Abstract
This paper unpacks ambiguities in the field of interdisciplinarity studies (IDS), explores where they come from and how they inhibit consolidation of the field. The paper takes its point of departure in two central fault lines in the literature: the relationship between interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity and the question of whether integration is a necessary prerequisite for interdisciplinarity. Opposite positions on the fault lines are drawn out to identify sources of ambiguities, and to examine whether the positions are irreconcilable - or disagreements that may continue to coexist in a consolidated field. It is argued that if we envisage a consolidated field of IDS, there is a need to develop common ground which calls for scholars of ID to be more explicit about the meanings they ascribe to ID than we see today when the sliding between the epistemological and political dimensions of the field may go unnoticed. It is suggested that whereas ambiguity may be unwanted in the epistemological dimension, it may be quite useful in the political dimension. A systematic comparison of opposite positions offers a common frame of reference for a more productive dialogue between different positions. The analysis shows that as to integration, the difference between opposite positions can be reconciled, whereas in the relation between interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity, the positions are antagonistic and logically exclude each other. The analysis suggests that it is the premise of integration that creates the conditions of possibility for “relabelling” interdisciplinarity and for using the “silo” for disciplines.
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Notes
Bromme (2000) draws on the theory of common ground (Clark 1992, 1996) when developing his psychological approach to interdisciplinarity. "The common ground theory postulates that every act of communication presumes a common cognitive frame of reference between the partners of interaction called common ground. The theory postulates further that all contributions to the process of mutual understanding serve to establish or ascertain and continually maintain this common ground" (Clark 1992, 1996) quoted in Bromme (2000: 119). This is the understanding of common ground for the field of IDS that this paper is based on. Furthermore, Bromme's (2000) insights on how mutual communication and comprehension are possible in the presence of different perspectives would be most relevant to apply to the field of IDS that draws scholars from many disciplinary backgrounds, and would merit further research.
For bounding of epistemic authority, see Madsen (2016).
Distinctions between what might be social and political are not elaborated on in this paper, as the main interest is the differentiation between epistemological and political, following Bourdieu's claim that "epistemological conflicts are always, inseparably, political conflicts" (1975: 21).
Meyerson (1991: 255) describes how ambiguities can arise from lack of clarity, multiple meanings resulting from fragmented, contradictory interests and competing ideas. Canet and Damart (2016: 3) stress how keeping concepts ambiguous and therefore open to various interpretations "encourages their adoption by organisations which are relatively free to define the way in which they use them." They build on Eisenberg's (1984) "strategic ambiguity" which was a reaction to the traditional view of clarity as the gold standard of communication effectiveness. Eisenberg defined strategic ambiguity as purposefully equivocal communication, as a way to reconcile needs for cohesion and coordination with the freedom required to ensure flexibility and creativity (1984: 9). Political theorist Michael Freeden claims that the construction of ambiguity is a central feature of political discourse, arguing that "[a]mbiguity, then, is not only the inevitable by-product of polysemy, but it is a recipe for political co-existence." And he continues: "[t]he structural tolerance of words in containing multiple, connected but not identical meanings is important to the adequate functioning of political and ideological orders" (Freeden 2004: 10).
I adhere to the view of Bourdieu that the primary target of reflexive analysis is "the social and intellectual unconscious embedded in analytic tools and categories” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 36).
One basic tenet of discourse theory that it shares with interpretive methodology, is that “language is not a transparent referent for what it designates nor does it merely ‘mirror’ or ‘reflect’ an external world but, instead, plays a role in shaping or ‘constituting’ understandings of that world …" (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012: 43). In general, constructivist analyses have a close focus on language and its role in creating reality, and both constructivists and interpretivists are interested in the context and in how meaning is generated.
When exactly this meaning is ascribed to ‘interdisciplinary research,’ all other possible meanings that the sign could have had, are excluded. Therefore, “a discourse is a reduction of possibilities. It is an attempt to stop the sliding of the signs in relation to one another and hence to create a unified system of meaning” (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002: 27). The discourse establishes a closure, but it is only a temporary stop to the fluctuations in the meaning of the signs, because a discourse can always be undermined by articulations that place the signs in different relations to one another (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002: 39).
e.g., Barry et al. (2008), Bromme (2000), Buanes and Jentoft (2009), Campbell (1969), Dogan and Pahre (1990), Gieryn (1983), Huutoniemi et al. (2010), Jacobs (2014), Jacobs and Frickel (2009), Klein (1990, 1996, 2000, 2010a, b, 2014), Krishnan (2009), Lattuca (2001, 2003), Messer-Davidow et al. (1993), Repko (2012), Siedlok and Hibbert (2014), Salter and Hearn (1997), O’Rourke et al. (2013), Weingart (2010) and Weingart and Stehr (2000).
Initially, to represent integration as a premise, Huutoniemi et al. (2010) was chosen, as they explicitly make a distinction between “interdisciplinarity in the specific sense” and “interdisciplinarity in a generic sense,” but this paper was later substituted with Bruun et al. (2005) as this is where the argument is developed more explicitly. Besides aligning with the NAS definition, this work rests on a categorization of interdisciplinary research that is frequently quoted in the literature, including Aboelela et al.’s (2007) literature review which found that “[i]n all sources there was common acknowledgement of a continuum with respect to interdisciplinary research and the degree of synthesis involved in the process and achieved in the outcome” (Aboelela et al. 2007: 329).
The body of work that adheres to the NAS definition is increasingly contested by a growing body of more critically oriented research represented in this analysis by Jacobs and Frickel (2009), Jacobs (2014) and Frickel et al. (2016), the latter being the key paper chosen to represent the opposite position of Bruun et al. (2005).
For the purposes of this paper, the narrowing down of the literature that informs the fault lines, and the choice of two key papers for analysis is a result of iterative processes of extensive reading and re-reading the field's literature, combined with general knowledge of the field and based on previous research related to ID (Madsen 2012, 2016, 2018).
The procedure for selecting texts for separate analysis conforms to the criteria developed in constructivist perspectives on document studies that Justesen and Mik-Meyer (2012: 126–27) describe as "pragmatic and loose" since “suitable documents are texts that will be able to shed light on this issue in such a way that the final analysis generates new, convincing and interesting knowledge.” And they further assert that “texts chosen for use in a constructivist analysis must be exemplary rather than representative.” In interpretive research, iterative–recursive processes are characterized by an abductive logic of reasoning and a focus on contextual meaning (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012), and these processes are consistent with the way discourse theory “reasons backward to establish structure from its empirical manifestations. It asks what the conditions of possibility are of this or that particular discursive production” (Laffey and Weldes 2004: 28).
Conventions used in the analysis: The quotes “interdisciplinarity in the specific sense” and “interdisciplinarity in the generic sense” are abbreviated to ID_specific and ID_generic, respectively. When specifically addressing a signifier (i.e., the word, term), the ‘inverted commas’ mark off the signifier that is being discussed, and the <brackets> indicate a concept functioning as a <nodal point> in the analysis.
This can be explained by the logic of difference which does the opposite of the dichotomization; the logic of difference is a more complex articulation of elements that dissolves existing chains of equivalence and incorporates them into an expanding order (Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000: 10–11).
As what constitutes the scientific field may be subject to negotiation in the concrete cases and may have fluid boundaries, a layer is inserted in the model to differentiate scientific from non-scientific knowledge.
cf. the dotted lines to the left in Fig. 3.
This might be paraphrased: The more disciplines are considered static, rigid, silos, etc., the more obvious is the need for interdisciplinarity.
Thus the area of the dotted lines in Fig. 3, left, may indicate the realm of the ideological.
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I would like to thank Hans Krause Hansen and Dennis Schoeneborn at Copenhagen Business School as well as the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and suggestions.
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Madsen, D. Epistemological or Political? Unpacking Ambiguities in the Field of Interdisciplinarity Studies. Minerva 56, 453–477 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-018-9353-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-018-9353-5