributions from two or morefields to a research problem), interdisciplinaryor pluridisciplinary (integration of knowledgeoriginating in two or more fields), or trans-disciplinary (knowledge produced jointly bydisciplinary experts and social practitioners)(Aboelela et al. 2007, Salter & Hearn 1996).The underlying goal of these terms is to distin-guish between low, moderate, and high levelsof interconnectedness or intellectual integra-tion. Others are more comfortable with looserdistinctions. We count ourselves among thelatter group and in this article use interdisci-plinary and interdisciplinarity as general terms

for describing interrelationships among aca-demic disciplines.

INTERDISCIPLINARYINITIATIVES AND UNDERLYINGASSUMPTIONS

Top-Down and Bottom-UpInterdisciplinary Initiatives

Recent efforts to promote interdisciplinaryscholarship have come from numerous sources,including federal agencies, private foundations,and universities. They have taken several forms,including dedicated grant support, competitionfor seed projects, interdisciplinary training pro-grams, and hiring initiatives targeted at fac-ulty whose expertise spans traditional academicboundaries. Specifically, in 2006, the NationalScience Foundation (NSF) set aside funds for aninterdisciplinary training program for graduateresearch fellows called the Integrative GraduateEducation and Research Traineeship (IGERT)(http://www.igert.org). In 2007, the NationalInstitutes of Health funded nine interdisci-plinary research consortia “as a means of in-tegrating aspects of different disciplines to ad-dress health challenges that have been resistantto traditional research approaches” (NationalInstitutes of Health 2007). As part of its ongo-ing capital campaign, Stanford University seeksto raise $1.4 billion for multidisciplinary efforts“to seek solutions to the century’s most pressingglobal challenges” (Strout 2006). Since 2002,the Mellon Foundation New Directions fellow-ships have offered faculty in the humanities andsocial sciences the opportunity to “acquire sys-tematic training outside their own disciplines”(Mellon Foundation 2008). In May 2008, theUniversity of Michigan announced plans to hire100 interdisciplinary faculty members over fiveyears “in areas that advance interdisciplinaryteaching and research” (University of Michigan2008).

These are not isolated developments. Brint(2005) carefully documents a growing empha-sis on interdisciplinary research initiatives by

www.annualreviews.org • Interdisciplinarity 45

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university deans, presidents, and provosts, es-pecially at leading private research universities.Common initiatives in this push for interdisci-plinary creativity include hiring academic starsto promote interdisciplinary scholarship; orga-nizing competitions for seed money for new,interdisciplinary initiatives; and promotingcross-disciplinary training. Brint’s emphasis ongovernment, foundation, and alumni fundinghighlights the importance of external financialsupport of these top-down initiatives. He alsoacknowledges the intellectual ferment bubblingup from the ranks of the faculty whose break-through research is driving many of these de-velopments, especially in natural sciences.

Although the impetus for interdisciplinaryresearch appears to be driven primarily by uni-versity presidents, provosts, and deans, there isalso broad acceptance of the value of interdis-ciplinary knowledge on the part of faculty. Arecent national survey of 1353 college and uni-versity faculty found that 70% agreed (stronglyor somewhat) with the statement that “interdis-ciplinary knowledge is better than knowledgeobtained by a single discipline” (N. Gross &S. Simmons, personal communication). This

view is shared by scholars in the humanities,social sciences, and natural sciences. Indeed, amajority of faculty in 19 of 21 fields agreed withthis statement; only mechanical engineers andeconomists disagreed. Economists’ skepticismof research from other disciplines is also evi-dent in their low rate of citation of other socialscience research (Pieters & Baumgartner 2002).

The bottom-up push for more interdisci-plinarity has been accompanied by more dis-cussion of this topic in academic journals. As arough indicator of the growth of scholarshipin this area, we have charted the use of theterm “interdisciplinary” in the titles of jour-nal articles, drawing on data from the Web ofScience©R. Nearly 8000 articles have been pub-lished to date using this term. As shown inFigure 1, research in this area has grownrapidly since the 1990s. The upward trend isremarkably consistent over time (see also Braun& Schubert 2003).

Table 1 displays the distribution of thesearticles by the academic discipline of the pub-lishing journal. There has been interest in in-terdisciplinary scholarship across a wide rangeof subject areas, from education to chemistry,

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Figure 1Trends in articles with the term “interdisciplinary” in title, 1990–2007.


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Table 1 Distribution of articles with the term “interdisciplinary” in title, by journal subjectcategory

Record count(N = 7694) %

Education and Educational Research 351 4.6%Gerontology 347 4.5%Medicine, general and internal 319 4.1%Psychology, multidisciplinary 298 3.9%Education, scientific disciplines 284 3.7%Public, Environmental, and Occupational Health 270 3.5%Rehabilitation 266 3.5%Psychiatry 260 3.4%History 257 3.3%Sociology 228 3.0%Multidisciplinary sciences 223 2.9%Chemistry, multidisciplinary 218 2.8%Information Science and Library Science 212 2.8%Social Sciences, interdisciplinary 206 2.7%Surgery 194 2.5%Health Care Sciences and Services 186 2.4%Oncology 174 2.3%Nursing 170 2.2%Literature 162 2.1%Geriatrics and Gerontology 158 2.1%Language and Linguistics 151 2.0%Religion 148 1.9%Clinical Neurology 147 1.9%Psychology 142 1.8%Philosophy 137 1.8%

Source: Thompson Scientific, 1956–2007. ISI Web of KnowledgeSM. Web of Science©R . Science Citation Index.Philadelphia, PA: Thompson Scientific Corporation. Available online at http://isiknowledge.com.

oncology, and philosophy, as evidenced by thesedata.

Assumptions Underlying the CurrentPush for Interdisciplinarity

Most advocates point to problem solving asthe main promise of interdisciplinary research(Klein 1990, 1996; Frodeman & Mitcham2007). Whether basic or applied, interdisci-plinarity is supposed to integrate knowledgeand solve problems that individual disciplinescannot solve alone. Despite its promise,advocates see numerous barriers impeding

interdisciplinary research and scholarship(National Academy of Sciences 2004,pp. 30–39). Epistemic barriers involve incom-patible styles of thought, research traditions,techniques, and language that are difficult totranslate across disciplinary domains. Disci-plinary structures reinforce these inefficienciesthrough specialized journals, conferences,and departments that route communicationinward. Administrative barriers reinforce thisintellectual balkanization. Thus, individualresearchers must make extra effort and takeon additional risk to pursue interdisciplinaryresearch without the kind of support that


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comes easily to researchers who remain withintheir home disciplines. The stakes are high andpressing. “To hinder [interdisciplinary] activityis to diminish our ability to address the greatquestions of science and to hesitate before thescientific and societal challenges of our time”(National Academy of Sciences 2004, p. 25).This line of argument is grounded in a numberof underlying assumptions about the nature ofdisciplines, research communities, universities,and knowledge:

� Interdisciplinary research has vast poten-tial for societal good in the form of newkinds of knowledge.

� More interdisciplinary research is betterthan less; its growth is fundamental to thehealth of the scientific enterprise.

� Disciplines and the institutional policiesthat reinforce them represent major bar-riers to interdisciplinary research.

� Reducing those barriers will enhanceconditions for the efficient production ofinterdisciplinary knowledge.

Although these assumptions are broadlyshared by advocates of interdisciplinarity, rarelyhave they been subject to empirical investiga-tion. Case studies predominate in the empiricalliterature that does exist, many of which takethe form of personal reflections (e.g., Salter &Hearns 1996). In contrast, there are virtuallyno comparative studies that investigate howdisciplinary and interdisciplinary relationshipsdevelop and whether the consequences of thosecollaborative outcomes are meaningfully dif-ferent. For example, there have been periodicefforts to promote interdisciplinary researchdating back to the work of the Social ScienceResearch Council in the 1920s, the RockefellerFoundation in the 1930s, military science in the1940s and 1950s, and applied social problemsin the 1960s (Klein 1990, Pickering 1995,Abir-Am 1988). Yet the lessons from historicalsuccesses and failures are not systematicallyleveraged to clarify how current initiativesare similar to or different from those un-dertaken in earlier decades. As a result, theliterature does not clearly establish the dual

propositions that disciplines impede thedevelopment of knowledge and that inter-disciplinary knowledge is more valuable thanthat emerging from within disciplines. Somestudies have highlighted the organizationaland epistemological challenges experiencedby interdisciplinary research collaborations(e.g., various chapters in Kockelmans 1979and Weingart et al. 1997). However, withoutcomparative research designs it is not clearhow many of these difficulties in collaborationare unique to cross-disciplinary teams. In otherwords, collaboration often involves the com-bination of researchers with complementaryskill sets. As a result, even intradisciplinarycollaborations may have their own challengesand result in different qualities of knowledge(Moody 2004). With these concerns in mind,we next bring some data on the contemporarysituation to bear on the assumptions underlyingthe broad push for interdisciplinarity.

INTERDISCIPLINARITY:A CROSS-SECTIONAL VIEW

The Prevalence of InterdisciplinaryCommunication

As we note above, an underlying assumptionof advocates of interdisciplinarity is that dis-ciplines represent disconnected silos that in-hibit innovation and stifle inquiry on topicsoutside the narrow confines of each discipline(Bitner & Brown 2006; see also Campbell1969). Another image of science, however, em-phasizes the interconnectedness of academicscholarship: a web. This is the dominantmetaphor in bibliometric research. Researchersexamine patterns of citations, and other ties, be-tween scholarly research articles to reveal a webof connections between scholarly articles, withno discipline standing completely apart fromthe others.1 Research nodes represent denseareas of connections within a broader map of

1Recent advances in scholarly databases hold the promise ofexpanding this line of research to include books as well asarticles (Jacso 2005).


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science (Small 1999, Small & Griffith 1974,Boyack et al. 2005). Disciplines are locatednearer or farther from each other based onthe density of connections as indexed by coc-itations, that is, citations in common betweenarticles. For example, Boyack et al.’s (2005)finding that biochemistry ranks high on in-terdisciplinary connections is consistent withWhitley’s (1984) emphasis on interdisciplinar-ity in the laboratory-based natural sciences.The literature on citation patterns is large, withmany substantive and technical issues, too largeto be summarized here (e.g., Nicolaisen 2007,Gmur 2003).

For our purposes, a central question is howcommon the connections are between disci-plines. The answer depends greatly on thelevel of aggregation of research specialties andthe substantive distance between fields. Porter& Chubin (1985) find relatively few citationsin common between demography, operationsresearch, and toxicology, which they view asevidence of the wide gulf between engineer-ing, the life sciences, and the social sciences.Van Leeuwen & Tijssen (2000), however, re-port very extensive connections across fields.They classified 2314 journals into 119 disci-plines represented by ISI subject categories andreport that most (69%) references are cross-disciplinary, that is, most references in a givenjournal are drawn from journals in other dis-ciplinary fields. This remarkably high rate ofcross-disciplinary citation in part reflects thedetailed journal classification scheme they em-ploy. Had they grouped journals into 20 or30 fields rather than 199, van Leeuwen &Tijssen likely would have reported a lowerrate of cross-disciplinary citations. Nonethe-less, their research fits more closely with the“web of science” imagery than with the “iso-lated silos” assumption.

Classifying references into 11 broad fields,the National Science Foundation (2000) re-ports cross-disciplinary citation rates rangingfrom highs of 38.3% in biology and 34.5% inpsychology to lows of 18.3% in physics and16.8% in earth science. The social sciences fallin the middle, with 22.7% of references drawing

from outside the social sciences. Delving withinthese 11 broad fields, the NSF data reveal thatthe social science field that draws most heavilyon research from other disciplines is area stud-ies, with a substantial majority (71.7%) of cita-tions coming from journals in other disciplines.Sociology falls in the middle with 48.5% of ref-erences coming from outside sociology. In thesocial sciences, economics is the most insular,with only 18.7% of references based on researchoutside of economics.

Rinia et al. (2001) approached the issue of in-terdisciplinarity in terms of timing. They showthat, in general, references to research withinthe discipline tend to be to more recent articles,whereas references outside the discipline tendto be more dated. They suggest that this findingis consistent with the diffusion of research fromthe home discipline outward to related fields.We were struck not by the existence of such adelay but by how small the differences typicallyare and by the fact that 4 of the 16 fields exam-ined cited literature outside the field even fasterthan that within the field.

Thus, although studies of selected fields of-ten reveal notable barriers to communication(e.g., Howey et al. 1999, Biehl et al. 2006), thebroader picture suggests a web of intellectualties that connects fields across the natural andsocial sciences. What is not clear is what distin-guishes well-connected from poorly connectedfields and what the optimum level of cross-disciplinary citation ought to be. Much of thedisciplinary self-citation rates may reflect thenature of academic specialization rather thanartificial barriers to communication posed bythe disciplinary organization of academic de-partments. Without a standard for the “appro-priate” level of cross-disciplinary citation, advo-cates of interdisciplinarity can always complainthat the observed level is lower than it should be.

The Diffusion of IdeasAcross Disciplines

Studies of interdisciplinarity assume that thereis little if any diffusion of ideas across disci-plinary boundaries, but as we note above, the


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most influential statements on interdisciplinar-ity do not investigate this assumption. Ratherthan sum all citations by journal or discipline,as the studies noted above have done, we soughtexamples of the prevalence of specific ideasor terms in various fields. The data stronglysupport Crane’s (2008) contention that someconcepts successfully diffuse across the human-ities and sometimes the social sciences as well.Table 2 presents data on the prevalence of theterm “postmodern” in academic journal articlescataloged electronically by Thompson ISI. Thisterm appears in thousands of journal articlesspread across disciplines in the humanities (e.g.,literature, religion, philosophy), the social sci-ences (sociology, political science, psychology),as well as various applied fields such as educa-tion. This tabulation by no means captures thefull range of diffusion of this term, given thatthe analysis focuses only on journal articles andomits books and other forms of writing.

We examined the term postmodern as partof the article title and then broadened oursearch to include the term as a subject cate-gory for the article. The latter approach yields aslightly different ranking of disciplines but leadsto the same substantive conclusion. Even in thespecialized context of academic journal articles,the term postmodernism diffused broadly. In-deed, the concept appears in journals from over100 disciplines.

Because the term postmodern may meandifferent things to different scholars, we re-peated this analysis with a narrower term that isless vulnerable to this concern, namely BrunoLatour’s “actor-network theory.” This term hasbeen the subject of 317 journal articles. As isevident in Table 2, this concept has diffusedacross a number of disciplines, from environ-mental science to sociology to economics. Itappears in many other disciplinary journals aswell, including anthropology, business, ethics,law, public health, and urban studies.

We then analyzed citations to Latour’s twomost influential books (Laboratory Life, Latour& Woolgar [1979 (1986)], and Science in Action,Latour [1987]). Again, each book is differentwith a slightly different set of disciplines, but the

Table 2 Diffusion of terms and concepts in thehumanities and social sciences

A. Presence of the term “postmodern” in thetitle of an academic journal article, by field ofjournal(2282 entries total)

1. Literature 13.7%2. Religion 11.03. Sociology 7.34. Humanities 6.5(multi-disciplinary journals)5. Philosophy 6.16. History 3.97. Romance Literatures 3.98. Education 3.69. Political Science 3.310. Linguistics 3.1

B. “Actor-network theory” as a title or subjectarea of an academic journal article, by field ofjournal(389 articles total)

1. Geography 18.8%2. Sociology 18.53. Management 18.04. Environmental Studies 8.75. Information and Library Science 6.26. Computer Science 5.77. Social Science 5.7(multi-disciplinary journals)8. History and Philosophy of Science 4.69. Social Issues 3.610. Economics 4.1

Source: Thompson Scientific, 1956–2007. ISI Web ofKnowledgeSM. Web of Science©R . Science Citation Index.Philadelphia, PA: Thompson Scientific Corporation.Available online at http://isiknowledge.com.

same thrust remains: Latour’s work is discussedby researchers in many fields. Whether theseconcepts diffused too quickly (becoming a fad)or too slowly (owing to unwarranted resistance)is not something these data directly address. As-sessing this would require a baseline indicatorof how much reception there should have been.Nonetheless, these data do appear to counterthe simple assumption that ideas developed inone discipline are rarely adopted in another.


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The data on references to Latour can alsobe viewed as a case of the incorporation of in-terdisciplinary ideas into disciplinary contexts.Latour’s work is stridently and explicitlynondisciplinary or postdisciplinary. This casethus raises questions about whether the accep-tance of ideas by scholars and researchers de-pends on whether these ideas originate in adiscipline or have an interdisciplinary origin.

We repeated this analysis using the worksof such prominent humanists as Lacan, Der-rida, and Foucault, along with prominent socialscientists including Charles Tilly and RobertPutnam (results not shown). Although each ofthese authors has been influential in a somewhatdifferent set of disciplines, nonetheless each hasbeen the subject of articles in many fields in thesocial sciences and humanities.

Another common pattern of diffusion ofideas across disciplinary boundaries is in thearea of methods, especially statistical tech-niques. For example, survival analysis is a sta-tistical technique that has been used in tens ofthousands of published journal articles sincethe 1990s. These papers appeared in publichealth journals; many types of medical journals,including oncology, cardiology, and surgery;statistics journals; computer science; demogra-phy; economics; ecology; and many other fields.In examining the spread of this powerful statis-tical technique, it is hard to see evidence of aca-demic silos impeding its diffusion. Is this diffu-sion too slow? Perhaps, but it is hard to specifywhat the right rate of diffusion would be.

Of course scholars in certain disciplines of-ten resist the ideas of those in other disciplines.One noted case involves the largely oppositeexplanations of improvements in health anddeclines in mortality advanced by McKeownand Preston. Thomas McKeown, a prominentBritish epidemiologist, argued that economicdevelopment was more important than med-ical advances or even public health measuresin contributing to the advancement in humanlongevity (McKeown 1976). Samuel H. Preston(1975), at nearly the same time, argued thateconomic development was less important thancommonly thought and that public health

measures were more important. It is commonlybelieved that epidemiologists have tended to ac-cept McKeown’s side of the argument, whereasdemographers have rallied to Preston’s posi-tion. In a 2007 symposium on his original 1975paper, Preston (2007) notes one possible reasonfor the continued difference of opinion, namelythat both studies were based on indirect evi-dence. Both scholars advanced their argumentslargely by the process of eliminating alternativeexplanations rather than providing data directlysupporting their conclusions. Our analysis of ci-tation patterns suggests that both the Prestonand McKeown papers were cited in journal ar-ticles in epidemiology, public health, demog-raphy, and other areas, and thus differences ofopinion were not the result of lack of visibilityof these studies.

Is there a “citation penalty” for interdis-ciplinary research? In other words, do schol-ars pay a price in terms of the recognition oftheir work by pursuing interdisciplinary top-ics? Studies on this topic yield conflicting re-sults. For example, Levitt & Thelwall (2008)find a disadvantage for interdisciplinary stud-ies in the natural sciences but not in the so-cial sciences. In contrast, Rinia et al. (2002)report no cost to interdisciplinary publications.The difference between these two argumentsdepends in large part on the status of interdis-ciplinary journals. If one adjusts for the rela-tively low status of interdisciplinary journals,as Rinia and colleagues did, then there is lit-tle or no additional penalty for interdisciplinarypublications compared with similarly rankeddisciplinary journals. However, advocates ofinterdisciplinarity might point out that thereare relatively few interdisciplinary journals thathave obtained high status, thus inhibiting schol-ars from pursuing interdisciplinary research.

The Assessment ofInterdisciplinary Work

A concern voiced by many academic commen-tators is that interdisciplinary work is too of-ten the product of “amateurism and intellec-tual voyeurism” (Davis 2007) and results in


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knowledge of “dubious quality” (Mansilla &Gardner 2003). To address such claims, univer-sity administrators, funding agencies, and in-terdisciplinary researchers themselves rely onindirect measures of the efficacy of interdis-ciplinary research bundled in statistics on thenumber of patents, grants, publications, citationpatterns, and the like. Yet scientists working ininterdisciplinary contexts recognize the prob-lem with such indicators, most critically thatthe standard measures of scientific productivityand quality represent the “disciplinary assess-ment of their interdisciplinary work” (Mansilla& Gardner 2003).

It may be useful to distinguish isolated for-ays into interdisciplinary topics from dramati-cally expanding interdisciplinary fields. Rapidlygrowing areas of inquiry such as neuroscienceand nanotechnology may not need special cri-teria for evaluation: These emerging fields havegrown explosively, have successfully competedfor funds, have spawned many conferences andjournals, and fare well on traditional criteriasuch as citation rates. The concern regardingspecial criteria for evaluation may be more com-pelling in the absence of this type of success.

Unfortunately, systematic efforts to developevaluative criteria for judging interdisciplinaryknowledge have been slow to develop, and di-rect empirical evidence on how the quality of in-terdisciplinary research is assessed remains thin.As Klein (1996) noted some years ago, “cri-teria for judgment constitute the least under-stood aspect of interdisciplinarity, in part be-cause the issue has been the least studied andin part because the multiplicity of tasks seemsto mitigate against a single standard.” The gapremains a pressing one today and the centralfocus of a recent special issue of Research Eval-uation (Klein 2006). Contributing authors tothat issue are in broad agreement that the as-sessment of interdisciplinary work is both ex-tremely complex—involving “multiple actorsmaking multiple decisions in multiple organi-zational settings” (Feller 2006)—and requiresnew models for evaluating the new “culturesof evidence” that are emerging from interdisci-plinary endeavors (Klein 2006). Empirical work

to date, although limited, identifies a number ofspecific challenges associated with the practiceand evaluation of interdisciplinary research.

The relative absence of epistemic claritylikely has impacts on the organization of in-terdisciplinary research and on the trajectoryof interdisciplinary careers. Summarizing re-sults from a survey of researchers working infive NSF-funded interdisciplinary programs,Rhoten (2005, Rhoten & Parker 2004) reportsthat younger faculty and especially graduatestudents express more enthusiasm for interdis-ciplinary work, claim more experience workingin interdisciplinary contexts, and develop moreinterdisciplinary than disciplinary connectionsthan do their more senior colleagues. At thesame time, younger researchers were also morelikely to identify particular costs associated withthe decision to pursue an interdisciplinary re-search track, including expectations that theywould encounter obstacles to employment andtenure.

Still other sorts of challenges derive frombroader social forces that shape interdisci-plinary outcomes. Combining primary datafrom three surveys on interdisciplinarity (theonly three in existence at the time of their anal-ysis), Rhoten & Pfirman (2006) find that womenscientists are engaged in cross-fertilization ac-tivities, form cross-disciplinary collaborations,and participate in institutional efforts of emerg-ing interdisciplines and problem-oriented re-search at greater rates than their male coun-terparts. Although provocative, these findingsare highly constrained by the limitations ofthe data, which do not permit consideration ofother intervening factors (e.g., race, cohort, in-stitutional context), do not distinguish betweenpush and pull factors, and do not consider is-sues related to the performance of interdisci-plinary science. They also do not consider dif-ferences among interdisciplinary domains thatare marginalized (e.g., women’s studies) com-pared with those that are “hot” (e.g., complexityresearch). Nevertheless, these findings providepreliminary support for the thesis that interdis-ciplinarity is gendered, and, perhaps more im-portantly, they draw attention to the need for


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research that attends not only to the social pro-duction of interdisciplinary motivations, prac-tices, perceptions, and outcomes, but also totheir consequences.

In a novel attempt to understand how in-terdisciplinary training affects the collaborativeproduction of interdisciplinary ideas, Rhotenand colleagues (Rhoten et al. 2008, Hacket &Rhoten 2008) recently conducted a “real-life”experiment, modeled after design “charrettes”(discussion groups) popular in nineteenth cen-tury French schools of architecture, in whichgraduate students participating in NSF-fundedinterdisciplinary training programs (IGERT)were compared with students with disciplinarytraining. Students were placed into workinggroups that controlled for gender, field, andyears of graduate training and were then giventwo and a half days to develop brief propos-als that would chart the next generation of re-search on human-ecosystem sustainability. Thecollaborative group process was monitored bytrained observers, and the groups’ products (theproposal and a 20-minute presentation) wereevaluated by a multidisciplinary panel of ex-perts, with the goal of assessing “whether and inwhat ways educational experiences change howyoung scientists work together and the qualityof what they produce” (Hackett & Rhoten 2008,p. 14). Contrary to the researchers’ expecta-tions, they found that IGERT groups with lesstraining (one to two years) received the high-est average scores of all groups, including in-terdisciplinary groups with three or more yearstraining in the IGERT program.

In a series of papers and a forthcomingbook examining how disciplinary experts judgeinterdisciplinary work (Lamont et al. 2006,Mallard et al. 2009, Lamont 2009), MicheleLamont and her colleagues asked 81 expertpanelists from a dozen multidisciplinary fel-lowship competitions in the social sciences andhumanities how they assess the quality ofinterdisciplinary research proposals and howcollectively the panel negotiates fairness inselecting winners. In ways that complementresults from Hackett & Rhoten’s (2008)charrette experiment, this study finds that

“discipline-specific ways of producing theoryand methods are still the bedrock of peer eval-uation” (Mallard et al. 2009, p. 22). Althoughidiosyncratic preferences play a role in experts’evaluations of proposals from other disciplines,the tendency is for panelists to abide by the epis-temological styles and evaluative criteria of thediscipline of the proposal under review. Thisfinding suggests that the key to procedural fair-ness in assessing the quality of interdisciplinarywork is not in giving up disciplinary autonomy,but in knowing when to give one set of dis-ciplinary standards priority over others in thecontext of assigning greater value to proposalswith intellectual breadth.

The Role of Research Centers

Research centers represent an important fea-ture of contemporary research universities thathas largely been neglected in the discussionof interdisciplinarity (Friedman & Friedman1982; see also Klein 1996, chapter 6). Centersare often organized around applied topics, suchas the problems of an aging society or the chal-lenges of bioethics, but there are also many cen-ters that focus on topics of enduring academicinterest, such as the Minda de Gunzburg Cen-ter for European studies at Harvard.

Our research indicates that research centersare an increasingly common feature of U.S.higher education. Drawing on the census oforganizations compiled by the Gale researchgroup (Gale Group 2008), we found nearly10,000 research centers located at colleges anduniversities in the United States in 2007. Re-search centers are most common at the lead-ing research universities. Our analysis of the25 leading research universities in the UnitedStates revealed that there were nearly 100 re-search centers (94.6) per school. There are thusoften more research centers than disciplinarydepartments. A remarkable total of 2366 re-search centers are found at these 25 universi-ties, representing nearly one-quarter of the to-tal found at all U.S. colleges and universities.

Examination of a sample of these centersfrom university Web sites suggests that the


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vast majority are ostensibly interdisciplinary, atleast in name and in self-presentation. Giventheir sheer number and tendency to identifyinstitutionally with interdisciplinary goals, re-search centers may function—imperfectly tobe sure—as intrauniversity “boundary organi-zations” (see Guston 2000) that help to bridgedisciplinary divides and serve as an organiza-tional counterweight to academic departments.Strong disciplines combined with the flexibilityto create diverse research centers as needed maybe an attractive organizational solution to thechallenges of organizing rapidly growing bod-ies of research and knowledge, perhaps not leastby providing micromobilization contexts for re-cruitment into emerging interdisciplinary fields(Frickel & Gross 2005). Thus, although advo-cates of interdisciplinarity have lambasted theostensibly hide-bound nature of academic disci-plines, it is clear that university-based academicdepartments coexist with an increasing numberand diversifying array of research centers thatat minimum represent an organizational con-text for bringing together scholars from diversebackgrounds with shared interests.

Do such centers facilitate communicationacross disciplinary boundaries? Among the rel-atively few studies to address this question em-pirically, Rhoten (2005) offers a guardedly pes-simistic analysis. On the positive side of theledger, faculty in the six interdisciplinary re-search centers she studied reported spendinghalf of their work time on center-related inter-disciplinary activity, and 83% said that their re-lationships with other center members had pos-itively influenced their own research agendas.She also reports that those centers with largernumbers of affiliated faculty yielded more in-formation sharing but fewer substantive inter-disciplinary connections.

Despite these encouraging findings,Rhoten’s overall appraisal is pessimistic. Shecomplains that the centers tend to be organizedaround catch-all themes rather than unifyingproblem definitions and consequently fallshort of achieving the transformative levelsof interdisciplinary synthesis. Although thisvaluable study identifies some important orga-

nizational problems, the question of whetherresearch centers represent efficacious solutionsto generating interdisciplinary research is farfrom settled. Our view is that a more modeststandard of interdisciplinary awareness and co-operation puts her data in a more positive light.Furthermore, if voluntary participation ininterdisciplinary research centers does not pro-duce true interdisciplinarity, it is worthwhile toconsider what types of organizational settingsmight be more conducive to interdisciplinaryresearch and scholarship.

INTERDISCIPLINARITY:HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

Continuity and Diversity in theDisciplinary System

The nature of disciplines and relations amongthem is an old topic in the sociology, philos-ophy, and history of science, and there is noshortage of theories about them (Ben David &Collins 1966, Clarke 1998, Graham et al. 1983,Lenoir 1997, Lemaine et al. 1976, Sherif &Sherif 1969). The strongest recent statementregarding the durability of disciplinary socialstructures in the face of interdisciplinary pres-sures is offered by Abbott (2001). He main-tains that the basic disciplinary structure of theacademy has changed little since the turn of thelast century and that virtually all universitiesand colleges have lists of departments mirror-ing the original set of natural science, social sci-ence, and humanities disciplines. Abbott tracesthis resilience to a “dual institutionalization”whereby disciplines structure the national aca-demic labor market as well as hiring practicesat individual universities, which cannot moveaway from the disciplinary organization of de-partments without undermining their graduatestudents’ opportunities to find employment atother universities. Stasis is reinforced by thesystem of undergraduate majors that has beenin place since the late nineteenth century. Likethe academic structure of employment, the vastmajority of majors are also organized by dis-cipline. Anchored in this way by the structure


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of faculty hiring and undergraduate education,“disciplinary departments are the essential andirreplaceable building blocks of American uni-versities” (Abbott 2001, p. 128).

Abbott views interdisciplinarity as a directconsequence of this disciplinary social struc-ture. He argues that interdisciplinarity is “oldnews” not only in that a hundred years ago“disciplines bred interdisciplinarity almost im-mediately,” but also in that academic interestin interdisciplinarity has been relatively con-tinuous over the decades since (Abbott 2001,pp. 131, 132). Despite this second-order stabil-ity, interdisciplinarity does not threaten disci-plinary dominance. This is in part because thedisciplinary organization of the academic labormarket holds the employability of interdisci-plinary researchers and thus their institutionalreproduction in check.

Abbott suggests that the disciplines endurefor intellectual as well as organizational rea-sons. Specifically, he suggests that the problem-driven knowledge that interdisciplinarity tendsto produce is not sufficiently abstract to com-pete successfully with the theory-driven knowl-edge that comes from disciplines—knowledgethat is often substantively sufficient for tack-ling many complex problems. Only a system-wide shift in the way academic careers are struc-tured can overturn this “virtually unbreakable”system.

A similar argument for the durability of pre-vailing disciplinary distinctions derives fromorganizational theory (Frank & Gabler 2006,DiMaggio & Powell 1983). The force of in-stitutional isomorphism induces colleges anduniversities to copy the patterns and practicesof other institutions in order to maintain theirlegitimacy, meaning that a given university islikely to have a biology and a history depart-ment because other schools do the same. CresoSa (2008), an advocate for interdisciplinarity,has suggested that the durability of disciplinesis due in large part to institutional pressures ofthis nature.

Whereas Abbott sees the current disci-plinary structure as impervious to all butthe most powerful winds of change, a num-

ber of other scholars emphasize the his-torical contingency and variability of disci-plines. Turner (2000), who shares a number ofAbbott’s premises, sees disciplines as employ-ment markets, essentially economic cartelswhose main functions are creating and regu-larizing internal markets for training and ex-changing faculty. Disciplines hire from within,and this characteristic—not a distinctive canon,intellectual traditions, or forms of knowledgeor expertise—differentiates disciplines fromnondisciplinary or extradisciplinary efforts.

Turner differs from Abbott in his view ofinterdisciplinarity. For Turner, interdisciplinar-ity creates “novel divisions of labor in responseto novel ends” (Turner 2000, p. 56). The endsdiffer, and so do the resource constraints inter-disciplinary efforts must navigate. For example,they may need to secure regular funding, ap-pease a public constituency, offer respite for dis-placed academics from other units, etc. Thesedifferent ends and constraints help to accountfor why interdisciplinary efforts take so manydifferent forms, as well as why they so oftenfail (e.g., Abir-Am 1987, Barmark & Wallen1980, Frickel 2004b). Turner draws on exam-ples from the marine sciences and oceanogra-phy to illustrate his framework (see also Mukerji1989 on oceanography and Knorr Cetina 1999on molecular biology).

Whereas Abbott sees interdisciplinarity asa residual phenomenon, structured by the so-cial organization of disciplines, Turner sees dis-ciplines and interdisciplinarity as distinct andlargely independent systems. On this reading,interdisciplinarity is not so tightly dependenton disciplines as to be derivative. “Where re-searchers are not dependent on [students andclients], disciplinarity is weak and interdis-ciplinary and nondisciplinary forms flourish”(Turner 2000, p. 60).

Where Abbott anchors his argument empir-ically on the century-long stability of the basicdisciplinary field, Turner sees this pattern as ahistorical anomaly. Turner maintains that thepower of disciplines is in part an artifact of his-tory, and he offers the recent fate of physics asan example of how once ascendant disciplines


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can weaken when “cartels make themselves ir-relevant” through the “fossilization” of their in-ternal markets (p. 64).

Whitley (1984) also stresses the historicalvariability of academic disciplines based on along view of organizational changes in systemsof knowledge production and control over thepast 300 years. But even during the initial hey-day of discipline formation, he notes that notall fields became deeply entrenched in universi-ties as disciplines. Some, like natural history, re-mained open to “learned gentlemen”—amateurscientists working on private estates outside theacademy (see Worster 1994, chapter 1). Butmore importantly, the centrality of academicdisciplines to the organization of scientific re-search has greatly diminished since then.

Whitley contends that over the course of thetwentieth century, the degree to which scien-tific fields have become mutually dependent—for example by sharing technical proceduresand instruments or by adopting evaluative stan-dards from one another—has increased, albeitunevenly. Greater interdependence has meantthat intellectual fields today generally exhibit(among other things) weakened boundaries, in-creased mobility of ideas and skills across thoseboundaries, and increased interfield coordina-tion of research objectives, strategies, and re-sults. Whitley argues that “traditional patternsof integration and control through academicdisciplines seem to have broken down in manyfields without any coherent and stable structureemerging to replace them” (p. 292).

Whitley presents interdisciplinarity as a var-iegated process of organizational change that issensitive to the internal organization of fields,relationships among fields, and the relation ofscience to other social systems. Like Abbott,Whitley sees interdisciplinarity as an elementalfeature of knowledge production systems, butalso one that is highly variable from one field tothe next and over time. In that sense, Whitley’sperspective is far removed from Abbott’s viewof interdisciplinarity as a “standing wave” pro-duced by and coextensive with the disciplinarysystem (Abbott 2001, p. 150). Where Abbottargues that transformative changes to the

university system will be required to dislodgeacademic disciplines, Whitley contends that inthe natural sciences this occurred long ago.And countering Abbott’s argument that inter-disciplinarity poses little threat to disciplinaryautonomy and identity, Whitley’s analysis setsincreased interdependence directly against thepersistence of disciplinary control. Thus, dis-ciplines and interdisciplinarity are not distinctsystems, as Turner argues, but neither is therelation between the two organizationally uni-form or historically stable, as Abbott contends.

The contributions of Abbott, Turner, andWhitley differ on the historical stability of thedisciplinary system and the role of interdisci-plinarity within this framework, but each takesdisciplines as a starting point for their analy-sis. Steve Fuller’s work on interdisciplinarityprovides a counterweight to their discipline-centric views. For Fuller, disciplines are utterlyconventional results of knowledge-makers’ suc-cessful bids to gain access to various kinds of re-sources that, once secured, are then controlledlargely through the rhetorical construction ofdisciplinary boundaries (Fuller 1991; see alsoGieryn 1999). Instead, and in stark contrastto Abbott, Turner, and Whitley, Fuller (2003,pp. 1, 3) views disciplines as “artificial holdingpatterns” that provide “the legitimating ideol-ogy of the makeshift solutions that define thedepartment structure of particular universities”and whose histories tend to be presented in waysthat make the current regime of disciplines ap-pear inevitable (see also Pickering 1993).

For Fuller (2003, p. 4), the real source ofcreative knowledge is to be found in inter-disciplinary inquiry, which he sees as a cen-tral “internal motivator of sustained epistemicchange.” The position that interdisciplinarity isprimary and not derivative (like Turner, above)takes its historical grounding from the obser-vation that today’s disciplines began as inter-disciplinary social movements “that aspired toaddress all manner of phenomena and regis-ters of life” (Fuller 2003, p. 4) and its polit-ical grounding from the ubiquity of contem-porary calls for interdisciplinary solutions todisciplinary problems (e.g., Wallerstein 1996).


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The point of interdisciplinarity, Fuller (2004)argues, is not to build on methods and insightsfrom existing disciplines—a common, but mis-guided approach that mistakenly assumes com-bining methods makes for better knowledge.Instead, the transformative promise of interdis-ciplinarity lies in its capacity to interpenetratedisciplines, changing what they do by providingcommunicative forms and channels for renego-tiating disciplinary boundaries and generatingnew epistemic standards. These observationsprovide ballast for the position of the most com-mitted enthusiasts for interdisciplinarity (Klein1990, 1996; Rhoten & Parker 2004). Fuller’stheory also shifts the empirical focus of researchfrom the structural nature of disciplinary inter-relations to questions of process: Specifically,where do interdisciplinary fields come from?

Interdiscipline Formation

Recent scholarship has come to view the forma-tion of disciplinary hybrids or interdisciplinaryfields as the result of collective action that is inmany ways analogous to that found in socialmovements. Scientific and intellectual move-ments (SIMs) are “collective efforts to pursueresearch programs or projects for thought inthe face of resistance from others in the sci-entific or intellectual community” (Frickel &Gross 2005, p. 206; see also McLaughlin 2008).The SIMs framework is based on the assump-tion that, however delimited, new knowledgefields are fundamentally political outcomes, theresult of struggles for resources, identities, andstatus. The framework has particular relevancefor studying the emergence and legitimation of“interdisciplines” (Frickel 2004a).

A growing body of historical research doc-uments the diversity of these processes in re-lation to a variety of institutional contexts andhistorical eras. These include studies of inter-disciplinary SIMs that are more or less internalto the scientific, medical, or academic fields,with biochemistry and cognitive sciences be-ing two well-studied examples (Bechtel 1986,Kohler 1982). Other studies situate interdis-ciplinary SIMs as straddling the academy and

other institutions. For example, SIMs as di-verse as mid-nineteenth century demography(Schweber 2006) and 1970s-era genetic toxi-cology (Frickel 2004b) have origins rooted instate administrative and research bureaucra-cies. Others are tied more or less directly tosocial movements, as the cases of black stud-ies (Rojas 2007) and women’s studies (Boxer1998) illustrate. Taken together, this body ofwork provides mixed support for the notionthat interdisciplinarity is something that can bestraightforwardly manufactured through top-down administrative policies. Although schol-ars have identified cases of interdisciplinarySIMs that directly benefited from administra-tive mandates—California Institute of Technol-ogy’s use of Rockefeller Foundation funds topromote molecular biology is a classic case inpoint (Abir-Am 1988, Kohler 1991)—in gen-eral, interdisciplinary SIMs are better under-stood as intellectual insurgencies generated andsustained from below by faculty and graduatestudents organizing collective challenges to thedisciplinary order.

This framework also has implications fortheories of disciplinary interaction, reviewedabove. We learn, for example, that interdis-ciplinary pressure in the academy is punctu-ated, rather than continuous, as suggested byAbbott’s “standing wave” argument. It also sug-gests that interdisciplines are shaped by so-cial forces beyond disciplinary labor markets,as Turner argues. Research suggesting that themovements for civil rights, women’s equality,and environmental protection contributed tostudent demand for programs in African Amer-ican studies, women’s studies, and environmen-tal studies (Brint et al. 2008) is consonant withFrickel & Gross’s (2005) framework, althoughthe latter does not require political disruptionper se. Institutional instability of any form thatcreates opportunities for insurgent intellectu-als to press the legitimacy of their claims canprovide conditions for the emergence of inter-disciplinary SIMs. Although the concentrationof new interdisciplinary fields in the 1970s inthe social sciences and humanities is related tothat decade’s signature social movements, the


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creation of area studies programs in previousdecades is more likely an outcome of nationalsecurity interests, whereas interdiscipline for-mation in the 1980s and 1990s in the life sci-ences was likely spurred by instabilities createdby technological innovation and changes in thelegal structures governing proprietary knowl-edge (i.e., intellectual capital, patents, licensingagreements). Researchers have yet to study inany detail the rise of interdisciplines compara-tively or over broad historical periods.

The Rise of Professionaland Applied Departments

The degree to which the current disciplinarystructure has been endured historically is aquestion over which the theorists discussedabove differ. Frank & Gabler (2006) documentlong-term shifts in the relative size of differ-ent academic fields (see also Gabler & Frank2005). Their work is distinctive in emphasizingthe global nature of these trends: Their analysisdraws on data they compiled on universities in89 countries spanning the course of a century.

Some academic domains and historical erasare likely to be more conducive to SIM-typeactivity than others. Brint (2002) highlights thegrowth of applied and professional fields ofstudy and a corresponding decline in the dom-inance of the traditional arts and sciences disci-plines. He envisions a future in which the influ-ence of the traditional discipline is diminished.In a more recent paper, Brint et al. (2008) docu-ments the growth in undergraduate enrollmentin interdisciplinary fields.

One key point of contention between Brintand Abbott is Abbott’s suggestion that the disci-plines will maintain their influence because themore applied fields hire faculty from the dis-ciplines. Thus, if faculty members in schoolsof communications or business continue to bedrawn from psychology, sociology, and eco-nomics departments, then the emergence ofsuch applied fields will pose less of a threat tothe disciplines. Brint (2005), however, presentsdata that indicate that the applied fields havedeveloped their own doctoral programs and are

relying less on the academic disciplines to re-cruit their faculty.

We compiled data from the 2004 NationalSurvey of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF)that addresses this issue in more detail (seeTable 3). The data summarize the fraction offaculty in each discipline, program, or schoolthat has their highest degree in the same fieldin which they are currently teaching. The find-ings on the disciplines in the arts and sci-ences confirm Abbott’s (and Turner’s) emphasison the concordance between degrees and de-partments: The overwhelming majority of fac-ulty in disciplines such as economics, sociology,and psychology have PhDs in these fields. Butthe same pattern now holds for applied fieldsas well: Most faculty in business, communica-tions, education, engineering, and medicine arehomegrown, and are not imported from the ba-sic disciplines in the social or natural sciences.While some fields, such as business and com-munication, draw a significant minority of theirfaculty from the traditional disciplines, in mostcases a clear majority of faculty report that theyobtained their degrees in these applied and pro-fessional fields and not in the basic disciplines.

Thus, the emergence of applied and profes-sional fields of study in higher education ap-pears to be related to a decline in the roleof the traditional disciplines. With the possi-ble exception of the very top tier universities,Abbott’s confidence regarding the continuedinfluence of the traditional disciplines in thehiring practices of applied and professional pro-grams appears to be misplaced.

Differentiation and Fragmentation

How interdisciplinary are interdisciplinaryfields? One possibility is that the rapid growthof a new interdisciplinary field results in higherthan anticipated levels of internal differentia-tion. Successful interdisciplinary research ar-eas thus may generate a new set of journals,subspecialties, internal conflicts over resources,in short, the same fragmentation that certainadvocates of interdisciplinarity hope can beovercome.


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Table 3 Faculty hiring patterns by field of department. For both columns, the data indicate thepercent of faculty whose degree is in the same field as their current department. The first column isfor all four year institutions; the second is for research universities

Percent of faculty with degreein same field as currentteaching position—allfour-year institutions

Percent of faculty with samearea teaching

position—researchuniversities

No degree 1.7 3.1Agriculture and home economics 68.6 70.3Business 73.5 76.6Communications 68.8 69.9Teacher education 85.3 86.7Other education 78.8 72.9Engineering 83.6 81.5Fine arts 89.4 84.8First-professional health sciences 85.0 86.0Nursing 73.5 67.8Other health sciences 52.3 53.9English and literature 87.0 87.9Foreign languages 88.8 89.8History 91.6 90.0Philosophy and religion 85.8 88.3Law 92.6 98.4Biological sciences 81.0 79.9Physical sciences 93.0 96.8Mathematics 85.0 88.0Computer sciences 58.3 64.9Economics 91.2 89.9Political science 94.0 93.4Psychology 93.2 93.0Sociology 92.3 94.7Other social sciences 69.4 68.0Occupationally specific programs 50.1 58.9All other programs 67.0 67.7

Source: National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty 2004.

Bibliometric research on nanotechnologyhas explored this issue but is thus far not defini-tive in resolving it. An early study suggestsa high degree of interdisciplinary citations innanotechnology research (Meyer & Persson1998). However, a more recent study of coau-thorship patterns (Schummer 2004) suggeststhat nanotechnology is not a single field butrather offshoots of physics, chemistry, electricalengineering, mechanical engineering, and ma-

terials science. Schummer’s strong conclusionis that nanotechnology’s “apparent interdisci-plinarity consists of largely mono-disciplinaryfields which are rather unrelated to each otherand which hardly share more than the prefix‘nano’” (Schummer 2004, p. 425).

We also think it is important to considerthe possibility that interdisciplinarity mightlead to its own type of fragmentation. Oneexample we found when we were investigating


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university-based research centers illustratesthe point. Pennsylvania State University hasendeavored to promote research related tohomeland security (see the HSI: Home-land Security Initiative Web site, for example:http://homelandsecurity.psu.edu/discovery/centers). This worthy goal does not fall withinthe purview of any single academic disciplineand thus is typical of the examples used toargue for the development of organizationalmodels that mobilize the insights and skills ofdiverse scholars. Yet the Penn State examplesuggests that interdisciplinarity does not meanthe unification or integration of knowledge.They have developed no less than 21 researchcenters focused on various aspects of homelandsecurity. These include the InternationalCenter for the Study of Terrorism, the Centerfor Information Assurance that addresses issuesof cyber security in the context of threats tocomputer systems, the Protective TechnologyCenter that focuses research and developmentactivities with the goal of protecting peopleand infrastructure from terrorist attacks, andother centers focused on crisis management,infectious diseases, nonlethal defense tech-nologies, and a host of other issues. Each ofthese may represent a laudable endeavor, butthe proliferation of these research centers,institutes, and laboratories underscores the factthat there are many aspects of any issue andthat interdisciplinary initiatives can lead just aseasily to the multiplication of academic unitsrather than their consolidation.

CONCLUSION ANDRESEARCH AGENDA

We have reviewed the recent trend toward thepromotion of interdisciplinarity on the cam-puses of many U.S. research universities. Thisdevelopment appears to be widespread and fu-eled by many different sources. Given these ef-forts to change one of the basic building blocksof our current scholarly system, we believe theassumptions underpinning this effort warrantcareful scrutiny.

We do not believe that the case has been fullymade, theoretically or empirically, for the gen-eral superiority of interdisciplinary over disci-plinary knowledge. The established disciplinesare not as static or as isolated as advocates of in-terdisciplinarity sometimes suggest. Althoughthere are certainly successful examples of inter-disciplinarity, established academic disciplinesremain dynamic centers of knowledge produc-tion that are open to external developmentseven while insisting on internal standards. Fur-thermore, the more than 10,000 research cen-ters currently occupying the campuses of U.S.colleges and universities provide considerableopportunities for those interested in buildingbridges between fields, even if that potentialis often underutilized. Additionally, the tradi-tional disciplines are not as dominant as theyonce were. Enrollment, degree, and facultyemployment data all indicate that the tradi-tional disciplines represent a smaller share ofthe academy than was the case only a gen-eration ago. We are also skeptical about thenotion that interdisciplinarity will substantiallyadvance the integration of knowledge. Many in-terdisciplinary projects make only limited gains(as do many disciplinary-based investigations),and those that are spectacularly successful canbecome established as new fields of inquiry,leading to a new round of differentiation andfragmentation.

The rapid growth of interdisciplinary re-search and university-wide effort to promotesuch scholarship raises many questions for re-search. Most of the topics discussed above war-rant much further inquiry. For example, inwhat contexts is the centralized promotion ofinterdisciplinarity effective, and in what cir-cumstances is interdisciplinarity more success-ful when it percolates from the bottom up? Dodepartments with faculty from multiple disci-plinary backgrounds promote interdisciplinaryscholarship or just an additional level of facultyinfighting? What types of interdisciplinary re-search centers are most dynamic? Which tendto be most enduring? Is the hiring of establishedsenior scholars whose work crosses disciplinary


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boundaries more effective as a strategy than hir-ing newly minted PhDs with cross-disciplinarytraining?

There is a clear need for more studies witha comparative research design. How does in-terdisciplinary scholarship compare with oth-erwise similar scholarship? Just as there areintellectual and social gulfs between disci-plines, there are also many chasms in researchapproaches and styles within disciplines. Whatare the similarities and differences betweenboundary-spanning research within disciplinescompared with similar efforts that crossdisciplines?

History also provides an important terrainfor research. What can we learn from the his-tory of disciplinary and interdisciplinary re-search that would give us further insights into

the efforts to promote interdisciplinarity? Forexample, there have been efforts to establishinterdisciplinary fields in the past. What canwe learn from the successes as well as thefailures of these efforts that would help aca-demic faculty and administrators best advancescholarship in general and interdisciplinarity inparticular?

Many topics in this area require seriousconceptual advances as well as creative col-lection of new data. For example, can gen-eral criteria be developed that would indicatethe appropriate level of communication be-tween disciplines? Can general criteria be de-veloped for the evaluation of interdisciplinaryresearch? The renewed efforts to promote in-terdisciplinary scholarship have given impetusto these and other research questions.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings thatmight be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For helpful comments and suggestions we thank Steven Brint, Diana Crane, Robert Frodeman,Steve Fuller, Neil Gross, Lowell Hargens, Michele Lamont, Erin Leahy, Susan Lindsey, NeilMcLaughlin, Diana Rhoten, Jason Owen Smith, Laurel Smith-Doerr, and Mitchell Stevens.

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