Outside the Lines: Issues in Interdisciplinary Research 9780773566217

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1 Disciplines
2 Interdisciplinarity
3 The Experience of Interdisciplinarity
Perseverance, Pictures, and Parts
"Agency" and "Agencies," or Interdisciplinarities I Have Known
On Finding One's Way in the Uncharted Swamps of Interdisciplinarity
4 The Practice of Interdisciplinarity
Computer Music and Acoustic Communication: Two Emerging Interdisciplines
(Re)producing Interdisciplinarity: Social Studies of Medicine at McGill
Thirty-Five Years on the Beaver Patrol: Canadian Studies as Collective Scholarly Activity
Falling between Schools: Some Thoughts on the Theory and Practice of Interdisciplinarity
5 Bridging Two Cultures
Easier Said Than Done: Biologists, Ergonomists, and Sociologists Collaborate to Study Health Effects of the Sexual Division of Labour
Surveying an Interdisciplinary CASM
Interdisciplinarity and the Ethics of Health Science Research on Human Subjects in Canada
6 Evaluating Interdisciplinarity
An Interdisciplinary Committee within a Disciplinary Research Funding Structure: The Experience of the First Two Years
Networks of Centres of Excellence: Opportunities for Interdisciplinarity
7 Changing the Map
8 Charting New Territories
9 Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Contributors

Citation preview

Outside the Lines Issues in Interdisciplinary Research

Starting from the premise that interdisciplinarity plays a critical role in the research community, Outside the Lines explores the nature and practice of interdisciplinary research in Canada. The authors, aided by contributions from others active in the field, address the ways in which interdisciplinarity is defined, positioned, and handled by researchers, universities, and critics, and examine such topics as "myths" of interdisciplinarity, postmodern critiques of interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and research grant allocation, women's studies, Canadian studies, environmental studies, and "emerging" disciplines. Outside the Lines combines a theoretical examination of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity as forms of knowledge production and organization with practical information about the basic difficulties and conundrums involved in the practice of interdisciplinary research. LIORA SALTER is professor and director of graduate studies, Osgoode Hall Law School, and is cross-appointed to environmental studies, York University. ALISON HEARN is part-time professor of cultural studies, Trent University.

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Outside the Lines Issues in Interdisciplinary Research LIORA SALTER AND ALISON HEARN

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo

McGill-Queen's University Press 1996 ISBN 0-7735-1438-4

Legal deposit fourth quarter 1996 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in the United States on acid-free paper McGill-Queen's University Press is grateful to the Canada Council for support of its publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Outside the lines : issues in interdisciplinary research. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1438-4

i. Interdisciplinary research, i. Salter, Liora. n. Hearn, Alison Mary Virginia, in. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 0180.55.148097 1997 001.4 096-990030-9 Typeset in Palatino 10/12 by Caractera inc., Quebec City

Contents

Preface

vii

Introduction 3 1 Disciplines 16 2 Interdisciplinarity 26 3 The Experience of Interdisciplinarity 44 Perseverance, Pictures, and Parts E L L E N BALKA / 46

"Agency" and "Agencies," or Interdisciplinarities I Have Known CAROLINE A N D R E W / 52

On Finding One's Way in the Uncharted Swamps of Interdisciplinarity M A R G R I T E I C H L E R / 58

4 The Practice of Interdisciplinarity 63 Computer Music and Acoustic Communication: Two Emerging Interdisciplines B A R R Y TRUAX / 64

(Re)producing Interdisciplinarity: Social Studies of Medicine at McGill ALBERTO CAMBROSIO / 73

Thirty-Five Years on the Beaver Patrol: Canadian Studies as Collective Scholarly Activity J I L L V I C K E R S / 78

vi Contents Falling between Schools: Some Thoughts on the Theory and Practice of Interdisciplinarity J O H N B. R O B I N S O N / 85

5 Bridging Two Cultures 93 Easier Said Than Done: Biologists, Ergonomists, and Sociologists Collaborate to Study Health Effects of the Sexual Division of Labour K A R E N M E S S I N G / 95

Surveying an Interdisciplinary CASM STEPHEN E. F I E N B E R G and J U D I T H M. TANUR / 1O2

Interdisciplinarity and the Ethics of Health Science Research on Human Subjects in Canada J U D I T H M I L L E R / 109

6 Evaluating Interdisciplinarity 118 An Interdisciplinary Committee within a Disciplinary Research Funding Structure: The Experience of the First Two Years GERDA R. W E K E R L E / 121

Networks of Centres of Excellence: Opportunities for Interdisciplinarity E L A I N E I S A B E L L E / 129

7 Changing the Map 136 8 Charting New Territories 158 9 Conclusion 173 Notes 185 Bibliography

193

Contributors 209

Preface

Good things take time, as dealing with interdisciplinary research should teach us. This book has certainly taken a long time. It began as a report undertaken at our initiative, with support from the then President of the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC), Dr Paule Leduc, and the Executive Director, Dr Louise Dandurand. We appreciate their support. SSHRC has been, and continues to be in the case of Dr Dandurand, well served by their efforts in every regard. When the report was submitted, a seminar was scheduled with senior staff of SSHRC. It was suggested about this time that the report should reach a much wider audience. After all, the book deals with problems that interdisciplinary researchers face all the time, and not with the administrative problems of a funding council or the universities. These problems are not resolved with a few reforms, no matter how well intentioned and occasionally far-reaching they might be. A report does not make a good book. Major revisions were called for, and they were made. The report was intended as a dialogue; we invited colleagues to join us and make this dialogue a real one. Their contributions required yet another rethinking, since a dialogue does not translate well into the pages of a book; transcribed interviews and conference proceedings are excellent examples of the pitfalls of moving lively dialogue onto the cold surface of the written page. There were also many reviewers along the route. Now, some years later, we finally have a book.

viii Preface

Of course some things have changed. Let us take some credit for a few of these changes, and for some of the discussions of interdisciplinarity in various universities across Canada. The environment is much more welcoming of interdisciplinarity than it was even a few years ago, and there is more experience with handling the problems raised by interdisciplinary research. Let us also say that, even now, many people still assume that interdisciplinarity and team research are the same thing. There remains a naive faith that interdisciplinarity will be created when a mix of disciplinary scholars are included in the same research initiative, even though each conducts his or her own study. Too often, the only "interdisciplinary" aspect of an indisciplinary research project is the management of the project. We wish we could say that the problems we once wrote about are no longer fresh or relevant. We cannot. Whatever consolation this offers us as writers and editors, this situation also distresses us because we are, first and foremost, committed to the research enterprise. Many have been patient with us through the long period of gestation: SSHRC, McGill-Queen's University Press, and our contributors, especially. Students have put up with bad photocopies; colleagues have all but given up on ever seeing this volume in book form. But our families deserve the prize. They have put up with all of our many distractions, preoccupations, and frustrations. For the most part, they have done so with exemplary good grace. Grace is a quality worth pondering. In essence, it involves listening to others and appreciating what animates them, however foreign or difficult it may seem. This is precisely what good interdisciplinary research requires.

Outside the Lines

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Introduction

Interdisciplinarity is too often associated with intellectual fads and fashions. This view, that interdisciplinary research lacks both substance and good scholarship, is frequently heard in university chambers. Interdisciplinary studies - for example, women's studies, communications, Latin American and Canadian studies, and even criminology - are seen to be marginal to the scholarly enterprise and to established disciplines such as English, philosophy, or economics. Some go so far as to argue that in times of financial restraint, interdisciplinarity is a luxury that universities can ill afford, and as a result, interdisciplinary studies and research should be relegated to the realm of the extracurricular. Of course, there is a contrasting view. In recent years some universities in Canada (Carleton, UQAM, York, Waterloo, and Simon Fraser, in particular), in the United States, and elsewhere have come to value interdisciplinarity. It is seen to represent the best efforts of researchers not only to focus on societal issues but to explore the social and practical applications of their expertise. In this second view, research is interdisciplinary because many research problems cannot easily be addressed from within the confines of particular disciplines. They require the concerted efforts of many people, each reflecting a different perspective. Neither of these views bears much resemblance to what is often called interdisciplinarity in the literature. Nor does it apply to the new intellectual movements that today sweep across many conventional disciplines in the name of interdisciplinarity. In this third version, interdisciplinarity represents a fundamental challenge to the premises

4 Outside the Lines

that have long supported research and a critique of the organization of knowledge into disciplines such as English or economics within the university. It would be easy to live with the three contrasting views of interdisciplinarity if those involved in each case could carry out their work without problems and without necessarily encountering each other. After all, what would it matter if universities regarded interdisciplinary studies as marginal, as long as interdisciplinary research was supported elsewhere? Would it matter that conferences are dedicated to a radical critique of disciplines if other academics could go about their research as usual without paying much attention to the often abstract and occasionally abstruse commentaries offered at such conferences? The premise of this book is that it does matter that there are fundamentally different views of interdisciplinary research. These different conceptions of interdisciplinarity have a significant impact upon each other and upon current forms of academic research. This impact has conceptual dimensions and very real material consequences, for example, when interdisciplinarity is used as a criterion in adjudicating research grants. Without a coherent definition, how are researchers to align their work to meet it? Increasingly, many researchers do describe their work as interdisciplinary, but in such cases they are often faced with vague and ill-considered stereotypes. Other researchers eagerly embrace interdisciplinary research only to discover later serious problems in conducting such research. Finally, the intellectual landscape has changed. New intellectual movements such as poststrucruralism and postmodernism, the feminisms, postcolonial theory, and gay and lesbian studies all embody implicit criticisms of the current organization and production of knowledge into disciplines. These ideas have appeared in virtually every field of study in the arts, social sciences, and humanities. The challenges these movements pose to disciplinarity and the ways in which they articulate the project of interdisciplinarity, cannot be discounted. In this book we do not argue for interdisciplinarity as a new and improved form of knowledge production or for its significance as an intellectual movement. We take it for granted that interdisciplinary research plays a critical role in the research community and that its significance as such is well established. Our task is to explore the ways in which interdisciplinarity is defined, positioned, and "handled" by researchers, universities, and critics. We hope to do this by focusing on the practical issues and problems facing researchers who attempt to conduct interdisciplinary work. Our task, simply, is to explore the nature and potential of interdisciplinary research. In many senses, this book may be seen to be comprised of two distinct modes of exploration: a theoretical examination of discipli-

5

Introduction

narity and interdisciplinarity as forms of knowledge production and organization, evidenced in the first chapters, and a more pragmatic examination of the problems and dilemmas of current interdisciplinary research in Canada, embodied in the scholars' contributions. These two conceptual threads intertwine, however, in the final chapters of the book. Here, an examination of the practical issues involved in interdisciplinary research necessarily involves and enhances our more theoretical arguments about the nature of interdisciplinarity. INTRODUCING

THE

ARGUMENTS

In this book we make several arguments about interdisciplinarity. In the following section we preview these arguments by contrasting them with prevailing myths about interdisciplinarity. Myth One: "Interdisciplinarity is..." Interdisciplinarity is not a unified or discrete phenomenon. Rather, it embodies all the questions and challenges that are (or can be) posed within disciplines and about the phenomenon of grouping knowledge into distinct disciplines. Some of these challenges are limited in their scope, dealing with such matters as the addition of new topics to the normal research agendas of particular disciplines. Others, such as the intellectual movements of postmodernism and poststructuralism, are exceptionally broad in their intent and radical in their implications. Myth Two: Interdisciplinary fields of study become new disciplines. Many now-established disciplines - sociology, for example - had their origins in interdisciplinary critiques of the established disciplines of their day. Some of the fields, such as natural resource management, now considered interdisciplinary, may eventually take on all the attributes of established disciplines in the future. A single trajectory of intellectual and institutional development cannot be assumed or predicted for all fields of study. Some interdisciplinary areas will never assume the attributes of a discipline, even with considerable institutional support. Myth Three: Interdisciplinarity is a recent phenomenon and interest in it will soon fade (as has been the case with other intellectual preoccupations). The terminology associated with interdisciplinarity has a long-standing history, and the phenomenon it describes has its origins in the first days of the universities. It would not be surprising, however, if new terminology was adopted to describe the phenomenon now called interdisciplinarity, primarily because the term "interdisciplinarity" has

6 Outside the Lines many of the characteristics of what Connolly (1983) calls an "essentially contested concept." Myth Four: Interdisciplinarity - whatever its importance - is a marginal interest within research, the granting councils, and the universities. All too often interdisciplinarity has been treated as a marginal interest within the research community and to some extent, this situation has become a self-fulfilling prophesy. There is a strong argument to be made that the so called marginality of interdisciplinarity reflects a perceptual distortion, and that a fair proportion of all scholarly activities today might well qualify as interdisciplinary. For example, many journals and academic conferences are now devoted to themes best described as interdisciplinary. This appears to be true for the arts, the natural and technical sciences, and the social sciences and humanities. Interdisciplinary work should not be considered marginal, we will suggest, but should be seen to be of major interest to researchers. Myth Five: Interdisciplinarity is best considered to be marginal, in spite of the fact that many people are engaged in it, simply because it takes place in relation to the "core disciplines." Little historical or sociological evidence exists to support the notion of "core disciplines," often contrasted with interdisciplinary fields of study. The various established disciplines and their central concepts did not develop as mere extensions of conceptual formulations taken from the so-called core disciplines. There is little evidence, within the social sciences and humanities at least, of a strong consensus about the heuristic value of the concept of core disciplines. Often, a discipline, such as sociology, is treated as a core discipline in most universities is not even granted status as a separate discipline in others. The notion of core disciplines implies a hierarchy of knowledge that even many natural scientists would be reluctant to accept. Within the social sciences and humanities, few would seriously propose that such a hierarchy exists, and fewer still would agree to any specific proposals about its content. Myth Six: Disciplines are mature when they display consensus about the topics and methods for research. The notion of the "maturity" of a discipline is problematic. In each discipline (history or physics, for example) there is a wide range of subfields; there are debates about the proper parameters for research and about models, perspectives, or paradigms; and there are conflicts about substantive issues, including the implications of particular methodological choices. To speak about consensus or maturity in conjunction with disciplines is to ignore the often fierce conflicts within

7

Introduction

disciplines and the great divergences in approach and topics that characterize their subfields. There is also considerable commonality and overlap between the different disciplines with respect to their topics, methods, and perspectives. Often more commonality and consensus exists between researchers in different disciplines than between those within a single discipline. Nonetheless, we suggest that it is appropriate to retain the concept of disciplines. It reflects an intellectual as well as an institutional situation. It is also important to keep in mind that the distinctions between disciplines are arbitrary and not always consistent among various universities or in different national contexts. These distinctions are often a product of institutional factors and of controversy rather than something inherent in the disciplines themselves. Myth Seven: Interdisciplinary research is critical research; it is grounded in different social and political commitments from disciplinary research. If interdisciplinarity represents complex challenges to specific disciplines and the phenomenon of disciplinarity, as we will argue, then it is appropriate to see it as developed in contradistinction to disciplinary research. In this context, the label "critical" is appropriately applied to interdisciplinary research. But there is no consistent evidence that interdisciplinary research always and inevitably displays any different social and political viewpoints from conventional research or that it always draws upon unconventional methodologies. Indeed, there is considerable evidence to the contrary. Myth Eight: Interdisciplinary research always involves team research. It is possible for an individual researcher to draw upon the corpus of more than one discipline or to conduct research within a field of study characterized as interdisciplinary. We will suggest, in other words, that interdisciplinary research is not the same as team research. The problems of interdisciplinarity are distinct and independent of the number of people engaged in any study. Myth Nine: Interdisciplinary areas can be productively grouped together for the purposes of research or institutional support. It is important to stress that there is relatively little common ground among the various manifestations of interdisciplinarity. Expertise in urban studies is not likely to be of much assistance to someone studying communications. The purpose of grouping interdisciplinary studies together is best achieved if they are viewed simply as emerging new fields of study.

8 Outside the Lines SOME BACKGROUND ISSUES INFLUENCING THE STUDY OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY

A study of interdisciplinarity could, quite conceivably, encompass most aspects of the production, authorization, and organization of knowledge. It might not only investigate how knowledge is categorized; it might also question the categories themselves. It could include the issue of what will count as knowledge, because by exploring interdisciplinarity, the researcher necessarily encounters the competing truthclaims of various representatives of scholarly work. A comprehensive study of interdisciplinarity would require an authoritative review of the state of the art in each discipline, but at the same time, it would raise the question of what renders such accounts authoritative.1 Obviously, no two authors could ever hope to achieve competency in such a broad array of literatures, nor could any study be sufficiently complex to encompass all these dimensions of interdisciplinarity.2 This creates a dilemma - the need to integrate quite different kinds of intellectual work even though it is difficult to achieve facility with more than one or two of them - which lies at the heart of the issue of interdisciplinarity. This dilemma is exacerbated by the fact that there is very little conceptual clarity in current scholarly debates around interdisciplinarity, because these debates involve professional, social, political, cultural, and epistemological issues. The concept of interdisciplinarity is rooted in the ideals of a unity and synthesis of knowledge and general education, ideals that, according to George Gusdorf, have been reinvented again and again throughout the history of the pursuit of knowledge: "the ideal of knowledge of one single realm is a constant factor in epistemology" (1977, 581). Inevitably this ideal is posed against the threat of specialization and fragmentation of knowledge and learning. The ideals of the unity of knowledge and interdisciplinary learning are seen to function as a kind of "epistemological panacea," to act as a hedge against the threats of "epistemological anarchy" and various "pathologies of learning." Positions in contemporary debates about interdisciplinarity tend to be divided into two distinct camps. The first camp involves an instrumental view of knowledge. It focuses on interdisciplinarity as an applied or problem-centred activity. This position does not seek to challenge disciplinary boundaries or the general epistemological assumptions accompanying the disciplinary paradigm. Its approach is one of methodological borrowing. Tools of research and analysis are borrowed and applied across disciplines, but no direct synthesis

9 Introduction

of knowledge is required or produced. Within this view, interdisciplinarity is a purely functional activity. With no overt or implicit critique of the dominant research or educational system, this form of interdisciplinarity is designed to respond to the external demands of society. Existing disciplinary categories remain unchallenged, specialization is championed, and interdisciplinarity is seen to result from disciplinary "slippage" leading to the establishment of new hybrid disciplines. This position is an instrumental justification for interdisciplinarity (CERI 1972 and Klein 1990). The second camp in the debates about interdisciplinarity has been said to provide a synoptic justification for interdisciplinary research and study. Here, the focus is on interdisciplinarity as a conceptual activity with an emphasis on the production of new syntheses of knowledge. Interdisciplinarity is a theoretical, primarily epistemological enterprise involving internal coherence, the development of new conceptual categories, methodological unification, and long-term research and exploration. For the most part, this view is firmly rooted within the concerns of the university or research institute. This perspective can be broken down further into those views that embody an overt critique of disciplinarity in their formulation of interdisciplinarity, and those that do not. The former position takes a critique of disciplinarity as its starting point and goes on to propose formulations of interdisciplinarity. Here, a primary definitional characteristic of interdisciplinarity is the epistemological challenge it poses to disciplinarity. The latter position proposes the exploration of nondisciplinary activity but maintains the importance of having a foundation in a discipline for the efficacy of any truly interdisciplinary work. Both positions move towards the development of interdisciplinarity as an activity distinct from disciplinary activity, as an "activity based on a set of shifts ... of certain frontiers of knowledge" (Berger 1972, 72). The characteristics and direction of these shifts differ significantly across the literature on interdisciplinarity. The overall thematic distinctions in debates in the literature about interdisciplinarity, then, involve a set of fairly polarized characteristics: instrumental concerns versus conceptual ones; problem solving issues versus epistemological issues; work focused on external social issues versus work focused on internal university or research related issues; interdisciplinarity as based upon and producing new disciplines versus interdisciplinarity as a legitimate end in itself. The problem of interdisciplinarity is not only a theoretical problem of definition. A specific example will illustrate its pragmatic dimensions.

io Outside the Lines

There is a new strain of scholarly work focused primarily upon issues of language and social relations called social semiotics (Hodge 1988). Researchers base their work both on the corpus of sociological and sociolinguistic research and on language theory and semiotic analysis. Language theory and semiotics are traditionally very different from the social sciences in their approach, philosophical grounding, and methodologies. By most standards, the interdisciplinary effort of social semiotics is a successful one. The authors working in this area contribute to a world-recognized literature and participate in an emerging community of scholars, and they share elements of a common methodology. So in this case, at least, the synthesis of approaches and methods in interdisciplinary research does not seem to be a problem. But there is something quite curious about this new literature that becomes evident only on closer reading. Its authors take great pains to stress that theirs is a political as well as an intellectual project (arguing, in fact, that all research is similarly oriented). Their politics is rooted in a commitment to feminism, and their intellectual project consists of uncovering the social and political relations embedded within the meanings of any text (Hodge and Kress 1979; Kress 1985). The text is seen to be part of a larger system of meanings that reproduces class, race, and gender relations in an inequitable manner. What is curious, then, is that their bibliographies are all but devoid of references to an equally large and equally world-recognized literature within the tradition of women's studies on the same topic, the relationship between language and social relations (Cameron 1990; Smith 1990). The social semioticians and women's studies scholars share a common political project, a commitment to feminism. Both groups commonly assert that all research has a political dimension. And finally, both literatures - social semiotics and feminist work on language - are commonly understood to be interdisciplinary in their orientation. The distinction between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity is not at issue here. Rather, what is evident is that an intellectual division still exists - in spite of interdisciplinarity - between two scholarly literatures that purport to examine the same topic from a similar approach, often drawing upon common methods of study. In a field of study such as social semiotics, which is dedicated to abolishing some of the established intellectual divisions between the humanities and the social sciences, why and how did new intellectual divisions become established so quickly and decisively? The study of interdisciplinarity is thought to be the study of the scholarly and institutional relationships among various branches or

ii Introduction fields of knowledge and an exploration of how these fields might be brought together when the subject matter or the intellectual or political project of the researchers demands it. But it must also be a study of how intellectual divisions are created and sustained in the first place.3 Consequently, an examination of interdisciplinary research requires an exploration of the emergence and status of knowledge and of the relationships between various kinds of knowledge. How then to approach the issue of interdisciplinarity? If a study of interdisciplinarity is to be done, researchers must reflect upon the issues that interdisciplinarity raises. We think that it is essential to acknowledge the difficulties encountered in the transposition of information from one scholarly context to another, between communities of researchers, disciplines, and university departments (Whitley 1984). It is crucial to explore the role of metatheory, that is, theories about the creation and influence of theory in scientific and other intellectual work in the conduct of specific (and often empirical) research studies. We think it is also useful to ask what research purposes are currently being served by the disciplines and by interdisciplinary studies in different universities and institutions. Could these same purposes be better served through other means? As they are described here, these are not questions amenable to research in the conventional sense, but they affect each and every researcher, whether the field is philosophy or economics, the topic gender relations or the West-Coast fishing industry, the approach Marxist or poststructuralist, the commitment to a specific discipline or to interdisciplinarity. Each question cuts across the so-called traditional disciplines and is relevant to many intellectual constituencies. The answers affect all researchers, because the final product of their work is always intended to be of interest to various publics. THE O R G A N I Z A T I O N OF THIS BOOK

The point of departure for this book is the simple observation that too many people are promoting interdisciplinary research without addressing even the most basic difficulties and conundrums involved in the attempt to do it. These people seem to assume that all that is necessary for interdisciplinary research to succeed is a combination of scholars from different disciplines and a consensus about the importance of their joint efforts. We feel that such interdisciplinary efforts will inevitably fail. In interdisciplinarity work, failure can take many forms. For example the so-called interdisciplinary teams might disaggregate over

12 Outside the Lines

time. Each researcher might make his or her own contribution, only to have the final product reflect a grouping of different studies with very little in common. The research itself might be carelessly done, and the concepts ill-defined. Preoccupation with the problems of interdisciplinarity might overwhelm the research questions, and as a result, generalizations about interdisciplinarity might be substituted for the substantive contribution of the research effort. Or wellconceived and carefully executed research might nonetheless fail to find an audience because of its interdisciplinary nature. If any of these scenarios come to be, then the potential benefits of interdisciplinary research are lost. Unfortunately these scenarios seem to be played out on a regular basis within the academic community. Observations about the many problems of interdisciplinary research led us to approach the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) with a proposal to write an extended essay on interdisciplinary research. Their support for this work is acknowledged and appreciated. During the course of our research, we examined research proposals submitted to SSHRC over a five-year period, including those adjudicated by both disciplinary and interdisciplinary committees. We also reviewed the assessors' comments. (The anonymity of the comments was preserved.) Officials from the other councils, which fund the natural sciences, engineering, and medical research, were also interviewed, although the primary focus of this book is the social sciences and humanities. University administrators and colleagues across Canada were also consulted. A quick glance at the table of contents of this book will suggest that it follows an unusual format. It is structured more like a conversation than an academic volume. It is intended to provoke discussion and dialogue with colleagues about the issues in the conduct of interdisciplinary research. To be sure, it includes an introduction to and a theoretical review of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. But it also includes quite informal - almost anecdotal - accounts by several well-known Canadian scholars about problems they have encountered in doing interdisciplinary research. Writing about interdisciplinary research does not require such an unorthodox approach, but we think it is justified here. However, when we were preparing the original essay, several people were asked to comment on their experiences with interdisciplinary research and the applicability of the emerging analysis. Their replies have been included as part of the book because these more informal contributions extend its analysis significantly in new directions. Something important would be lost if we were merely to summarize these views.

13 Introduction

In chapters i and 2 we provide a historical and conceptual examination of the concepts of "disciplines" and "interdisciplinarity." These observations inform the final chapters of the book. By chapter 3, we are ready to let other researchers speak for themselves. Let us now introduce the contributors briefly (for more information, see the list of contributors at the end of this book). In chapter 3 we meet three people who define themselves as interdisciplinary scholars. Ellen Balka graduated from two interdisciplinary graduate programs before she took up a job in a third. Margrit Eichler has had a seminal influence on both sociology and women's studies. Caroline Andrew has been President of the Canadian Political Science Association, and yet she writes about research that crosses the disciplinary boundaries from urban to women's studies. In chapter 4, John Robinson joins Barry Truax, Alberto Cambrosio, and Jill Vickers to speak about the practice of interdisciplinarity. Robinson has led an almost entirely interdisciplinary career in the areas of environmental studies and natural resource management. Barry Truax speaks about the problems involved in establishing two new fields of study: one now has most of the attributes of disciplinarity, while the other remains frankly interdisciplinary. Alberto Cambrosio speaks of the challenges involved in being part of the evolving Social Studies in Medicine program at McGill. Jill Vickers traces the emergence of a new field of studies - Canadian studies distinguished from its cognate disciplines by the different orientations and preoccupations of its graduate students. In chapter 5, we deal with another form of interdisciplinary practice, one that bridges the social and natural sciences. Stephen Fienberg and Judith Tanur work at the nexus of the social and natural sciences in a variety of new disciplines that bridge statistical and social scientific research. Judith Miller, who worked for several years with the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons (and who is a biologist by training), dealt with social and ethical issues regularly in her capacity as the first director of a new national council developing standards for biomedical research. Karen Messing, a natural scientist, found herself working in two instances with sociologists because it seemed advisable to learn about the social relations within the work site when she was conducting research on occupational health problems. Chapter 6 includes views from two people who have assessed or adjudicated interdisciplinary research. Gerde Wekerle, who teaches in Environmental Studies at York University, was the first chair of SSHRC'S first interdisciplinary adjudication committee and thus was present when its initial guidelines and standards were being developed.

14 Outside the Lines

Elaine Isabelle once worked with the Natural Science and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) and now works with SSHRC (SSHRC has recently been combined with the Canada Council, incorporating responsibility for the arts). At NSERC, Isabelle was responsible for the National Centres of Excellence Program, a major initiative involving the natural, medical, and social sciences in developing research centres on strategic topics. In chapters 7 and 8, we return to the original essay with some new insights and delineate six approaches to interdisciplinarity. The purpose is not to create a new typology; the categories have little importance in themselves, and other analysts might wish to add to the list. The purpose in distinguishing between varieties of interdisciplinary research is to identify the problems that emerge in connection with each of them. It is self-evident, for example, that the problems encountered by someone seeking to establish a new field of study (and to have it recognized as an emerging discipline) are not the same as the problems encountered by someone functioning as part of an interdisciplinary research team. Each kind of problem deserves attention in its own right. This analysis is divided into two parts. Chapter 7 deals with interdisciplinary research as it pertains to new and existing fields of study. The issues should be familiar to all university researchers, who cannot help but encounter new fields of study, topics that bridge two or more existing disciplines, or challenges to the orthodoxy in existing disciplines. The problems described will also be familiar, even if they are all too often glossed over or ignored. The purpose of chapter 7 is to address the problems of interdisciplinary research in a way that will facilitate their resolution. Chapter 8 takes up the more radical challenges posed by interdisciplinarity and thus offers less in the way of resolutions. Three challenges are of particular interest. The first is to be found in the new intellectual movements (some of which are called postmodernism and/or poststructuralism) that take issue with the existing organization of knowledge into specific disciplines such as political science and economics and with the assumptions upon which it is premised. The second deals with basic issues in scientific methodologies: specifically, who conducts the research and on what terms. The third deals with what is often called problem-centred research and, consequently, with the conflicts between research and other social or political priorities that increasingly impinge upon the conduct of research. The book concludes in chapter 9 with a commentary on the implications of interdisciplinarity. We suggest, for example, that it makes

15 Introduction

little sense to speak about core disciplines, distinguishing them from interdisciplinarity, as is often done in the universities. We question whether one can locate a centre and a periphery in the intellectual landscape. We find that the most important contribution made by interdisciplinary research lies in the many different kinds of challenges it offers to existing disciplines and approaches to scholarship. In other words, we argue that the real benefit offered by interdisciplinary research is not necessarily to be found in the content of its subject matter or even in the many new journals and publications it spawns. It lies instead in the dynamism interdisciplinarity creates and has come to embody within the research community and the university. Rightly or wrongly, and with research of varying quality and scope, interdisciplinary researchers break with tradition, undermine orthodoxy, and open new subjects for exploration. We believe that there can be few tasks so important.

i Disciplines

Many writers involved in debates about interdisciplinarity attempt to make distinctions between interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, pluridisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. These particular distinctions do not concern us in this book.1 We have chosen to put them aside because they imply a stable universe of disciplines that can be combined or integrated in different ways. In this chapter, we want to examine this assumption and question the extent to which the universe of disciplines really is stable. How and from where do disciplines derive their illusion of stability? How is this idea of stability constructed, deployed, and sustained within and outside the academy? The intention in this chapter and the next is to clarify the meaning of discipines and interdisciplinarity. We have observed that far too often disciplines are discussed with little reference to the practical evidence at hand. People speak, for example, about the maturity of a discipline or about the consensus within it without noting the abundant conflicts existing within even the most well-established disciplines. Faced with evidence of such conflict, some authors advocate abandoning definitions of disciplinarity altogether, while others suggest that the conflicts within any discipline are so great and the boundaries between disciplines so unclear that the term discipline should be set aside, regardless of whatever other definitions are used. We disagree. We suggest that there is a middle ground between acknowledging the arbitrary and highly fluid divisions that exist within the research community, on the one hand, and using a static

17 Disciplines

conception of disciplines (as always having existed in their current form and as representing something essential about human knowledge), on the other. THE MANY USES OF LABELS

Universities are littered with survivors of academic wars. Indeed, it is often said that academic conflict is frequently so fiercely and bitterly contested precisely because victories are of so little consequence outside the academy. A fair proportion of academic wars involve conflicts between disciplines, partly because access to rewards and power is controlled through the administrative units of the university, which are usually intended to mirror the organization of knowledge into disciplines. But there is also no doubt that the intellectual organization of knowledge does (and should) directly impinge upon the research of individual scholars. The status of disciplines and interdisciplinarity is consequently a product of both institutional structures and intellectual work. The distinctions between disciplines and interdisciplinarity are often used in a superficial manner, however. Worn as badges of affiliation, they serve merely to identify the wearer as a proponent of one form or another of knowledge classification. In this function, these terms are hollow labels - a researcher is a historical sociologist as opposed to a social historian, a "disciplinarian" or an "interdisciplinarian." The terms are taken for granted and not subjected to the kind of scrutiny required to make proper sense of the debates concerning them. Too often these labels function as part of the rhetorical strategies in academic politics. In recent years, the term "discipline" has acquired a new inflection in much academic discourse. Michel Foucault has caused many to rethink the role and nature of the academic "disciplining" of knowledge. Here, the term "discipline" is placed in relationship to the concept of punishment, but it means something other than direct control of society through coercion. In this context, "discipline" means the regulation of human conduct and social relations through the inculcation of appropriate forms of consciousness, roles, and norms within a framework of knowledge and discourse tightly tied to particular regimes of power. Academic disciplines are evidence of the political deployment of knowledge products. As Timothy Lenoir writes "[disciplines are dynamic structures for assembling, channeling, and replicating the social and technical practices essential to the functioning of the political economy and the systems of power relations that actualize it" (1993, 72). Academic disciplines, then, are seen

i8 Disciplines

as evidence of the greater disciplining of modern life through discursive forms. Although for the most part in this book we use "discipline" in its more conventional sense to refer to the branches of knowledge represented mainly in the universities, it is worth keeping this new, quite different notion of "discipline" in mind. For this understanding of the disciplining of knowledge inspired by the work of Michel Foucault serves to amplify, complicate, and deepen the exploration of disciplines and interdisciplinarity. These two seemingly distinct definitions of discipline - as a branch of knowledge and as a means of social control - should always be understood together. Disciplines defined as branches of knowledge always already connote the regulation of knowledge in the service of power relations.2 A B R I E F H I S T O R Y OF D I S C I P L I N A R I T Y

Before embarking on a more detailed discussion about the epistemological and conceptual issues surrounding disciplinarity, it is important to situate disciplinarity in its historical context. What follows is a brief review of some of the central events in the development of disciplinarity. The origins of the disciplines can be found in the medieval university, where the study of theology and the arts became distinct from law and medicine. At this time, demands for specialization came from outside the walls of the university: "the medieval universities exhibited a considerable respect for the world of praxis: their faculties of law and medicine were closely tied to the actual exercise of these professions" (Birnbaum 1969, 54). The university, in this guise, was responsive to the special needs and interests of the student and operated along the lines of a medieval guild "which sought to regulate not only prices for lodgings and books but also the form and content of lectures and courses of study, going so far as to place their professors under bond, in order to insure that the students got their money's worth" (Swoboda 1979, 55). During the Renaissance and Reformation, universities became entrenched as educational and training institutes, and knowledge was ordered broadly under faculties of law, theology, arts, and medicine. The process of learning was strictly hierarchical. Based on ideals of Aristotelian logic and authoritative knowledge, the pursuit of knowledge became highly formalized and rigid: "Disciplines originally referred to the institution of the disciples ... The disciples necessarily subordinated themselves to the teacher ... Doctrines were considered final and given" (Swoboda 1979, 57). During this time

19 Disciplines

research activities increased outside the university in institutes and academies, learned societies, and salons. Universities, propagators of "what was known" were opposed to academies and societies who were searchers for "what could become known" (58). True disciplinarity and specialization was the product of the nineteenth century and was directly connected with the rise of the modern natural sciences, the industrial revolution, and the rise of technology. Universities, institutes, and learned societies became more integrated and melded responsiveness to social demands with the ideals of research. The specific demands of the industrial marketplace encouraged the increasing specialization of research and the solidification of disciplinary boundaries. The natural sciences, in the move from the field to the laboratory, became synonymous with specialization. The social sciences also developed during this time. Disciplinary delineation in the social sciences was partially due to government and industrial demands for work and research in the areas of policy formation, administrative issues, and issues concerning population the census and vital statistics (see Klein 1990; Swoboda 1979). The German university provided a model for the entrenchment of the disciplinary structure. During the nineteenth century the German university worked to fulfil two main functions: to supply technicians and trained professionals for industry and to secure recruits for the maintenance of the hierarchical university system. Students in both streams were required to pass sets of examinations in one or two firmly delineated disciplines, thus guaranteeing their ability to succeed either inside the university or outside in the professional world. German universities gained respect because of their ability to supply and mobilize professional workers quickly to develop and exploit new technologies. Research laboratories inside universities became integral parts of new industry; a relatively symbiotic relationship was formed between government, industry, research, and education (see Swoboda 1979; Flexner 1979). American universities were "reformed" in the mid-nineteenth century and were modelled after the German prototype. The integration of research facilities into the American college led to the establishment of the American university. Specialized, disciplinary knowledge "was not intended to serve the purposes of some abstract 'truth' or the demands of 'pure' knowledge ... the justification for these reforms was expressed in terms of the applicability ... of this knowledge" (Swoboda 1979, 73). Social issues and problems were the impetus for these educational reforms. Disciplines vied for social funding and worked to justify their existence by achieving high student enrolment. But teaching and research were set at odds,

2O Disciplines

leading the academic to occupy a "schizoid" position, since "his eventual success as a researcher was dependent upon his immediate success as a teacher" (76). The primacy of research and the social demand for professional training, however, continued to exert an influence on the structures of the academy, allowing disciplines to function in relative isolation from each other. Faculty cultures, instead of providing a wellspring of accessible and multidimensional teachers, became the province of scholarly virtuosi: "Faculty organization, the corporate organization of the university, by the state or public sponsors and treasurers of the universities, legitimated the virtuosi. The disciplines became their private arenas" (Birnbaum 1969, 55). The combination of social and institutional bureaucratization, demands for efficient professionals, and the idealization of professorial virtuosi led to the further entrenchment of disciplinary specialization. These institutional and social dynamics have continued to this day, ensuring the maintenance and hegemony of disciplinary research and education. IS THERE A B A S I S FOR D I S C I P L I N E S ?

Disciplines involve recognizable communities of scholars that develop conventions governing the conduct of research and its adjudication. Disciplines rely upon technical language and particular methods of analysis. They develop standards of evaluation specifically suited to their methodology and objects of analysis. Debates occur within the parameters of disciplinary communities and are then reflected in their journals and their commonly adopted teaching curriculum. Not all of these attributes are a product of, or even necessarily associated with, the intellectual foundations of disciplines. Support from the universities, criteria of the granting councils' adjudication committees, support for learned journals, the organization of universities into departments, and the association of graduate degrees with specific disciplines all lend credence to the idea that disciplines are an inevitable and necessary component of intellectual work. But it is an open question whether these institutional arrangements of the universities and granting councils create or simply reflect actual intellectual divisions. It is a classic case of "the chicken and the egg." Are disciplines based on intellectual foundations that are simply recognized by administrative bodies, or does the institutional support for the organization of research and the universities into disciplines create the intellectual rationale for disciplines? On closer examination, there is considerable evidence that the disciplines are much less distinct than one might expect. Taking the

21 Disciplines

example of the social sciences, one can easily find evidence that disciplines such as anthropology or psychology are much less stable, coherent, and oriented to consensus than one might expect. In the social sciences, the same topics are dealt with across several disciplines. Indeed, there appears to be little intellectual reason for assigning many topics to the particular disciplines. Historians, sociologists, psychologists, economists, and anthropologists all deal with the West-Coast fishing industry, for example, as they do with household income, economic development proposals, the impact of monetary policy, and the assumptions of welfare economics. The notion that there is a distinct, accepted, and prevailing methodology associated with each discipline is also not tenable. Although it is true that only political scientists are likely to conduct studies of voting patterns in elections, other social sciences draw upon the same sampling and interview methods to carry out work on other topics. Sample surveys, modelling and simulation, questionnaires (structured and unstructured), historical documentation and archival research, and even participant observation can be - and often are used in most social scientific disciplines, and the first three are used extensively in the natural sciences as well. A similar span of intellectual perspectives is also evident across many of the various disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. There are, for example, Marxist economists and Marxist professors of literature; functionalists and/or systems theorists in political science and anthropology; poststructuralists in social work and philosophy; empiricists (for lack of a better label) in all of the above. Furthermore, internal conflicts within each discipline are commonplace. They have resulted in the establishment of distinct subfields within the disciplines that function as if they were separate disciplines in their own right. Some of these subfields even maintain their own journals, hold their own conferences, and constitute, for all intents and purposes, their own community of scholars. Groups that bridge two or more disciplines are also common. They draw their members from several disciplines on the basis of a similar perspective (for example, a political economy network) or methodology (for example, applied survey research), but only sometimes do they claim to be disciplines. Finally, it should be noted that similar political and conceptual debates take place in many disciplines. The feminist debate, for example, owes little to the organization of knowledge into disciplines. It has taken place in such diverse contexts as biology, sociology, and literature. In other words, what looks to an outsider like a discipline may resemble a collection of disciplines upon closer scrutiny because of

22 Disciplines

the existence of subfields, while nondisciplinary fields of study, such as political economy, may exhibit most if not all of the attributes of a discipline. Disciplines are wrought with conflict as well as consensus. Under such conditions, there are good reasons to question the usefulness of the concept of disciplines. Does it serve any purpose other than supporting the institutional needs of the universities and granting councils? There are good reasons not to discard the label, however. First, almost all universities use the term "discipline" to indicate distinctions within their faculties. Even if there was no intellectual basis for retaining the term, there would still be strong practical reasons for doing so. Second, although many topics, perspectives, and methods are represented in each discipline, they are not represented equally everywhere. It may well be true that there are poststructuralist thinkers in the field of economics, and that sociology as well as economics deals with matters of household income, but no one would be likely to mistake a sociology journal for an economics journal, nor would anyone expect the agenda of the next meeting of the economics association to feature a lively debate about poststructuralism. Each of the disciplines is characterized by a somewhat different constellation of methods, perspectives, and topics. The overlap between disciplines is incomplete; not all topics, perspectives, and methods are common to every discipline. Within any discipline, it is appropriate to speak about prevailing foci of attention, methodologies, and perspectives, notwithstanding the fact that there may well be some conflict about the adequacy of these dominant or prevailing themes. In this sense, disciplinarity does have intellectual foundations, and distinctions among disciplines do represent obvious divisions. Third, as any observer of academic conferences will attest, the agendas and styles of debate of the various disciplines are quite different from each other. Even when the topics are similar, even when the methods for research are identical and the perspectives of the researchers are similarly grounded in particular paradigms, it is easy to identify the differences between the sociologists, political scientists, and the historians. DISCIPLINES AS

REGISTERS

Feminist theorist Deborah Cameron (1985) works with the concept of "registers" as a useful way to identify the differences between sociologists and historians, for example, and to understand how differences occur between communities such as disciplines. Cameron uses "registers" to refer to the manner in which information is

23 Disciplines

understood, arguments are marshalled, and issues are discussed in different communities. Each community has a different discourse, or register, reflecting its specific points of reference and its prevailing epistemological assumptions, she says. Each relies upon a different technical language and a distinct manner of speaking. And each community has its own modes of perceiving, organizing, and disseminating information. In other words, notwithstanding all the problems attached to their discipline and its relations to others, economists, for example, know when they have wandered into a meeting of other economists, because economists generally speak within the same register, regardless of the subject of their research or the methods they use to pursue it. We will return later in this book to the concept of registers, because it provides a very useful basis for the discussion of the relationships between disciplines and the issues raised by interdisciplinarity. For now it will be sufficient to rely upon the concept to illustrate the differences among disciplines. The registers that characterize disciplines are characterized, in turn, by five attributes: • a constellation of topics, perspectives, and methods; • the dominance of a prevailing approach (usually along with several critical perspectives on it); • institutional recognition in the form of departmental status, graduate programs, journals, and conferences; • a community (self-proclaimed) of scholars; and • methods of inculcating or compelling adherence to the register of the discipline. OTHER DIMENSIONS OF DISCIPLINES

Two other aspects of disciplines will prove useful to our thinking about disciplinarity. First, disciplines can be characterized by the degree to which they are exclusive, rather than inclusive, with respect to the attributes listed above. Let us use "tightly bounded" and "loosely bounded" to describe this difference. Disciplines may be tightly or loosely bounded in terms of the stringency of the criteria they impose for membership in their community of scholars, the degree to which their register permits deviation, the controls they exercise over members (for example, the willingness to publish unorthodox material in the disciplinary journals), the range of topics considered to be within the discipline, and so on. Indeed, from this perspective, disciplines locate themselves somewhere along a continuum between being tightly and loosely bounded. Sociology is an

24 Disciplines

example of a loosely bounded and economics an example of a tightly bounded discipline. Before proceeding, several points should be noted. This dimension of disciplinarity, like the one that follows, is meant to be descriptive, not normative, in orientation. Within any discipline, strong arguments can be made for either a tightly bounded or a loosely bounded approach. For example, some sociologists might argue that controversy about paradigms is essential to the pursuit of knowledge (and thus that their discipline should be loosely bounded), while other sociologists (arguing from the perspective of a tightly bounded approach) might counter that sociology needs reform because it includes "anything and everything" and therefore lacks a common bond as a discipline. They suggest that sociology should adopt a tightly bounded approach distinguishing clearly between sociology and anthropology or politics, for example, and that sociologists should exercise control over who has membership within the community of sociologists. This same debate has occurred in law. Traditionally, most academically oriented legal research has been closely allied with the profession of law. But in the last decade, some scholars have begun to challenge the prevailing orientation of legal scholarship (Arthurs 1986; Gordon 1984) They suggest that academic legal research should encompass questions also addressed by sociology, philosophy, and history and should examine not only what law is but also what law does. For these latter groups, both the theoretical foundation and the research agenda for the study of law should be expanded, and membership within the community of scholars doing legal research should include sociologists, historians, and others. In other words, they propose that the discipline of law should cease to be tightly bounded and become, instead, loosely bounded in its approach. It must also be stressed that the character of a discipline - as tightly or loosely bounded - is not inherent in the discipline per se but emerges as a result of how the discipline is practised. For example, there are sociologists whose commitment to their discipline is as tightly bounded as that of any economist, and there are, conversely, economics departments where "anything goes." For the purposes of discussion, disciplines can be assigned to a position along a continuum, but such assignments serve no purpose other than to illustrate a particular dimension of disciplines.3 A second way of distinguishing among disciplines is in terms of the balance between theory and incremental or empirical research within each discipline. Before describing this dimension further, it is important to note that the broad but very important discussion about

25 Disciplines

the degree to which theory (paradigms) shapes empirical research, and vice versa, has been put aside for the purposes of this discussion. The point is a simple one. Different disciplines are characterized by the degree to which they are openly theory-driven or, conversely, by the degree to which incremental or empirical research is significant in creating the main corpus of their work. In other words, assuming for the sake of argument that all disciplines are governed by paradigms and that in each case also, scholars conduct individual studies that together progressively comprise the corpus of the scholarship of the discipline, it is nonetheless important to take account of how theory and empirical research are blended differently in each discipline. In Canada today, sociology leans towards being theory-driven, while economists would argue their discipline is driven by empiricial research. That an outside observer might disagree with these assessments is beside the point. There is a continuum, and points of difference between disciplines can be identified by locating disciplines along it. These two modes of describing disciplines - as tightly or loosely bounded and as driven by theory or research - will prove useful in understanding reactions to interdisciplinarity, but they are not confined to disciplines. Interdisciplinary fields of study may themselves be characterized as tightly or loosely bounded and as more or less theory-driven, even as they take issue with these same characteristics of disciplines. We will return to these ideas in later chapters. We would simply like to assert now that in spite of the very significant divisions that exist within any field of study such as a discipline (differences of topic, perspective, paradigms, and methodology), there remains a strong intellectual foundation for conceiving of knowledge creation in disciplinary terms. Disciplines, in particular, are characterized by different constellations of topics, methods, and perspectives and by the prevailing theses about and approaches to the subjects of their research. These differences reflect the registers of the disciplines, or ways of understanding and speaking about the topics addressed in their research. All the differences that we have mentioned are supported through such institutions as the university, granting councils, journals, and meetings, but they reflect something more than simply social and institutional practices.

2 Interdisciplinarity

Interdisciplinarity has come to occupy a central place in current discussions around knowledge production. And, as we have noted, interdisciplinary practices have come to occupy a significant place in academic research, both as a mode of research and as a requirement for research funding. But there appears to be little conceptual or definitional clarity in the concept of Interdisciplinarity. In the following sections we will draw upon the work of Klein and others to present a brief history of the rise of what is now called interdisciplinarity, an examination of the various ways interdisciplinarity has been defined and deployed in the literature about knowledge production, and, finally, a discussion of the various ways interdisciplinarity can arise and be practised within the pragmatic confines of a distinct research community. A B R I E F H I S T O R Y OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY

The interdisciplinary movement in the United States, in particular, embodied in the institutional settings of the university, research institute, and learned society, has been described by Klein as having evolved through three distinct historical periods: World War I to World War II, World War II until the late 19605, and the late 19603 until the present. The characteristics of these eras reflect many of the dominant issues and themes in the current debates about interdisciplinarity that we will discuss in the following section.

27 Interdisciplinarity

The World War I era saw discussions of interdisciplinarity as part of a more broadly based movement toward educational reform; general, nondisciplinary education was proposed as an antidote to the increasing fragmentation and scientization of knowledge within the disciplinary system. Integration across disciplines was promoted during this era and evidenced in such epistemological adventures as the unity of science movement - an attempt to unify knowledge through logical positivism, and the philosophy of science movement. Tension existed at this time (and continues to exist) between "proponents of a single metalanguage or a unified science, and proponents of more modified integrative concepts along specific problem spheres" (Klein 1986, 414). The World War II and post-World War II era was characterized by strong debates about interdisciplinarity in the social sciences. One side of the debate proposed interdisciplinarity as a primarily methodological and instrumental enterprise that involved borrowing tools and methods across the disciplines but left disciplinary boundaries intact. This form of interdisciplinarity was linked to problem solving and was encouraged by the demands of a war and postwar economy (see Klein 1990). The second side of the debate insisted upon a conceptual integration of knowledge and was evidenced in the emergence of "area" studies, which were meant to bring specialists together around the examination of different areas of the globe. This view held to an ideal of interdisciplinarity as involving an epistemological challenge to the theoretical entrenchment and institutionalization of knowledge in disciplinary form. Proponents of the view were committed to the possibility of a synthesis of knowledge. This second era was also characterized by the increasing visibility of the issue of interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary team research in scholarly circles and by the funding by government and private industry of large mission-oriented interdisciplinary research projects such as the Manhattan Project. It was marked as well by what Klein has called a "quiet revolution" in the humanities. This revolution involved the emergence of synthetic theories such as structuralism and systems theory and the increasing integration of linguistics, language theory, history, literature, aesthetics, philosophy, and studies of film and popular culture. It indicated a move away from metaphors of physical processes toward metaphors of symbolic forms in the humanities (see Geertz 1980). In the sciences, as well, the move toward conceptual integration appeared in the form of "grand simplifying conceptualizations such as the second law [of thermodynamics], the mass-energy equivalence and quantum mechanics" (Klein 1986, 417).

28 Interdisciplinarity

The third era, as demarcated by Klein, involved the increasing professionalization of the interdisciplinary movement. Many new educational institutions were formed at this time with the expressed intention of pursuing interdisciplinarity. In 1970 the first international seminar on interdisciplinarity was held by the OECD, resulting in the publication of Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities (CERI 1972). This book was, by all accounts, the seminal reference in the field on interdisciplinary research and education. During the 19705 and 19805 interdisciplinary research and education were well funded and two distinct American interdisciplinary associations were formed. INTERSTUDY, founded in 1980, involved debate and work around interdisciplinary team research projects and included members from the academic world, government, and industry. The Association for Integrative Studies (AIS) was more academic and conceptual in orientation and consisted, for the most part, of scholars and teachers involved in interdisciplinary education. The AIS was most concerned with the epistemological study of interdisciplinarity. In the 19805 and 19905 these organizations continued to thrive, along with an increasing demand for interdisciplinary work outside the university. This work was asked to address local and global problems whose solutions could be seen to lie in the hands of all segments of society. Klein argued that a distinction had become clear between endogenous interdisciplinarity, "concerned with the production of new knowledge," and exogenous interdisciplinarity, which "interrogates the disciplines on the demarcations they apply to 'real life' and demands that the university fulfil its social mission" (1986, 421). Given the economic realities of the 19805 and 19905, she suggested, the focus of academic institutes and funding agencies was primarily upon the establishment of exogenous interdisciplinary research projects. Each of the contributors in this book provides a window on some aspect of the history of interdisciplinarity in Canada. Not stated, but certainly relevant, is the fact that many new universities were created in Canada in the 19605 and 19705, and other older Canadian universities undertook a broader mandate and expanded their programs in the same period. In many cases, the new universities were located in close proximity to long-established ones, and in any case, they bore the stamp of the times when they were created. Thus, most of them developed programs in areas that we would now consider to be interdisciplinary, either because this was considered to be the intellectually promising course to follow, or because, by being interdisciplinary, the new or refashioned universities could claim to be breaking

29 Interdisciplinarity

new ground in comparison with the older institutions. All the Canadian universities especially known today for their interdisciplinary studies, with the possible exception of Carleton, were established or restructured in this period. The funding councils were slow to recognize this development, but they did so by adding first one and then a second and then more new committees or subcommittees to their adjudication process. In addition, they developed a new approach to research - strategic research - in which the intention was to focus research efforts on a particular topic. Interdisciplinarity was one of the criteria for several of the strategic programs, but even today it is not clear what the research councils mean by interdisciplinarity. Strategic research was given a major boost with the funding of several new programs, the funding of networks of research centres, environmental research, research on the management of technology, and more. In these cases, also, the councils have been slow to define what they mean by interdisciplinarity. Finally, two of the councils, one dealing with the social sciences and the humanities (SSHRC) and the other with the natural and engineering sciences (NSERC), established interdisciplinary adjudication committees. The experience of SSHRC will be described by one of our contributors. Elsewhere, the development of interdisciplinarity was influenced by many of the same factors as in Canada, and funding councils have demonstrated similar conceptions, or lack of conceptions, of interdisciplinarity, while nonetheless pursuing similar policies for encouraging new forms of research. DEBATES ABOUT INTERDISCIPLINARITY

As we mentioned briefly in the introduction, the literature about interdisciplinarity can be marked by clear divisions. For the most part, authors concerned specifically with theoretical issues, epistemology, pedagogy, and the disciplining of knowledge stand in direct opposition to those writers who advocate a more instrumental and pragmatic approach to interdisciplinarity, focusing largely on its function as a problem-solving activity that may be designed to cater to the demands of industry and government. In the following section we will outline in detail the characteristics of these positions which we have chosen to call "instrumental interdisciplinarity" and "conceptual interdisciplinarity." We have broken down the category of "conceptual interdisciplinarity" further into those forms of interdisciplinarity that maintain a dependence on the integrity of the disciplines and those forms that pose a fundamental challenge to disciplinarity.1

30 Interdisciplinarity INSTRUMENTAL INTERDISCIPLINARITY

Recent developments in the literature about interdisciplinarity indicate a lack of concern with the reformation of disciplinarity and the resolution of epistemological issues and reveal instead a keen interest in the development of interdisciplinarity as a practical solution to unsolved problems. As we have said, instrumental interdisciplinarity consists, for the most part, of borrowing methods and tools from across the disciplines in an effort to address needs dictated by the specific problem at hand. Ironically, specialization, rather than being a barrier to cross-disciplinary work, is perceived as a conduit for interdisciplinarity: "the emergence of complexity [requiring specialization] leads to the gradual erosion of boundaries of the special branch [the discipline]" (Pilet, quoted in Klein 1990, 43). Complexity generates its own need for coordination, and coordination itself breeds interdisciplinarity. The process of "fission" - the breaking down of subjects into specialities and subspecialties - is seen to lead to the creation of new units of knowledge as researchers approach each other at the borders of the fields. These various interactions produce new interdisciplines that then work to become recognized as disciplines in their own right. Here, interdisciplinarity - the creation of interdisciplines that bring together subspecialties - is perceived as one step in the ever-burgeoning process of the creation of new realms of knowledge or new disciplines or both. In the practice of instrumental interdisciplinarity, no overall synthesis of concepts or analyses is attempted; no fusion of different perspectives toward the creation of new knowledge is fully tried. The integration of existing frameworks into temporary syntheses based on a specific problem is all that is attempted. Guy Berger calls this a "unity of practice": an effort to bring the academy into the community, to analyze the many dimensions of a social problem, and to communicate efficiently across disciplinary divisions. Instrumental interdisciplinarity has been likened to operational research - research focused on the provision of information for specific forms of decision making, for example. This form of interdisciplinarity "is governed by the pragmatic ends which determine the way the phenomena to be studied are cut up." Proponents of this view feel that the real strengths of interdisciplinarity get lost in discussions of epistemological issues and the search for unified knowledge - that interdisciplinary research and study must always be applied to problems "that involve major decisions and are of vital political significance" (Sinaceur 1977, 576).

3i Interdisciplinarity CONCEPTUAL INTERDISCIPLINARITY

We have noted that there are two distinct forms of conceptual interdisciplinarity, characterized by their approaches to disciplinarity. The first recognizes that a basis in the disciplines is important for effective interdisciplinarity but also insists on the importance of nondisciplinary activity. With this view no overt critique of the epistemology of disciplinarity emerges. The second form sees interdisciplinarity as posing an explicit epistemological critique of disciplinarity. Disciplinarity is accused of stultifying the true pursuit and evolution of knowledge. In this second view, there are two further alternatives to the disciplinary organization of knowledge proposed. The first alternative advocates a form of transdisciplinarity - the search for a unity of knowledge. The second alternative is critical of disciplinarity and the ideal of unity, and it proposes, through interdisciplinarity, a form of politicized transformative knowledge. Interdisciplinarity as Dependent upon Disciplinarity In recent years theories of interdisciplinarity have been developed that seek to employ and expand upon disciplinarity rather than to criticize it. This perspective works to highlight the strengths of a disciplinary organization of knowledge and to suggest that those strengths may be extended into the development of new non- or interdisciplinary modes of knowledge-seeking. Social psychologist Donald Campbell is one major proponent of this perspective. His paper "Ethnocentrism of the Disciplines and the Fish Scale Model of Omniscience" (1969) proposes a reorientation of thinking around the issue of specialization. Like many advocates of instrumental interdisciplinarity, Campbell embraces the process of fissioning knowledge into smaller and smaller subspecialties. In this process each individual or group of individuals can achieve a certain level of competence. Campbell's emphasis on specialization flies in the face of the traditional interdisciplinary ideal of breadth and comprehensiveness of knowledge - an ideal Campbell calls a "Leonardoesque aspiration" (1969, 329). He feels the ideal is bound to lead to failure. In fact, he asserts, the notion of uni-disciplinary competence is also a myth. The integration and comprehensiveness of a discipline is, Campbell insists, a collective product "not embodied in any one scholar. It is achieved through the fact that the multiple narrow specialities overlap; and that, through this overlap, a collective communication, a collective competence and breadth is achieved" (330).

32 Interdisciplinarity

Campbell sees the administrative and institutional organization of the disciplines as impediments to the development of a truly interdisciplinary omniscience. He argues that the collective comprehensiveness of different realms of knowledge "should be brought about by means of overlapping patterns resulting from efforts of a unique and deliberate narrowness. Each narrow specialty can be compared to a fish scale on a fish. For every systematically knowable subject matter there should be an adequate scientific approach that leads to a discipline concerning that subject matter or problem area" (1969, 333). Although Campbell is critical of the current disciplinary structure, he does not seek to dissolve it or to dissolve the notion of specialization. He does not argue against the epistemological assumptions of disciplinarity but finds fault with the administrative packaging of disciplinarity. He calls only for the disciplinary system's reordering in such a way as to both maintain the disciplines and encourage "the flourishing of narrow interdisciplinary specialties" (1969, 348). Proponents of this view of conceptual interdisciplinarity feel that although there is nothing wrong with specialization in and of itself, disparate disciplines need to recognize their interdependence: "each discipline needs the others in a fundamental and basic sense, because each discipline needs the findings of the others as a check on the validity of its own generalizations and theories" (Kockelmans 19793, 135). Disciplinarians need to learn to borrow responsibly from other disciplinary frameworks. They can do this by keeping abreast of developments in other disciplines through journals, seminars, and conferences. Interdisciplinarity here is dependent upon the good will and communication skills of the academics involved. No overt attempt is made to create any kind of transdisciplinary approach to the field being studied. In her discussion of the disciplinary paradox, Klein lends the most interesting voice to this perspective. She finds fault with the continued rhetorical opposition of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, and she labels it "an oversimplified dichotomy that obscures the more subtle interactions that do take place" (1990, 105). Disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are not polarized ideals, she suggests, but are, in fact, relative to each other. Their opposition has created a paradox, according to Klein, one that does not allow the possibility of being both disciplinary and interdisciplinary. Klein attempts to navigate between the two positions regarding disciplinarity - one position is overtly opposed to disciplinary hegemony, while the other cites the need for a strictly disciplinary basis for any interdisciplinary work.

33 Interdisciplinarity

Klein asserts that unless interdisciplinary work becomes a "discipline" proper, it does not get respect within the academy. But in the process of becoming a discipline, interdisciplinary work tends to lose its characteristic flexibility and malleability. Klein insists upon the recognition of both a discipline's "positive" value - as embodying "a stable epistemic community and agreement upon what constitutes excellence in a field" (1990, 107) - and its "negative" attributes, exclusivity, self-containment, and the setting of strict paradigm controls. In its negative value, disciplinarity becomes a threat to the development of knowledge. Klein locates the paradox in these facets of disciplinarity and warns, "Interdisciplinarians who criticize disciplinarians for sacrificing openness must come to terms with the prospect [of sacrificing openness] themselves. Trying to maintain 'discipline' in the midst of 'epistemological polytheism' can be very difficult" (107). But, Klein also asserts, interdisciplinarity can easily become "undisciplined," superficial, and facile without an established process of assessing the validity of its ideas and theories. Such a process is firmly rooted in disciplinary procedures. Klein proposes a process of "multimodality." This term describes the use by interdisciplinarians of several different modes of inquiry: theory, history, empirical work, and so on. Multimodality allows one to address the complexity of many interdisciplinary problems. Klein often argues that multimodality helps researchers avoid nearsightedness and cultivates reciprocity among different modes and disciplines: "An interdisciplinary field constitutes a unique form of specialization. It is a selective integration within a spectrum of disciplines" (1990, 116). Here, again, we see how this form of conceptual interdisciplinarity is dependent upon disciplinarity to provide both its foundation and its point of departure: "Because interdisciplinary inquiry concentrates on the nexus between two or more disciplines, researchers must have competence in each area. They must consciously reflect upon the purview of each discipline, its questions, its methodology and its unique potential" (Cluck 1980, 69). Conceptual Interdisciplinarity as a Challenge to Disciplinarity

The second type of conceptual interdisciplinarity is distinct from the perspective just described in that its primary characteristic is its profound opposition to disciplinarity. As we mentioned, within this view the ideal goals of interdisciplinarity differ. One perspective argues for the continued search for a unified realm of knowledge -

34 Interdisciplinarity

a true transdisciplinarity. Another perspective finds fault with this ideal and attributes to interdisciplinarity the ability to transform and politicize knowledge. The two positions do, however, share some criticisms of disciplinarity. Disciplinarity is criticized for fragmenting and dislocating knowledge, for creating, through specialization, useless units of knowledge having no bearing or application to real social concerns or to the evolution of human thought. "The specialist, as G.K. Chesterton said, is someone who knows more and more about less and less; he is heading for the eschatological extreme where he will know everything about nothing" (Gusdorf 1977, 585). Disciplinarity is seen to lead to exclusivity and rigidity in the pursuit of knowledge, to what Norman Birnbaum has called a "mandarin culture - educating persons who could speak only to each other in an increasingly circumscribed language or set of languages" (1969, 56). The institutionalization of the disciplines and the codification of disciplinary processes and procedures has taken the burden of true intellectual investigation and exploration off the shoulders of scholars. Disciplinarity is linked with the ideals of scientific objectivity and the scientization of knowledge. It is seen to have created "a new status of knowledge whereby every discipline shut[s] itself up in the splendid isolation of its own methodologies, turning the language of the exact sciences into a kind of absolute." Critics of disciplinarity see this penchant for the "quantitative accumulation of information" as being paid for "by a dismantling of the intellect" (Gusdorf 1977, 585). "In this scientization of thought, the real fluidity of life disappears from the gaze of knowledge" (Kroker 1980, 5). Criticism is also launched against the administration of knowledge. This administration, it is claimed, is closely linked with politics and power. "Disciplinary developments in the universities express ... new views on social problems developed by new elites" (Birnbaum 1969, 57). Disciplinarity serves the interests of the status quo. This particular formation of knowledge - or classificatory approach - works "[t]o repress life ... to preclude from attention, to prohibit the manifestation of some elements of experience while permitting the surfacing of others" (Kroker 1980, 5). Disciplinarity prevents the true evolution and politicization of knowledge; it is the product of the power of those who would like to maintain the social order as it is. "The sponsors of the universities were (and are) well served by a state of affairs in which the division of the kingdom of learning into rigidly compartmentalized fiefdoms prevents it from becoming ... a counter-society within the larger

35 Interdisciplinarity

society" (Birnbaum 1969,58). As Arthur Kroker states "[a] disciplinary division of knowledge is power masquerading as reason" (1980, 6). The disciplinary organization of knowledge prevents the mobilization of intellectual resources to change society and works to suppress the potential of public scholarship, "a mode of scholarship which is nonhierarchical, publicly oriented and historically conscious." Transdisciplinarity: The Search for a Unified Theory of Knowledge. Many theorists of interdisciplinarity who agree with these criticisms of disciplinarity propose, as an alternative, a search for a unified theory of knowledge that is transdisciplinary in orientation. Transdisciplinarity can take many forms (see Kockelmans 19793), but the underlying desire remains the same: the unification of all forms of specialized knowledge and "a reaffirmation of lost wholeness" (Gusdorf 1977, 581). Some proponents feel this quest for unity, a quest as old as theoretical reason itself, must be brought about by philosophical reflection: "Philosophy, precisely because it is concerned with beginnings and foundations ... should contribute to the unification of all theoretical knowledge by reflecting on what all sciences presuppose" (Kockelmans 19793, 148). These theorists claim that the tendency toward unity is an integral part of all theoretical efforts. They feel that each science or discipline, if studied in depth, will necessarily lead to a place where all sciences converge, a central point of unification. This search for unity and for integration, then, becomes the key principle of genuine research: "transdisciplinarity will then be understood as a specific attitude in regard to the sciences, an attitude oriented toward comprehending the contributions of each discipline from the perspective of man's search for meaning, which is itself suprascientific because inherently human" (153-4). Critical Interdiscipinarity. Another perspective on conceptual interdisciplinarity may be called "critical interdisciplinarity." It not only poses a profound epistemological challenge to disciplinarity but also takes issue with the ideal of the unification of knowledge proposed by advocates of the position just outlined. Instead of unification, interdisciplinarity is understood as a quest for critical and transformative knowledge. George Gusdorf points out that the quest for epistemological unity has been a guiding tendency throughout the history of knowledge. But, Gusdorf contends, this quest has failed, and this failure is part of a more general failure on the part of society: "The dissociation [or fragmentation] of knowledge is both cause and effect of the dislocation

36 Interdisciplinarity

of human existence in the present day world." Gusdorf claims that the ideal of unity formulated by transdisciplinarity is simply one aspect of the ideal of science and the disciplinary organization of knowledge, an ideal that has clearly not been reached. For Gusdorf, the revival of this interdisciplinary ideal "far from representing epistemological progress, may be regarded as pathological, a secondary reaction to the inexorable disintegration of modern mental space ... a desperate measure of defence to preserve entire or in part the wholeness of the intellect" (1977, 587). Kroker echoes Gusdorf in his criticism of what he calls "vacant" interdisciplinarity, "[a] type of interdisciplinarity which remains imprisoned within the boundaries, the 'logic' of the traditional disciplines" (1980, 5). The quest for a unity of knowledge presupposes that it does, in fact, exist and is dependent on what Kavaloski (1979) has called an "objectivist epistemology," a view of knowledge as something externally generated and "naturally" connected. Proponents of critical interdisciplinarity take issue with this view of knowledge as an "object" of learning, as some "thing" residing between disciplines as an objective body of information. They are also opposed to the concomitant objectivist pedagogy, which regards the education process as consisting primarily of the "assimilation of knowledge that lies within or between bodies of knowledge ... that themselves lie outside the learning subject" (Kavaloski 1979, 227). These critics contend that three dire consequences flow from an objectivist epistemology and pedagogy: (i) human knowledge is reduced to a body of material to be consumed; (2) students become intellectual consumers; and (3) teachers are privileged agents of knowledge. As a result, interdisciplinarity is "floundering upon an internal contradiction between its espoused humanistic goals and its implicit objectivist epistemology" (226). Interdisciplinarity must escape the contradiction by redefining itself to take into account not just the content but also the form and the processes of knowledge and education, it is argued. It must renounce the reification of knowledge and the objectivist illusion in order to strive for meaningful goals of freedom of inquiry, innovation, and integration. This can be done by returning education to the terrain of dialogue between teachers and students, by transforming the university to a place involving the collective production of learning, and by moving beyond "thinking primarily of interdisciplinary education as an assimilation, however integrated, of a subject matter, and begin[ning] to think of how it can become an integrative process of becoming more human, of realizing our human nature" (Kavaloski 1979/ 34)-

37

Interdisciplinarity

Kroker claims that interdisciplinarity has the potential to create a critical discourse. Interdisciplinarity is a "strategy of inquiry ... intended to encourage the development ... of a style of knowing, a mode of intellectual discourse ... which compels a 'rediscovery' a 'rethinking' from a variety of intellectual perspectives" (1980, 3). Kroker advocates the return of thought "to the active and critical posture of a philosophy of life": "When critical intelligence reconnects with life, with social reality, then the 'object' of inquiry ... necessitates for its comprehension an intellectual practice which is flexible in its categories and holistic" (8). Kroker advocates a type of interdisciplinary knowledge responsive to the political and social needs with which it is connected. As Birnbaum insists, perhaps a little more conservatively than Kroker might, "The solution does not consist of discarding mankind's accumulation of knowledge as so much pernicious ballast, but in creating new systems for codifying it ... as a way of transmitting to the future a heritage of learning which alone can serve as a basis for a rational polity" (1969, 66). Gusdorf would agree with the assessments of Kavaloski, Kroker, and Birnbaum. He views interdisciplinarity as a transformation of traditional ways of knowing and learning, as a move towards a new mode of knowing in harmony with a "logic of life ... richer than that of our ideas" (Gusdorf 1977, 596, quoting Morin). "Interdisciplinary learning should be a logic of discovery, a reciprocal opening up of barriers, a communication between the different realms of knowledge ... The very principle of interdisciplinary research aims at breaking pre-existent moulds of intelligibility" (Gusdorf 1977, 596). Gusdorf argues for a kind of interdisciplinarity that would work to restore the "human significations of knowledge" and revive "the traditional alliance between science and wisdom" (599). I N T E R D I S C I P L I N A R I T YY A N D THE PRAGMATICS OF RESEARCH

We will not resolve the debates we have just described, nor is there likely to be widespread acceptance of any one conception of interdisciplinarity. Distinguishing between instrumental and conceptual interdisciplinarity and locating the very different premisses underlying the various commentaries on interdisciplinarity is useful because it permits us to understand what is at issue for the various protagonists in the debate. But even understanding the debate is not likely to produce converts to one or other position within it. Nor will it address the central question in this book: how to resolve the problems encountered in interdisciplinary research. What it does do is illustrate

38 Interdisciplinarity

how different from each other some of these problems might be, depending upon how those engaged in interdisciplinary work understand what it is they have undertaken to do. To address the problems of conducting interdisciplinary research, however, we do need a framework, an orientation to both disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. For this purpose, we will continue to use the term "disciplines" to refer to the intellectual divisions established within the research and university communities. Some caution must be exercised, inasmuch as the separate disciplines are each cross-cut by divisions no less important than those between the disciplines. Moreover, one can never know the degree to which the distinctions between disciplines are based on intellectual as opposed to institutional factors. Nonetheless, we think that for our purposes in this book, disciplines can be usefully understood as reflecting prevalent constellations of topics of interest and paradigmatic commitments. They are characterized by their registers, which are recognizably different from each other for a variety of reasons. Their continuing existence is evidence of some degree of agreement among communities of scholars about the appropriate methodologies for research. Because of both the differences within disciplines and the similarities among disciplines, and because the project of knowledge creation is inherently problematic; disciplines are always subject to challenge both from within and from without. These challenges may address the adequacy of the discipline's coverage of topic areas or the range of topics legitimately considered to be suitable for research within the discipline. They may concern the prevailing paradigms that are reflected in any discipline at any point in time. Challenges are sometimes raised about how such commitments were initially established and about the trade-offs implied when some topics, some approaches, and some methods are privileged over others. Challenges also arise concerning the manner in which disciplines enforce or inculcate their registers and the ways in which communities of scholars (represented through disciplines or not) maintain the boundaries of their communities. They concern relatively narrow issues or very broad ones such as have been described earlier in this chapter. From all these challenges it is possible to understand the phenomenon of interdisciplinarity. Indeed, for the purposes of identifying and resolving problems of conducting interdisciplinary research, interdisciplinarity is best understood not as one thing but as a variety of different ways of examining - and perhaps confronting - the establishment, content, parameters and powers of disciplines and the prevailing approaches to research they engender. In this context,

39 Interdisciplinarity

interdisciplinarity means taking issue with the registers of one or more disciplines and with whatever is implied in the development, substance, and maintenance of these registers. Let us be specific. 1 Interdisciplinarity can arise within a community of scholars when researchers argue that a particular topic of study has been neglected. Examples are risk analysis in the health or technical sciences, and Canadian studies in the social sciences and the humanities. In both instances, no challenge to the prevailing perspectives and methodologies in the original disciplines is necessarily implied or intended when the new interdisciplinary field of study is created. Researchers, who focus on risk analysis do not view their colleagues as misguided in a fundamental sense, nor do they reject the prevailing methods used by the psychologists or toxicologists whose horizon they wish to expand by developing risk analysis as a new field of study. Graduate theses in Canadian studies are quite acceptable by the standards of political science or history. The intention of researchers in these examples of interdisciplinarity is to draw attention to lacunae in the prevailing research programs and to create subfields or hybrid fields of study that address topics otherwise not included. 2 Interdisciplinarity can arise when the constellation of topics, methods, and perspectives that prevails within a particular discipline is challenged. For example, cultural studies developed as an interdisciplinary area when researchers took issue with the limitations of anthropology, sociology, history, political science, or literary studies. None of these fields was able to adequately address the ways in which cultural practices and forms are intricately bound up with historical forces and relations of power. Cultural studies offered a new paradigm for research in this area, in this instance by combining methods from the social sciences and the humanities and by blending art theory, literary analysis, and social research. 3 Interdisciplinarity can arise when people from one discipline come to appreciate the similarity between their perspective or interests in particular topics and those of other disciplines. In this case, commonalities shared by researchers from different disciplines become more important than what is shared with members of their original disciplines. In Canada, as we have noted, political economy is a field of study with an established community of scholars, with its own journal, with international points of reference, and even with a graduate program. It is a good example of how people from different disciplines shape a new field of study by arguing

4O Interdisciplinarity

that their common perspective is more important than the disciplinary differences that separate them. Environmental studies is another example. Researchers doing this type of interdisciplinary research do not necessarily reject their disciplines of origin. 4 Interdisciplinarity can arise when researchers question the value of the institutional factors that support the divisions between the disciplines. For example, in universities, as we have already noted, law schools are normally oriented toward the profession of law. Even legal research is designed to support professional expertise. But some legal researchers want to separate the study of law from the practice of law, even in the law school curriculum. They see the advantages of conceiving of law as a social science, and their work has more in common with sociologists and historians than with their professional legal colleagues. In theory, they might even be content to dissolve faculties of law or relegate them to the status of professional trade schools if they could be assured that questions about law, both broadly and narrowly understood, were being adequately dealt with in other disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields. 5 Interdisciplinarity can arise when researchers raise issues about the relationship between disciplinarity and systems of institutional and social power, as has occurred with poststructuralism and some new studies of language and discourse. In this case, interdisciplinarity involves examining the premisses of theory and research in the manner we have called conceptual interdisciplinarity. It is a means of appreciating issues about the domain of knowledge and knowledge creation. 6 Interdisciplinarity can arise when some scholars feel overly constrained by the boundaries of their discipline or the restrictions imposed by its registers or the community it represents. In this case, researchers seek to shift the central focus of their previous discipline in a new direction. The researchers who created communication as a separate discipline (communication began as an interdisciplinary field of study; only some people now consider it to be a discipline) were mainly those who felt that they could not pursue such topics as the role of the media or ideology adequately in their disciplines of origin. What was marginal to sociology or political science became central to communication (Salter 1987). THE M A N Y FACES OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY

Each of the examples of interdisciplinarity just discussed, and any number of others that might have been chosen, highlights a different kind of challenge to the activities and orientations of the established

41 Interdisciplinarity

disciplines. Indeed, the only thing these examples have in common is that they do challenge the disciplines or disciplinarity. Risk analysis is a very differently oriented field of study from communication, although, interestingly, some scholars in communication focus on aspects of risk communication. Canadian studies is differently oriented from cultural studies, although both are normally grouped together as interdisciplinary fields of study. Furthermore, our list of challenges, and thereby of different versions of interdisciplinarity, is not complete. It could not be complete, because there are few practical limits to the kind or specific content of the possible challenges to the established disciplines. Virtually anything about the established disciplines can give rise to a challenge and thus to a new form or example of interdisciplinarity. Moreover, even within any interdisciplinary field of study, challenges might be posed. For example, in many universities, women's studies reflects a form of interdisciplinarity that is based on recognizing a lacuna in the subject matter of the established disciplines. In this case, women's studies is very similar to Canadian studies. But there are researchers affiliated with women's studies who espouse a radical critique of the disciplinary structure itself. These people conceive of women's studies as an interdisciplinary challenge to what others have established as women's studies. That those whose approach is being critiqued also consider themselves to be interdisciplinary is of no consequence. The critique is cast in the name of interdisciplinarity nonetheless. In fact, women's studies is a good example of a field that displays all versions of interdisciplinarity, in conflict with each other for paramountcy. There are those who see women's studies as filling a lacuna and those who see it as a critique of disciplinarity, as just noted. There are those who want women's studies to achieve the status of a discipline; for these people, interdisciplinarity is a way station, an intermediate step in an emerging discipline. There are those who challenge the prevailing orientation in women's studies programs in the universities, and others yet whose ambitions focus on reorienting sociology or history to deal with the issues raised by women's studies at the core of their disciplines. There are those who use women's studies as the avenue for raising questions about the purposes and orientations of the academic and research enterprise. CONCLUDING

REMARKS

Any project is intimately bound up with and influenced by its purposes. This book is no exception. We have surveyed some of the many ways that discussions about interdisciplinarity have taken shape, but

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we must recognize that, in the final analysis, differences among them rest upon choices made by researchers about the task to be undertaken. This book may make a contribution to a discussion about variants of interdisciplinary work, and perhaps also to the debate about the epistemological and political foundations of disciplinarity, but the task we have undertaken is a different one. The impetus for this book lies in a growing recognition by ourselves and others that whichever conception of interdisciplinarity one adopts, very serious problems remain in conducting or disseminating interdisciplinary research. To be sure, the problems arising from the relatively straightforward combination of different forms of expertise within a single research project are quite different from those arising in conjunction with the philosophical debates about the nature of disciplinarity. The issues faced by researchers in cultural studies are different from those encountered in risk analysis, different yet again from those in women's or environmental studies. It is our belief that all these problems need to be confronted and resolved to the greatest extent possible and that this task is furthered by understanding all these activities as challenges connected intimately to interdisciplinarity. To speak about interdisciplinarity so broadly, it is necessary to establish some points of reference. We have done this in several ways in this and the preceding chapter. First, we have relied upon the concept of registers to convey what is different about various fields of study (and the communities of researchers active within them). We spoke of registers in connection with disciplines, where they are most evident, but we can now leave aside the question of whether fields of study are understood to be disciplines or whether they are interdisciplinary. The notion of register applies to both. Using registers as a means of distinguishing fields of study combines insights about the intellectual basis for differences with an appreciation of the institutional foundations and exercise of power likely to be involved in any organization of knowledge. We then distinguished among fields of study in terms of whether the registers involved were tightly or loosely bounded. Again, this distinction reflected an appreciation of both the intellectual and the institutional basis for the organization of knowledge. Tightly bounded fields of study, we said, are characterized by relatively high levels of agreement among researchers in the field about the appropriateness of the prevailing constellation of subjects, approaches, and methodologies and by the degree to which these same researchers actively police the boundaries of and membership or activities within their field. A discipline can be tightly or loosely bounded; so, too, can interdisciplinary work, which is subject to the same distinctions. Finally, we distinguished among fields of study by reference to the degree to

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which their registers are theory-driven. In doing so, we reiterated an important point in the literature on interdisciplinarity, the distinction between instrumental and conceptual interdisciplinarity. Understanding that any field of study is characterized by a register that is more or less tightly bounded and, as well, more or less theorydriven helps us appreciate the very different intellectual and institutional cultures that have grown up around economics, sociology, environmental studies, law and women's studies. However, it does not provide grounds for distinguishing economics and sociology from cultural or women's studies or risk analysis. It does not distinguish disciplines from interdisciplinarity in a manner conducive to identifying and resolving the particular problems of conducting interdisciplinary research. To make that distinction, we have chosen to view interdisciplinarity as reflecting any challenge to the limitations or premisses of the prevailing organization of knowledge or its representation in an institutionally recognized form. The challenge may be to the phenomenon of disciplinarity, as in the case of conceptual interdisciplinarity, or to the uses of knowledge, as in the case of instrumental interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinary research can arise even as a challenge to an existing interdisciplinary field - for example, when a postmodernist or poststructuralist critique is raised within women's studies in an attempt to reorient this new interdisciplinary field. It is the action of challenging what would otherwise be taken for granted as the proper organization, content, methodology, or purpose of research that creates and defines interdisciplinarity. There can be as many types of challenge as there are researchers prepared to offer them. Each type poses discrete problems for the researcher, however. In this book, we will take up some of the most frequent interdisciplinary challenges, dealing with each of them in turn. In each case, we will determine where problems for researchers are likely to arise and how these problems might be addressed. Discussions about disciplines and interdisciplinarity are often highly abstract. Given the scope of the debates involved, it is not inappropriate that this should be so. At the same time, it is all too easy to lose sight of the actual research involved and of the often mundane but nonetheless important issues arising in conjunction with it. We need to have a picture in mind of what is occurring when researchers undertake research they think of as interdisciplinary and of the everyday problems they encounter. In the next four chapters, we provide these pictures in the form of frankly anecdotal accounts written by people engaged in interdisciplinary research. It is to their problems that this book is addressed.

3 The Experience of Interdisciplinarity

Is interdisciplinarity a characteristic of research or is it perhaps more descriptive of the qualities of the researcher? In this chapter, we ask three researchers to comment upon their own work as it illustrates interdisciplinarity. We suspected that interdisciplinarity may have more to do with how these individuals have positioned themselves in relation to their research than with the character, subjects, or methodologies of their research. This view of interdisciplinarity was confirmed in our examination, in the preparation of this book, of applications for funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The applications chosen for examination included some from granting programs where interdisciplinarity was a prerequisite for funding. For purposes of comparison, some applications from the regular disciplinary granting programs were also examined. After reading the applications and the reviewers' assessments in each case, we came to the conclusion that from the materials at hand, one could not have distinguished in any blind test between interdisciplinary and disciplinary applications. There were applications involving more than one approach or discipline in the so-called disciplinary pile, and single-minded, narrowly focused projects in the interdisciplinary pile. What distinguished the two groups of applications was not their content but the state of mind of the researchers involved in each case, a state of mind made evident by the researchers' own choice of funding program. Ellen Balka is an example of a young scholar who has developed her work entirely within the context of interdisciplinarity. In the

45 Experience of Interdisciplinarity

comments that follow, she uses her computer as a metaphor for her experience. It is an apt metaphor because, for most people, the deconstruction of the whole (the computer into its mechanical parts) represents an overwhelming experience, and also because the transposition of information into the computer environment requires translation of a coherent picture into a series of binary choices. The tension between disciplinary specialization and the "unity of knowledge" (reflected in some variants of interdisciplinarity) is readily apparent in this simple metaphor. Interestingly, even as Balka moved from one interdisciplinary field to another, the focus of her research remained constant. The location of her studies in different contexts facilitated the development of different perspectives upon the same topic, but the research itself demonstrated a relatively straightforward progression. In effect, by being interdisciplinary in her orientation, Balka had the opportunity to fashion her own specialization and pursue it with single-minded determination by drawing upon whatever various disciplines and interdisciplinary fields had to offer. This was necessary, she argues, because no existing discipline encompassed the subject and the methodologies she wished to pursue. In this sense, her work is an example of the first variant of interdisciplinarity described above; it reflects lacuna in both the established disciplines and interdisciplinary fields of study. Seen in this light, interdisciplinarity involves shaping a coherent program of research about a topic otherwise left unstudied, and drawing upon methodologies from different fields of study for the necessary tools to complete the research. Caroline Andrew is also an interdisciplinary researcher. To be sure, some of her research has been published in disciplinary journals. Other work bears a more obvious stamp of interdisciplinarity. But she would argue, and it is easily observed, that her research has coherence irrespective of how it is labelled. Her work also illustrates the different variants of interdisciplinarity that are evident in each of the many different studies she has undertaken. Like Balka, Andrew locates the impetus for her interdisciplinarity partly in external factors: it is not the case, she says, that one simply decides to embrace interdisciplinarity and then shapes one's research accordingly. Rather, Andrew has undertaken a program of research that, for a variety of reasons, has seemed out of place or has even been excluded from a disciplinary context. Hers is primarily an instrumental interdisciplinarity, she says; the pragmatic uses of research are no less important to Andrew than the content and conclusions of her research. But in the context of feminist research in particular, Andrew finds that being concerned with the uses of research can present a fundamental challenge to the

46 Ellen Balka

research enterprise. Consequently, it is also possible to characterize Andrew's work as conceptual interdisciplinarity. Academics regularly borrow terminology, concepts, and theories from each other in the effort to provide new insights about the implications of their research. In Andrew's case, as in the case of Margit Eichler, whose contribution follows Andrew's, borrowing terminology is not as simple as it first seems. Terms moved from one disciplinary register to another lose their original connations and are understood quite differently in their new context. As a result, interdisciplinary researchers have the feeling that they are working in a strange form of cross-cultural studies, almost as if they were being forced to translate their work from Chinese to English without formally recognizing that different languages are involved. Reading Eichler's contribution, one is reminded of Simmel's notion of the marginal person. Simmel, one of the founders of modern sociology, was particularly interested in the role played by people who were part of a community but not recognized as full members of it. Simmel argued, and Eichler seems to agree, that the marginal person is potentially capable of great insight, insight not available to regular community members: marginal status allows one to see what others take for granted. At the same time, Simmel suggested, marginality is often highly uncomfortable for the individual involved. The marginal person is not a participant in the received wisdom of the community, is not comfortable with its accepted categories; but, at the same time, is not oblivious to their significance. The marginal person is continually required to resolve the problem of "fit," to negotiate what community members take for granted. Further, the marginal person remains the outsider and is treated accordingly. For Eichler, to be an interdisciplinary researcher has meant to engage in almost every kind of interdisciplinarity identified above. It has also meant being marginal, in the Simmelian sense, with all the benefits and problems that marginality confers. PERSEVERANCE, PICTURES, AND

PARTS

Ellen Balka

My study was a mess. Taped to the wall were large pieces of newsprint containing notes about the theory and methodology of discourse analysis. Computer repair manuals were stacked in a. tower on the desk, next to the mountain of technical books on computer networking. Various computer parts and corresponding piles of

47 Perseverance, Pictures, and Parts

screws littered every available surface. Periodicals from the 19705 about the early days of the contemporary women's movement sat in a corner. Computer diskettes for a computer-aided drafting package, waiting to be installed on the dismantled computer, were stacked neatly in a pile on a chair. I was preparing for my comprehensive doctoral exams. My topic (the use of computer networks in the context of feminist social change) required that I demonstrate competence in the areas of feminism and social change, technology and social change, and discourse analysis as theory and method. I had got stuck intellectually. I could not figure out how all of these areas related to one another. Instead of treating each area separately, I wanted to articulate the relationships between the three bodies of literature and develop an overview or a framework. I could make my way through any one body of literature without considering the others, but I was concerned about my ability to bring them all together in the context of my dissertation. I scribbled diagrams on scraps of paper. Discouraged by my inability to draw, I decided that better tools were needed. I bought a mouse for my computer and a computer aided drafting package to create drawings in layers. Once it was installed, I would be able to alter part of my diagram without ruining the rest of it. Unfortunately, the mouse was not working properly, and the software could not be installed without a complex manoeuvre. This marked the emergence of a new work pattern. When I had difficulty, either the computer would break or I would decide that it needed upgrading and dismantle it voluntarily. After two or three days of computer parts everywhere and little sleep, I would put the computer back together and sit down to write. I gradually grew accustomed to this pattern. By the time I had finished my doctorate, I had become a competent computer repair person, and only one part of my original computer remained. I had also defended my orientation to social problems, avoided being taken to task for my political commitments, produced a relevant piece of work in a voice accessible to feminist activists who often lack any knowledge of computers, and dealt with the potential intellectual threat that qualitative approaches to research often pose for quantitatively trained researchers. One of the most valuable skills I developed was an ability to translate technical information for a nontechnical audience in ways that were interesting. Reflecting on interdisciplinarity allowed me to understand the intellectual struggles that I had confronted in preparing for the dissertation. Simon Fraser University has a mechanism to allow graduate students to complete interdisciplinary graduate degrees outside of

48 Ellen Balka

departments and disciplines. Entry requires a dissertation proposal. When I wrote the proposal, I justified the topic and its interdisciplinarity partly on the basis of what Salter and Hearn identify as a "new agendas" or "new voices" approach to research (chapter 8). I argued that women had been omitted as the subjects of study in relation to computer networks and that previous research in the area of women and technological change suggested that existing research might not be relevant to the needs of women's organizations. One year after applying to the special arrangements doctoral program, I rewrote my original dissertation proposal for a funding application. I was enrolled in a research methods class in communications, which served as my formal introduction to scholarship and research in this new field. Having done work in quantitative research, my long-standing interest in qualitative research was finally being addressed. I began to question the assumptions upon which some quantitative research is based and to identify new problems with the existing body of research on the use of computer networks. I struggled to reformulate a research problem. As a result of studying communications research methodology, I had become interested in the processes surrounding the use and adaptation of computer networks. I had to abandon the language I had been using for a decade to describe technology, along with my focus on the identification of impacts and effects of technological change. In order to frame the research through a new disciplinary filter, I found myself grappling with material about technology that I had been relying upon for years. It was as if I was trying to end up at a location I knew well, but from a totally new direction and without the aid of familiar landmarks along the way. I also had to learn how to apply different criteria in assessing the validity of research. Discourse analysis seemed a promising approach to investigate the use of computer networks by feminists in the context of social change. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. Although I had developed some level of comfort with qualitative research, I had not worked with material on discourse analysis enough to anticipate the numerous theoretical, language, and translation problems I would encounter through the selection of a new method. Despite this fact, the outline of my dissertation contained in the funding proposal was (with the exception of the ordering of parts) the outline used in my dissertation. Having no discipline-based criteria to bound my study of discourse analysis, I simply began reading. The reading list included material on prepositional and syntactical analysis, speech act theory, sociolinguistics (quantitative and qualitative), content and conversational analysis, and material on the relation of language to the formation of

49 Perseverance, Pictures, and Parts

consciousness and ideology as well as gender. I eventually came to understand my study of discourse analysis as the examination of issues related to language, communication, and social action that had both theoretical and methodological implications. This was not a conclusion I reached easily, since much of the material about discourse analysis fails to address how language and communication are related to social action. The difficulties with discourse analysis are complicated by the fact that some writing deals with discourse analysis as a method or technique and, consequently, focuses on issues such as how to collect and code data. Other material presents discourse analysis as a model or theory of communication and focuses on the interpretation of data (written or spoken language). Finally, some work is concerned with language in a more global or abstract sense as a process that is influenced by, but also reproduces, class- and gender-based social relations. To confuse matters even more, discourse analysis is studied and used for many different purposes. This leads some authors to focus on linguistic rules and syntax (the production of language), while others focus on discursive styles and patterns in efforts to demonstrate how men and women communicate differently. All of these factors combined suggested that several issues should be addressed in any study where discourse analysis is incorporated. First, it is useful to distinguish between theories or models of discourse, on the one hand, and discourse analysis as method or technique, on the other. Within the former category, one might additionally address the relationship of language to social action or reality, as well as the relationship of language to gender construction. The failure of most work on discourse analysis to make explicit these relationships has made it difficult to ascertain the theoretical perspectives underlying techniques for discourse analysis and to determine what are the practical implications of models of discourse. However, when the relationship of language and communication to social action is placed in the foreground, one can begin to understand why some authors focus on linguistic rules and others focus on types of discourse as processes that reproduce social relations. In addition, this approach makes it possible to see that implicit in all theories of social action are theories of gender and that communication is central to the production of gendered selves (Todd and Fischer 1988). In discussing the relationship of language to social action, it is possible to see how authors writing from different perspectives view the relationship of language and communication to gender. I eventually came to terms with this literature by charting all the relationships outlined above on paper, using a new mouse and a

50 Ellen Balka

computer-assisted drafting program that I installed after discovering and solving yet another major problem with my computer. Along with many women my age, I had returned to university to pursue graduate work that would, ideally, be consistent with my feminism and relevant to the women's movement. My interest in research had flourished during two years I spent working in an engineering firm engaged in research about alternative energy technology. During that time I had also sat on two advisory councils vested with the responsibility of advising a municipality about energy planning. The two experiences had led me to believe that properly conducted research could effect social change. As a young and enthusiastic feminist, I saw the need for change all around me and decided, against the wisdom of many of my peers in the women's movement, to pursue graduate education. As the first student admitted to a master's degree program in women's studies at Simon Fraser University, I was aware of the need to do research that would stand up to the scrutiny of the wider university community. My topic was interdisciplinary (the adaptation of technology assessment methodology to a popular education format, to be used to educate women workers about technological change), but the research design I chose and the voice I assumed in writing were safe (a quasi-experimental design, the traditional academic voice). My political interest in my master's degree research topic was consciously muted in my MA thesis, but I was determined to make my doctoral research more accessible to women outside of the academy than my MA research had been. This personal and political commitment required me to write in an accessible voice. I was interested in the relationship of computer network structure to the forms of communication and communicative processes that occurred on-line. It was impossible to discuss the structure of computer networks without first explaining how they worked. My doctoral committee was composed of a theoretical chemist with a joint appointment in computer science and women's studies, a sociologist and an anthropologist who were teaching communications, and a sociologist teaching sociology. Since a majority of the members of my committee lacked technical knowledge about computers in general and computer networks in particular, no one protested the inclusion of a chapter that began with the basics (the distinction between computer hardware and software), included several pictures (of different network structures), and provided an overview of how computer networks worked. Since this chapter clearly had to be written

5i Perseverance, Pictures, and Parts

in an accessible voice, it helped legitimate the use of that voice throughout the thesis. My insistence on producing the graphics myself led to the purchase of a new graphics card and monitor for my computer. Although I did remove many occurrences of the pronoun "I" from my thesis and agreed to some modifications in terms of voice, I felt that the end result was accessible. The irony was that dealing with complex theoretical issues related to technological change in an accessible voice was much more difficult than I had anticipated, and perhaps less successful than my coverage of technical issues. I still do not fully understand how my committee and I resolved the voice issue, though I remain grateful for the opportunity to learn to write accessibly, as well as to confront the numerous issues one faces in challenging the orthodoxy of the academy. I am still somewhat surprised that I was able to address my interest in the use of computer networks in the context of feminist social change within the university. Perhaps because I lacked the potentially protective structures of a department, I feared that something would go wrong and my work would be deemed inappropriate for a doctorate. To combat these fears, I relied on what a friend calls the "competency-deviancy theory/' which maintains that demonstrating competence in important areas such as theory and research methodology creates space for one to display deviance in other respects, such as in choice of topics or mix of disciplines. Keeping this in mind, I worked hard to develop a clear methodological approach that was well grounded in a body of literature. I also held onto my faith that the theoretical problems I encountered through my work in more than one discipline would eventually be resolved. I read widely in relevant areas of computer science, both because, as a discipline, computer science is beginning to address social issues and because it was important to be able to locate my work in relation to computer science. As a doctoral student I occasionally taught undergraduate courses for the computer science department, the communications department, and the women's studies program. This aided me in assimilating the language of each discipline and provided a context for interaction with discipline based scholars. After I moved to St John's, Newfoundland, to take up a faculty position in women's studies, people at the university would ask me what department I was in. I would explain that I was appointed to women's studies, which was a program, not a department. Predictably the next question would be, "Well, then, what is your discipline?" Even though I developed a response to this question, I was not entirely comfortable being asked. But gradually, I began to understand the

52 Caroline Andrew

value of my interdisciplinary education, rather than viewing it as many others did, as a form of intellectual deviance and frivolity. It sometimes strikes me as odd that instead of going out and buying a new computer, I have replaced my computer piece by piece over time. I justify this practice as a combination of continuing education and intellectual problem solving. I almost replaced my lowdensity floppy drive recently (the only part of the computer I began my doctorate with that still exists). I was working on a piece of research that employed both qualitative and quantitative methods. Predictably, I decided to use a new piece of software to do my statistics. Perhaps it was my return to quantitative methods that tempted me to dismantle the computer once again. I resisted old habits and completed the first run of my statistics and charts without a screwdriver. One of the diagrams I drew with my computer assisted drafting program during preparations for my Ph.D. is on top of a pile of papers on my desk today. It formed the basis of a review article I wrote recently about women and technological change. "

AGENCY

"

AND

"

AGENCIES,

"

OR

I N T E R D I S C I P L I N A R I T I E S I HAVE

KNOWN

Caroline Andrew Agency

As part of a research project done with two colleagues from sociology at the University of Ottawa, Cecile Coderre and Ann Denis, we receive a letter evaluating a manuscript we have submitted to Work and Occupations. Our study is on the interrelationships of the private and public dimensions in the lives of middle and senior women managers, and this particular manuscript deals with career paths, educational trajectories, and family histories. At one point in the manuscript, wanting to underline our interpretation that the data indicated a certain margin of choice exercised by these women in their careers (as well as factors less subject to the influence of the women, such as their family backgrounds and the particular sociopolitical context of the 19703 and 19805), I had suggested the use of the word "agency." The texts I read as a political scientist use "agency" to suggest the importance of the individual actor and to underscore the recognition that the "heavy" factors of economic structures or class positions (so popular in the studies of the 19603) are not everything. The word was being used loosely, but it seemed, at least to me, to fit the sense of that section of the manuscript. One of the evaluators objected to the use of "agency," stating that

53 Agency and Agencies you distinguish between socio-political context and "agency." I find myself confused by this distinction. By page 9, it appears that agency is taken as women acting as agents for themselves in selecting between home and career choices. Some of us were raised in an academic environment that is divided equally between sociology psychology and economics. Agency theory is very, very big in economics and deals with the way in which people behave as agents for others. Agentic behaviour (psychology and sociology) must be carefully distinguished from this when you are talking about the economic realm. To be honest the concept is now a very rare one in the research circles in which I am involved. It appears to have sprung from the concept that women were emotive and men agentic; most of us dismiss the early research as flawed by stereotyping.

As I had never heard of the word "agentic/' and therefore certainly had never associated it with men rather than women, this does illustrate the problems of vocabulary in doing research that attempts to cross or link disciplines. Not only are words used differently within different disciplines but they can be used with different degrees of intended precision. I had not wanted to use the word in an absolutely technical sense (although clearly "agency" is not commonsense vocabulary) but the evaluator seemed to be reacting as though she or he was reading the word in a narrowly defined and precise fashion. As Salter and Hearn later put it in chapter 7 of this book, the language problem arises because the same words are used in quite different ways in different disciplines and because the meaning of any term is derived, at least in part, from the way it is used within the register of a discipline. These misunderstandings about words and their meaning pose problems for interdisciplinary research. Members of a research team must not only reach agreement on the interpretation of the data (already something that brings out differences in intellectual backgrounds and disciplinary traditions) but there must also be agreement on the way in which every term is going to be defined and used. This certainly increases the heaviness of the research process, not to mention the difficulties in communicating the results. I am tempted to mutter, "If one can only speak to those who use the same words as oneself." On to my second story ... Agencies

As part of a research project being done with two colleagues from Carleton University, Fran Klodawsky from Geography and Women's Studies and Colleen Lundy from Social Work, we are trying to think

54 Caroline Andrew

of sources of financing for a new part of the project. The original project looked at the creation of the Women's Action Centre Against Violence (Ottawa-Carleton) and we wanted to extend the project to do a cross-Canada comparative study of similar local initiatives. To what agencies should we apply and how would our choice influence the description of the project? This is not to say that the project would change but rather that, like most research projects, it is multifaceted and can be described according to a variety of perspectives. The project describes the way in which a broadly based coalition of women's groups, service providers, and community groups succeeded in convincing the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton to fund an organization that would work locally on issues of violence against women. The new phase of the project would extend this research across Canada to compare other examples and, in the process, to gain a better understanding of locally based community politics around feminist issues. The project is therefore about solving the problem of violence against women in our society and local community initiatives for social change; it is about the relationships between participants in a project and the policy thrusts taken by the project; it is about feminist theory, etc., etc., etc. All these (and other) theoretical foci exist, but they cannot all be developed in the average length of an application form. There is therefore a choice to be made, and the choice is in part pragmatic. If we are asking SSHRC for funds, the foci are more likely to be theoretical than if we are asking Health and Welfare. When we discover an American foundation that finances research aimed at reducing violence in society, our project fits, but the description in this instance needs to make clear the link between the project and the mandate of the foundation. Some of the theoretical foci are more appropriate to this last application than are others. The different theoretical possibilities that the project evokes are also influenced by the division of work within the research group. We all share some knowledge of the literature on women's studies, but we also have separate disciplinary literatures. I know political science material; Fran knows geography; and Colleen, social work. Depending on who decides to do the first draft of an application, certain fields of literature and certain foci are easier to describe, and these choices will almost certainly remain predominant in the final form of the application. As the editors put it in this volume (chapter 2), instrumental interdisciplinarity attempts, at best, to create what "Guy Berger calls ... a 'unity of practice': an effort to bring the academy into the community, to analyze the many dimensions of a social problem, and to communicate efficiently across disciplinary divisions."

55 Agency and Agencies

It is true that our underlying objective is to make the OttawaCarleton initiative better known, in hopes that this knowledge will help other communities take action against violence against women. It is a social objective linked closely to a theoretical objective by our belief that a better understanding of the process will make it easier for other communities to use. Theoretical clarity is necessary to achieve social pertinence. We had come to a very easy, harmonious, and rapid understanding about a research plan and a division of work. Would we have agreed on things so easily if we had had to agree first on a common theoretical framework and focus? But also, will the research be limited without this theoretical framework? Can we go beyond banal description if we do not have conceptual clarity? Conceptual and Instrumental Interdisciplinarity These two examples illustrate some of the questions raised in any study of interdisciplinary research. They certainly indicate, from my point of view, the usefulness of distinguishing between conceptual and instrumental interdisciplinarity. The example of problems with the definition of "agency" is about the way we articulate our results - it is about the interpretation of the data and how this interpretation can be described in ways that can be understood across a number of disciplines and approaches when those disciplines do not use the same words in the same way. The choice of agencies, or funding sources, is a more pragmatic decision, not because it occurs earlier on in the research process but because there are a variety of equally valid ways to articulate the aims of the research project. And this, in turn, is linked to the fact that in the case of the study of the Women's Action Centre Against Violence, the better understanding of socially pertinent phenomena, and not theoretical clarification, is the principal motivation for the research. The values of interdisciplinarity are cumulative - more questions are asked, more perspectives are brought to bear on the object being studied. To force a comparison, interdisciplinarity in this case allows us to see more rather than to see better. It is the addition of perspectives rather than the formulation of a new perspective. It is instrumental interdisciplinarity, not conceptual interdisciplinarity. At this point, once again, questions are raised for me. I realized that my initial reactions to interdisciplinarity all related to team research experiences and that I was in danger of confounding interdisciplinarity and team research. This led me to think more about the research work I do on my own, most of which has been centred around cities and women - both clearly interdisciplinary subjects, or

56 Caroline Andrew

objects, of research. However, as I thought about the two, I realized how very different my practice is in each of these fields. In my case, my research stance in relation to cities has been much more instrumental; and in relation to women, more conceptual. Most of the research I have done on politics and urban development would fall into the category of instrumental interdisciplinarity. Very little of the reading I do is by political scientists - geographers would probably be the principal group, but also sociologists, planners, historians, and economists. In bringing together these authors, I am not really trying to forge from them an integrated perspective or a synthesis, I am usually trying to see how some particular phenomenon that interests me has been studied by others. The research focus starts more from an urban phenomenon than from a theoretical question. Of course this oversimplifies the relationship between theory and empirical research, and many epistemological questions do emerge in my research on urban politics. I am, for instance, very conscious that I may not be accurately borrowing from the geographers or that I may be borrowing things that have been criticized or dismissed by geographers. Can I just add "political" to "space" and not feel guilty about misusing my sources? From time to time urban studies has wanted to claim status as a discipline, but generally this has not been done, at least in Canada. A discipline needs to have definite limits; it needs to exclude, whereas urban studies in Canada has tended to be inclusive. Canadian urban research has, for instance, been very concerned with specifically Canadian problems (this because of the enormous amount of American writing on urban development and the obvious problems of using it directly for understanding Canadian cities) and this focus draws it into questions of national political culture and historic patterns of development rather than restricting it to what goes on within the limits of the Canadian city. Thinking about conceptual interdisciplinarity in individual research is made easier for me when I compare my research work in urban politics and in women's studies. Whereas the research in urban politics is predominantly a form of instrumental interdisciplinarity, that in women's studies is much closer to conceptual interdisciplinarity. Women's studies sees itself as a critic of classical disciplinarity and as a transformative practice. One cannot read in women's studies without being confronted with methodological and epistemological questions. If one wants, as I do, to look at questions of women's presence in local politics, one is constantly being pulled towards new definitions of politics and of the local. The feminist commitment to the personal as political transforms traditional definitions of politics

57 Agency and Agencies

and, often, traditional ways of behaving in politics. Jill Vickers, Evelyne Tardy, and Dominique Masson have all done research on this area; Vickers (1989) by looking at how women define their political participation, Tardy's research team (Gingras, Maille, and Tardy 1989) by comparing women's and men's activism and their articulation of these roles, and Masson (Anadon et al. 1990) by looking at the internal organization and processes of operating within women's groups. All these studies not only give concrete information about women's local political involvement, but they do so in ways that raise theoretical questions that cannot be ignored. It is this insistent quality that is fundamental to women's studies and that marks conceptual interdisciplinarity for me. One is obliged to think about definitions, about concepts, about looking at things in fundamentally new ways. One is forced to unite separate bits of analysis rather than accumulate specialized fragmentations. So where does this leave me? One can think of my examples as forming a sort of simple matrix of kinds of interdisciplinarities, as illustrated below: Instrumental Interdisciplinarity

Conceptual Interdisciplinarity

Team Research

Sources of funding and multiple definitions of project

Definition of concepts and their use across disciplines

Individual Research

Urban studies

Women's studies

What I retain as central is that all these forms of interdisciplinarity are important -1 do not, at all, think of the questions of instrumental interdisciplinarity as being less noble than those of conceptual interdisciplinarity. Figuring out how best to work in a group on questions of social pertinence is absolutely fundamental - and so is being obliged to reconsider one's definitions of central notions and of segmented expertise. Encouraging one form of disciplinarity does not mean discouraging others. Therefore, there is no need to quarrel about what is the most genuine form of interdisciplinarity. The policy prescriptions are clear - a variety of forms of research support that encourage a variety of modes of interdisciplinary projects. But this goes beyond the scope of this text, which was intended to document my own experiences with interdisciplinary research and look at the questions that these experiences have raised. The questions raised are endless and constant. That, to me, is what is so rewarding about interdisciplinary research.

58 Margrit Eichler ON F I N D I N G ONE S WAY IN THE U N C H A R T E D SWAMPS OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY1

Margrit Eichler

Some people seem to have an inborn sense when it comes to orienting themselves in strange surroundings. Others get lost on their way to friends they have visited a hundred times or more, and they occasionally have problems finding their own office. I belong to the latter category. This type of handicap can be partially overcome with good maps that correspond to clear signs. Even bad pathfinders can learn to orient themselves that way. It makes one keenly aware of the need for signposts of all types. One of the contributions of the recent studies of interdisciplinary research is that they set some signposts for an area that is more or less uncharted. I shall try out some directions suggested in this book by applying two tests: first, do they include all the paths that I have personally travelled in the swamps of interdisciplinarity? Second, do they include adequate descriptions of these paths, or are there aspects that are missing or misleading? In order to answer the first question, I need to list the various interdisciplinary paths I have trodden in the course of many years: • working with librarians to construct bibliographies, bibliographies of bibliographies, and, recently, a women's thesaurus; • working with people from various disciplines in putting together a journal;2 • collaborating with an undergraduate history major on an article on history and historiography; • working with a demographer on a book chapter; • working with a nonacademic in editing an (academic) journal issue/book; • working with an interdisciplinary group comprising a political scientist, a psychoanalytically oriented literature professor, a philosopher, a law professor, and others, to write guidelines for nonsexist research; • collaborating with a historian to write an encyclopedia article on the women's movement; • teaching a joint course with someone from a different discipline (on one occasion a course in human relations, on another occasion in law); • working with a lawyer on theoretically reconceptualizing a particular issue in family law;

59 Uncharted Swamps

• writing a book on nonsexist research methods; • becoming extensively involved in women's/feminist studies through participation in courses, conferences, feminist organizations, informal grass-roots groups, government bodies, collaborative projects, and so on. Salter and Hearn identify six views of interdisciplinarity, with the intention of identifying problems within each of these views (see chapter 2). Taking their expanded list as my basis, I conclude that I have engaged in all forms of interdisciplinarity they list: I have done research involving two or more disciplines; challenged established disciplines (bringing a feminist perspective to sociology); been involved in the first (and later) stages of new fields of study (women's studies); critiqued various disciplines (using nonsexist research criteria); formulated and helped to partially address a demand for relevance of research to women and identified new agendas - for example, by trying to integrate the analysis of unpaid housework into any analysis of work in general and to integrate a female and male, child and adult perspective into family studies, and, at present, by trying to integrate a feminist with an ecological and sociological perspective. The broad roadways charted by Salter and Hearn therefore meet their first test: they allow me to account for everything under one or more of their descriptors (and quite often it is more than one). Since no claim of exclusivity has been made, this is no problem, and probably an advantage, because it reveals some of the layeredness of the phenomenon under consideration. Now to the second question: How adequate is the description of the lay of the land? Salter and Hearn identify problems attached to each of the six approaches. Here I would like to add some detail to the map. I have certainly experienced each and every problem they identify, and then some. It is on these additional ones that I wish to focus. When discussing research involving two or more disciplines, the authors identify three problems: the translation problem, the language problem, and the reception problem. I have encountered all three, but in my experience, doing interdisciplinary work outside of a team effort that involves representatives from various disciplines increases the problems to such a degree that they become qualitatively different, of an order of magnitude that puts them into a category all by themselves. The problems start at the formative stage, at which talking is the best way to achieve some clarification of one's thoughts. Finding

60 Margrit Eichler

someone to talk with is as likely as winning the lottery. Precisely because you are involved - by yourself - in a task that is marginal by definition, it is not of central interest to anyone else. Nor are you able to put the issues into a form that sounds compelling, concise, and worthy of attention. The people who would be your best partners in talking and your best critics are also likely to be themselves deeply involved in something only marginally relevant to what you are trying to do and about which - strangely enough - they wish to talk. (This is where graduate courses come in very handy - students are a captive audience, if ever there was one.) After you have written something, neither the people in your home discipline nor the people in the sister disciplines into which you have fearfully and timidly ventured are likely to be interested in reading it and in giving you feedback - because it continues (by definition) to be marginal, and everyone is frightfully busy with matters that are of central concern to them. Yet you desperately seek constructive criticism. No one likes to play the fool, and it is easy to make basic mistakes due to unfamiliarity with a particular disciplinary terrain. On the other hand, not everyone is suited to serve as a critic: you want someone who is willing to read your work and correct basic misapprehensions concerning the discipline without trying to silence your criticisms - someone who sees the brilliant idea behind its clumsy and inelegant presentation. In my experience, it takes a special person who is able to penetrate to the essence of a thought behind the obvious and unavoidable ignorance of specific issues, modes of thinking, and manners of expressing oneself. Such persons tend not to be defensive about their own discipline, are quite willing to hear it criticized, even by an outsider, and to consider such criticism soberly. They tend to be people who have themselves struggled with a similar problem and are therefore able to appreciate and sympathize with your dilemma. If, in spite of these problems, the work gets done, it still needs to be published. By definition, it will not fit any of the established categories, unless it is stuffed uneasily into one of the existing pigeonholes. If the product is an article, the choice is between a disciplinary and an interdisciplinary journal. The disciplinary journals are likely to send it back, sometimes expressing their admiration at the brilliance of the argument and regretting that it does not fit into their disciplinary subject matter. More often, they are likely to send it back because the piece is not sufficiently embedded in what they consider the relevant literature. They may politely inform you that although your approach is original your concepts are not the ones currently in use when debating these issues. (That, of course, was the whole point of your exercise.) Besides, so-and-so (a bigwig of the discipline) has

61 Uncharted Swamps

conclusively shown - using the conventional approach - that matters are quite different and therefore you must obviously be wrong. An interdisciplinary journal may accept it, at the cost of losing a large chunk of the audience you wanted to reach. If the product is a book, your work must be stuffed into some existing pigeonhole, whether it fits or not. The publisher must, after all, know where in the catalogue to mention the book and to which audience to gear it. If you are lucky, the publisher will ask your advice on how to categorize your book. If your editor then switches to a job with another publisher or the publishing house is sold (it seems to be happening constantly), whatever was agreed upon tends to be lost in the shuffle. Once the book is published, the problems continue. Now the librarian classifies your work. Current referencing systems are often not set up to identify a work in multiple disciplines (if the number exceeds, say, two) and therefore researchers in the various disciplines are not led to it. The consequences of being misclassified may be quite dramatic. In one example, the publisher added the subtitle A Practical Guide to a book entitled Nonsexist Research Methods. Consequently, it was classified, in at least one university library, with manuals and how-to books, rather than with books on social science methods or theory.3 One solitary author cannot possibly have the time, knowledge and energy to present the completed work to colleagues from different disciplines to whom it might be of interest. It is impossible to attend all the relevant meetings of the respective learned societies. If there is no established scholar from within a specific discipline who informs her or his colleagues that some interdisciplinary work might, in fact, be relevant to their discipline, it is less likely to be recognized as relevant.4 Turning to a second swampy spot in which we can expand the description somewhat, Salter and Hearn note that there are two views of interdisciplinarity - a view of interdisciplinarity as the first stage of a new field of study or discipline and the opposing but also complementary view of interdisciplinarity as an intellectual movement. I submit that one can think of these two views as being tied antithetically together. As Salter and Hearn note, different disciplines are differentially receptive to intellectual movements, and adherents of the "intellectual-movement camp" may inadvertently drift into the "new-field camp" because of administrative constraints. This well describes a current dilemma of women's/feminist studies. Undoubtedly, various disciplines have been differentially receptive to integrating a feminist perspective (Eichler 1992), and, to complicate things further, different departments within the same

6a Margrit Eichler

disciplines are also differentially receptive. Equally undoubtedly, women's studies is developing as a new field of study. It has its own learned society, at least one PhD program, MA programs, and a number of major and minors to its credit (Tite 1990). There are five endowed chairs and there is a strategic research program at SSHRC that addresses one aspect of the field. This constitutes progress, but it also poses some problems. Women's/feminist studies has been around for twenty-odd years. During this time an immense amount of highly innovative, important, and challenging work has been done, mostly by scholars who would identify their work as discipline-based with a feminist perspective.5 By that definition, they belong in the intellectual-movement camp. Looking over the disciplines of those academic authors who have been defined as influential by their peers (Lenton 1990) leads to a similar conclusion, since they can all be easily identified with a discipline other than women's studies. The first generation of intellectual pioneers had to confront extraordinary challenges. One of their coping mechanisms was to go back and forth between their home discipline and this newly emergent field. This is an extremely difficult, rewarding, and exhausting road to travel. In the process of exploring and mapping the new field, structures were put in place that accommodate interdisciplinary thinking. By their very existence, they alter profoundly the nature of the collective enterprise. For instance, the experience of students who graduate from women's studies programmes is significantly different from the experience of students who go through regular programs and turn to women's studies later in their career. Are you still interdisciplinary when you have never defined yourself in disciplinary terms? Is the price of an institutional base necessarily the loss of fluid boundaries? These are questions that need to be addressed. We ignore the changed make-up of our intellectual explorers and of the field at our peril. From my personal perspective, I have tried to fill in some details in the broad outlines provided by the editors of this volume. Having talked about some of the problems, it may be worthwhile to close with a reflection on why people such as me seem to be addicted to mucking around in the swamps of interdisciplinarity. After all, there are much cleaner places to walk in that require less effort and pose fewer risks. But where else can one find the same excitement, the same sense of discovery, the same likelihood of discovering breathtakingly new and stunning intellectual vistas? For those of us who are engaged in this activity, it seems that the thrill of exploring the unknown that is close to us, and within which we live, is worth the effort it takes.

4 The Practice of Interdisciplinarity

Each of the four contributors in this chapter - John Robinson, Alberto Cambrosio, Jill Vickers, and Barry Truax - has participated in the emergence of something akin to a new discipline, but all argue that their preoccupation with the practical uses of research provided the impetus for their own interdisciplinary orientation. The practical use is different in each case. The contribution of social science to the study and practice of medicine, as described by Cambrosio, is necessarily quite different from the artistic endeavours in the field of computer music described by Truax, or the significance of environmental studies for public policy described by Robinson, or the establishment of Canadian studies within the university described by Vickers. In each case, these contributors describe how they combined materials not previously considered compatible to give shape and substance to new fields of study. They also emphasize the reasons why this combination was necessary, reasons that draw attention to the relationship between scholarly knowledge and its use or application outside the universities. The fields of study these researchers describe - Canadian studies, environmental studies, computer music, and the social study of medicine - have many of the characteristics we have attributed to disciplines. Each now displays a recognizable constellation of topics and approaches to research and something akin to a register. Yet, interestingly, only environmental studies is a ready candidate for disciplinary status. Why is this so? It appears that there is no general answer that applies to all cases. It is necessary to critically examine the institutional history of each field of study in order to address this

64 Barry Truax

question. One field of study emerges as an interdisciplinary specialization connected to a discipline (social studies of medicine) a second is labelled as interdisciplinary, even though it functions for all intents and purposes within the university as if it were a discipline (Canadian studies); a third is now generally recognized as a discipline, in spite of the previously divergent methodologies of its practioners (computer music); a fourth has now achieved most of the attributes of a discipline but takes great pride in its interdisciplinary status (environmental studies). An examination of the actions of particular individuals and the organisation of knowledge in specific univerities would also aid in an assessment of the fate of each of these fields of study. COMPUTER MUSIC AND ACOUSTIC

COMMUNICATION: TWO EMERGING INTERDISCIPLINES Barry Truax

If living in times of great transitions makes life more interesting, then I am twice blessed, for I have been a participant observer over the past two decades in the emergence of two related interdisciplines. Although there is some overlap between them, they are at distinctly different stages of development. The elder of the two, computer music, has grown from modest beginnings in the 19505 as an esoteric offshoot of a general interest in musical applications of technology to its current proliferation as a multimillion dollar industry, on the one hand, and a professional discipline in its own right, on the other. The younger interdiscipline, for which I have coined the term "acoustic communication," has grown out of work in "soundscape studies" by a research group at Simon Fraser University named the World Soundscape Project. It is an example of an "emerging voice" that is attempting to use the framework of communication studies to study phenomena that have largely been ignored in the social sciences. It is clearly still in its infancy and struggling to establish its identity. I propose to sketch a brief life history of each interdiscipline that may illustrate two contrasting lines of development. Computer music, as the application of digital technology to any and all questions of musical import, traces its beginnings to the pioneering efforts, mainly in the United States, of individuals who were generally scientists or engineers with some degree of musical background, whether amateur or professional. Notable among these was Lejaren Hiller, a chemist and composer, then at the University

65 Two Emerging Interdisciplines

of Illinois, who along with Leonard Isaacson programmed the Iliac computer in 1955 to generate output that could be transcribed into music notation. The first results, a string quartet and a book, Experimental Music, were greeted with outrage and scepticism, but today this work can be seen to be well grounded within the intellectual climate of the time, which saw, in particular, the emergence of information theory and cybernetics. The best-known pioneer, Max Mathews, an engineer at Bell Labs and an amateur musician, profited from the invention of the digitalto-analog converter around 1960 (which allowed numbers to be translated into audible sound) and created general-purpose software for producing synthesized music. Since the machines he used were timeshared mainframe computers, the process involved several stages of card punching, number crunching, and transporting the resultant digital tape to a facility housing the converters, a process requiring hours if not days to complete. However, the initial results of Mathews's work included a family of computer music languages (such as MUSIC iv and MUSIC v and their descendents, which established a set of software conventions that have influenced most of the mainstream approaches since), a book, The Technology of Computer Music (1969), and a somewhat controversial record, Music from Mathematics. This musical output presented everything from well-known tunes to more experimental noise-studies by one of the few composers to work in the Labs in the early years, James Tenney, currently at York University. My own involvement in the field dates from 1972 when I was a postgraduate student at the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, which had just acquired a minicomputer (PDP-I^). This medium-size computer (having the equivalent dimensions of several refrigerators) was designed for a single user and therefore could be programmed, as in my early POD programs, for interactive compositional work. Although the sound output was limited to monophonic synthesis (external digital oscillators came later), the computer and composer could engage in a "dialogue" about the work in progress. For perhaps the first time, the composer could react to programmed models of musical structure and modify the results quickly, and in addition, the composer's work process could be documented, since the record of the work session could be studied and reproduced. The computer became a compositional assistant as well as a framework for developing new musical ideas. Five years later the advent of the microcomputer reduced the size and cost of such a system, and five years after that, the commercial musical-instrument manufacturers introduced a communication protocol (musical instrument digital interface, or MIDI) to allow their by

66 Barry Truax

now largely digital devices to talk to each other and be controlled by microcomputers. The intervening decade has witnessed the massive growth of personal computers and MiDi-controlled synthesizers. Although today the modes of interaction with the machine are far more elegant, the musical applications far more varied, and the international spread of such systems impressive (unless one laments the loss of regional variations in studios), software remains the weak link in the system. Viewed as an interdiscipline, computer music can be seen to be propelled by advances in technology and, in particular, by the pressures of the commercial industry that has grown up around it. Yet this is not simply a case of technological determinism, since computers are not merely hardware. The software component ensures that the machine reflects specific knowledge of how to achieve goals, a specific model of how the process is to be carried out, and a desirable range of human behaviour in response to it. In short, the software creates a communicational environment within which the user operates. But software always carries a paradox within it. On the one hand, to be perceived as useful, it must be flexible and offer the user the illusion of doing "whatever you want"; but at the same time, software systems are "conservative" in that they can only perform what is known well enough to be programmed or what can attract a large enough market. More specifically the weak link is the way in which user knowledge based on experience with the program is (or is not) channelled back into the software to expand its capabilities. Even though most software appears to be a closed system, there is still the tantalizing, if largely unrealized, potential of its unlimited ability to expand toward new models and systems of unprecedented complexity. Computer Music Today The field of computer music today is well established, lively, and flourishing, showing many signs that it has progressed from an emergent interdiscipline to the full maturity (with lingering adolescent traits) of a discipline in its own right. Most of the infrastructure is in place. There is the International Computer Music Association, based in San Francisco with an international board of directors, which sponsors an annual conference that generally alternates between Europe and North America and which in 1993 was held in Japan. The MIT Press publishes the Computer Music Journal (CMJ), now nearing twenty volumes. There are regular competitions, juries, commissions, performances, festivals, reviews, publications, degree programs, and so on. Pioneers in the field, most still living, are regularly honoured, there

67 Two Emerging Interdisciplines

are standard reference works and, perhaps most importantly, there is an international "fraternity" (yes, it is still male dominated). When the editor of the CMJ was asked at a recent conference to define what computer music is, he was inspired to gesture to those around him and say "it's us." F. Richard Moore, in a recent survey of the field, identified computer music as the intersection of five parent disciplines, namely, music, computer science, engineering, physics, and psychology, with the "inter" disciplines between each pair of fields being AI research, digital hardware, device design, psychoacoustics, and psychomusicology, respectively (1990). Particularly telling is the fact that the younger generation seems to move much more easily between and among these areas, though the ideal of equal competence in hardware, software, music, communication, and cognitive modelling is seldom achieved. However, we have moved a long way from my undergraduate experience in the 19605, when one felt like a refugee walking between the science building and the music studio! Much of the sense of community seems to stem from the realization that the field is moving so quickly on so many fronts that no single individual can possibly keep up with it all - mutual support seems to be crucial, particularly if one is working locally in relative isolation. The institutional relations to the "parent" disciplines have largely stabilized as well. Moreover, as these disciplines are increasingly under siege because they produce graduates with traditional training for whom there is a dwindling need, they sometimes merely tolerate, but more frequently welcome, computer music into their curriculum in the hope of adding a veneer of contemporary relevance and student appeal. However, lack of funding for arts education has generally meant that facilities are often unstable, difficult to upgrade, and dependent on cheaper, commercially available equipment intended for a mass market and limited in research potential. Bruce Pennycook, at McGill University, has commented that the university generally has lost its position as the leading edge in the field as a result (1986). In fact, many computer music studios, particularly in Europe, have thrived apart from either parent discipline, unless absorbed into a music department that is especially well endowed for the purpose. One thinks of CCRMA (the Centre for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics) at Stanford, now housed within the music program but originally independent of it and a "guest" of the AI Lab; or the high-tech Media Lab at MIT; or IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique / Musique) in the Centre Beaubourg in Paris; or the Institute of Sonology, originally semiautonomous within

68 Barry Truax

the University of Utrecht, but now affiliated within the Royal Music Conservatory in The Hague. A perennial conundrum in computer music is why there are no major studios in Germany, given the country's leadership in high technology and its strong cultural roots. One telling answer is that there seems to be little institutional support for interdisciplinary work in that country. The tradition is that musicology is taught at the university, composition at the conservatory, technology is fostered by industry, and production studios are housed within the state radio institutions. Even when such institutions are geographically close, there seems to be little tradition of communication or cooperation between them. In Canada, as in the United States and Britain, work in computer music has, until recently, been almost exclusively associated with the university. However, the recent proliferation of relatively low-cost commercial equipment has produced a corresponding proliferation of computer music in private studios, small artist-run "parallel galleries," and even in secondary and elementary schools. Given the recessionary budgets of most universities, a common cynicism is that the students have more equipment than do the schools. However, research and development remains active in a few universities and in a growing number of small companies seeking out niche markets. Funding for computer music in Canada is generally acknowledged to lag behind the country's estimable reputation for its electroacoustic music production. Part of the problem is that the field has at various times been perceived to fall between the three granting councils. SSHRC funding has been sporadic but generous, at times supporting research in musical applications, but generally not studio development of software design for composition. The Canada Council (now joined with SSHRC) has targeted its support mainly to artists and arts organizations, and at present has only one grant for research (within the Integrated Media program), which is nonrenewable. It remains to be seen whether the merger of the two councils will result in any increased support for this interdiscipline, which is now so well established internationally. Acoustic Communication Compared with the field of computer music, which is widely established, acoustic communication is still merely a "proposed" interdiscipline that has emerged from work in the area at Simon Fraser University. Although acoustic communication relates to the interests of a wide range of scholars and artists, few of them work within a

69 Two Emerging Interdisciplines

department of communication or have any other institution or communication network in common. However, I have attempted in my book Acoustic Communication (1984) to give the field an intellectual basis that can be understood as a twofold critique, first, of traditional disciplines that study some aspect of sound and, second, of the social science interdiscipline of communication studies itself. The second critique is based simply on what I have found to be a "blind spot" in the social sciences regarding any subject involving perception. With the traditional disciplines, what is most striking is the way in which the study of sonic phenomena has been fragmented across nearly all areas of academic discourse. Each area proceeds from its own theoretical models and methodology, using its own terms and language, essentially getting the "local picture" correct but ignoring the landscape (or soundscape) as a whole. In addition, and here we see a common thread with the stance of other emerging interdisciplines, acoustic communication finds its justification in the fact that contemporary problems related to sound and audio technology are not well handled by the traditional approaches. Problems such as noise pollution, the impact of the audio industry and the use of sound in media, the apparent decline in listening abilities, and so on, seem insurmountable, except in localized ways, with traditional methodology. From a theoretical perspective, I have suggested that a new model, one that I call a communicational approach, is needed. The traditional models have been based principally on the notion of energy transfer as found in the physical sciences. Sound and its behaviour is modelled as a series of energy transfers from the source, through the medium, to the receiver, and finally to the brain, ending perhaps with a final emotional dissipation of the energy as annoyance or pleasure. Audio engineering substitutes an analogous series of signal transfers to describe the way in which sound is converted (that is, transduced) from its physical, acoustic form to an electrical signal, then stored, processed, or transmitted, and finally reconstituted at the "receiver's" end. Similarly, classical psychophysics treats the auditory system's processing of incoming stimuli as a series of stimulus-response reactions. Music and linguistics are largely concerned with the internal workings of the phenomena they have defined as within their domain, but most of their theory seems to be based on some kind of linear transmission model, with an emphasis on performance strategies. The consequences of the base model of each discipline can perhaps best be seen at the level of its corresponding design theory. Acoustical engineering, for instance, when concerned with problems of noise,

jo Barry Truax

deals mainly with acoustic energy at the source and in the process of propagation, or else it advocates isolating the receiver or otherwise modifying the sound to minimize unwanted effects. An interesting case of the applied use of psychophysics is the Muzak industry, with all of the attendant controversy surrounding the manipulative use of sound for specific effects on workers and consumers. Architectural acoustics seems caught up in the complexities of achieving good acoustics even in well-defined situations, such as spaces for speech and music transmission; it hardly considers less controlled situations in which quantitative and qualitative criteria have not been agreed upon. And music, which Herbert Simon (1969, 81) calls one of the oldest of the sciences of the artificial, is still largely concerned with matters of musical style, analysis of artifacts (the score), abstract works of art that are thought to exist independent of cultural context, and analytical models that assume an idealized listener that scarcely can exist today given the impact of noise, mass media consumption, and audio consumerism. The theory of acoustic communication substitutes information for energy or signals as the basic "unit" of its model. Hence, since information is the result of cognitive activity, listening is placed at the centre of the process, not as some final stage of a series of energy/ signal transfers. The linear transportation model of signals, in turn, is replaced with the notion of sound as mediating the relationship between listener and environment, where the patterns of influence can proceed in both directions. That is, the communicational situation can be modified, either with a change in the physical environment itself or simply with the listener's perceptual habits. And finally, the notion of context, which is frequently ignored in traditional models, is given a central place in acoustic communication, in the sense that sonic information is dependent both on the nature of the sound itself and on its context. It is impossible to sketch out all the applications of this new theory, but perhaps it is clear that by being more listener centred and context sensitive, acoustic communication will approach problems in less of a linear "effects" manner and give more emphasis to relationships and processes. In short, it will attempt to deal with the complexities of a communicational situation. It uses all the knowledge garnered from the traditional disciplines, with its validity limited by the assumptions under which it was created, but proposes a larger, more encompassing framework for understanding the contemporary world. In particular, the model of acoustic communication provides fresh insight into the impact of technology that is so troublesome within

yi Two Emerging Interdisciplines

the modern context. Traditional audio theory is based on an assumed neutrality of technology whereby if the transmission of the audio signal is perceived (or measured) to have "fidelity" to the original, then it is thought to have been successful. Besides ignoring any responsibility for content, this model also ignores the inevitable fracture in context - what R.M. Schafer (19773) terms "schizophonia" that exists between the original source and its later out-of-context reproduction. A similar philosophy of neutrality is embodied in the use of sound effects that are synchronized to appear "natural" and in emotive music that assumes we all feel the same reaction to a scene (or if not, we will be made to). Acoustic communication, on the other hand, assumes the inevitable artificiality of the situation, and notes the new relationships (often consumer oriented) that are created by these supposed "extensions" of acoustic phenomena. From a design perspective, the imperative is based less on the manipulative use of sound for its effects and more on an exploration of the sound material itself and ways in which the listener can achieve new levels of understanding of the world through sound. In short, one tries to look past the marketplace hype, which promotes everything as new but instead hides endless repetition of the same, to find situations where technology achieves a net gain in that it changes the process of communication. Acoustic Communication Today Acoustic communication will probably not ever have the infrastructure of a discipline in its own right to the extent that computer music has managed in less than forty years. However, it seems to me that communication studies is the proper place to locate it as a field of special study. In order to populate such a field, the intellectual problem I alluded to earlier of the fragmented approach to the study of sound would have to be solved, since this problem translates into a lack of people with sufficient interdisciplinary training. Ideally, we would train students in the social sciences with a sufficient knowledge of acoustics, psychoacoustics, audio technology, and specifically applicable aspects of music, linguistics, audiology, and acoustical engineering. This is clearly a formidable task. Electroacoustic musicians often come closest to this breadth of background, though even with them there are few who can see past a preoccupation with their art to consider applying it to matters of social concern. At the same time, in the "real world" distinctions between media and art, popular and serious music, or media and environment are becoming increasingly blurred and often involve the same technology.

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Another possible line of development is for students of acoustic communication to "break into" areas normally open only to graduates of specialized disciplines or to combine communication studies with those disciplines. The advantage such "hybrids" would have, I believe, is a better grasp of how to deal with complex applied problems. Acoustical engineers, for instance, learn all the scientific methodology, but in practice have to deal with government regulation, political imperatives, and individual psychology. Audiologists are trained with the required medical background, but can they communicate with people experiencing hearing loss in a way that makes the implications clear to them? Even more typical is the way in which audio-trained personnel know the technology but have only conventional ideas about how to use it (not to mention frequently having impaired hearing and listening abilities). Fresh ideas could provide a "competitive edge" to anyone entering these fields. However, it is reasonable to expect resistance to these new ideas from the established disciplines. The World SoundScape Project, cited above as the progenitor of studies in acoustic communication, fortunately began in the late 19605 and early 19705, directed by R.M. Schafer, at a time when experimentation and interdisciplinary work was, if not in vogue, then at least open to being funded. UNESCO, the Dormer Foundation, and SSHRC were some of the sources of public funds used to sponsor field trips across Canada and Europe, the results of which appeared in the group's published documents and recordings. However, by the mid-1970s, sympathy for such experimental work was waning. Schafer left Simon Fraser, and I, as a young, visiting faculty member, had my first experience of an academic "hatchet job" when we applied to SSHRC for a new project involving the study of a village in British Columbia that had been chosen for its acoustic integrity (that is, it was not on a major highway or flightpath) and interest. SSHRC proposed a site visit and sent out a team comprised of senior academics in geography, physics, and anthropology, along with a junior academic from music. Short-term funding was granted, pending review, but we clearly did not measure up to the reviewers' standards and further funding was curtailed. Whether or not the decision was correct does not matter much now, but what struck me was the vituperation (on paper, at least) of the reviewers, despite the cordial site visit. One in particular even suggested I should be assessed the costs of the reviews! Perhaps they were right; we had no phos in any of the established areas, and our methods probably seemed ad hoc. The project disbanded and I went on to do my own research that culminated in the publication of Acoustic Communication,

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which I hope will prove to be a better contribution to the field. But, to my knowledge, the kind of fieldwork that was started has never been done since. I'll always wonder if it was a coincidence that the village we chose (Chemainus) later became famous for its vitality and spirit when it countered the closing of its sawmill with an imaginative mural project that has turned the town into a booming tourist attraction. Was there a correlation between its acoustic cohesiveness and the spirit that later manifested itself? All new ideas have to fight for survival, but ultimately it may be how well they respond to the needs of the time that determines their longevity. Here, I am convinced that the future of acoustic communication will be bright. Problematic acoustic phenomena are becoming increasingly commonplace and are often complex. The traditional approaches have few answers and even less inclination to adapt their methods to meet the challenge. Public funding is increasingly looking at cost-benefit analysis, and students are voting with their feet by looking at interdisciplinary and applied fields with new interest. And as for the long dormant "soundscapes studies" work at Simon Fraser, much is happening: a new newsletter in several issues with an international mailing list of over 400 people, and at a conference in 1993 entitled the Tuning of the World, a new international organisation, the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, was formed. Stay tuned!

(RE)PRODUCING INTERDISCIPLINARITY: SOCIAL STUDIES OF M E D I C I N E AT McGILL

Alberto Cambrosio

In September 1990, I began my new job in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine (SSOM) at McGill University. As can be inferred from its name, this is an interdisciplinary department. Interdisciplinarity was not a new experience for me. My previous position included teaching students of an undergraduate program in science, technology, and society; furthermore, although I had been formally a member of the department of sociology, my office and research activities had been located within the Centre de Recherche en Evaluation Sociale des Technologies, which recruited people from sociology, communication, history, and industrial engineering. My phD stemmed from an interdisciplinary department, the Institut d'Histoire et Sociopolitique des Sciences of the University of Montreal, where students were exposed to a mix of history and sociology of science and technology, science policy, and epistemology. A postdoctoral

74 Alberto Cambrosio

fellowship had allowed me to further specialize in science studies at the program in Science, Technology, and Society of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To sum up: my whole career has been unfolding under the sign of interdisciplinarity. Direct acquaintance with various interdisciplinary departments and programs has taught me not only that the institutional arrangements making up these experiences can be profoundly different but that important differences can also be found in the way the term interdisciplinarity is understood. These two aspects are, of course, closely linked. Ethnographic research in academic and research settings has shown how, even in traditional institutions, the various meanings and arrangements surrounding daily work have to be continually reconstituted through informal negotiations. This is arguably even more true of institutions where the tacit agreements of a somewhat routinized disciplinary order have been replaced by the often explicit discussion of new interdisciplinary arrangements. Interdisciplinarity can be understood as a meeting of disciplines around a given problem area or as the creation of a new problem area that none of the existing disciplines can claim as its own.1 In practice, this analytical distinction is often blurred. Scholars of different disciplinary origins and with various degrees of commitment to their discipline will contribute in various ways and to varying degrees to the constitution and mapping of the problem area. The problem area can be a recent construct (for example, "textuality") or a commonsense object (for example, "medical practice"). In the latter case, interdisciplinary scrutiny will lead to its redefinition. The important point is that interdisciplinarity is a situated endeavour. Any attempt to provide context-free definitions of interdisciplinarity or to generalize from local conditions has to be viewed with some healthy scepticism. In what follows, I will concentrate on my present experience at McGill University. However, my decision to focus on some of its elements, as opposed to others, has undoubtedly been shaped by previous exposure to other interdisciplinary programs. I will discuss three related aspects of SSOM. First, the department, while very much research-oriented, is also directly involved in teaching activities, especially at the graduate level. This is an important point. Although people often experience no difficulty in conceiving of (at least informal) interdisciplinarity in the production of knowledge,2 the reproduction of knowledge is mostly seen as the exclusive domain of disciplines. In our case, this has led to the negotiation of a peculiar set of arrangements between our department and the other relevant departments in the faculty of arts, culminating in the establishment in 1988 of a joint interfaculty graduate program.

75 Social Studies of Medicine

Second, SSOM is characterized by a double interdisciplinarity. On the one hand, its faculty members belong to three different disciplines (anthropology, history, and sociology) all situated within the large family of the social sciences; on the other hand, the department is located within the faculty of medicine, with most of its professors cross-appointed in the faculty of arts, and is thus called to act as a sort of bridge between the biomedical and the social sciences. It is this second kind of interdisciplinarity that appears to be the most important source of creative tension. Third, SSOM is not the result of an instantaneous decision to establish it, but, rather, it is the outcome of a process of slow accretion, set in motion in 1966 by the decision of the faculty of medicine to offer a chair in medical history to Dr Don G. Bates. Subsequently Dr Bates, in response to developments both within and outside the medical and academic world, developed a plan to add an anthropological and sociological dimension to the activities of what thus became a fullfledged, though admittedly small, department. Social Studies of Medicine is at present composed of three historians, two anthropologists, and one sociologist. What various observers perceive as the high degree of integration of the members of the department, as opposed to the eclectic mix that one often finds in hastily constituted interdisciplinary units, can be ascribed to this slow growth process. Let me briefly address, in turn, each of these three issues. As far as the distinction between production and reproduction of knowledge is concerned, the point here is not to discuss the theoretical usefulness of this dichotomy in differentiating disciplinary from interdisciplinary practices. Rather, the point is that in practice, this distinction matters, both for students exposed to existential doubts about their scholarly identity, not to speak of the (in my experience ungrounded) fear of bleak prospects on the job market, and for colleagues in other departments worried by possible encroachments on their academic turf. In the case of SSOM, these difficulties have been solved by a set of arrangements with the departments of the faculty of arts corresponding to the three disciplines represented within SSOM. Prospective MA students3 in the anthropology, history, and sociology of medicine apply to the corresponding department in the faculty of arts, are selected by a joint committee composed of representatives of SSOM and of the relevant arts department, and upon completion of the program, the degree is awarded by the arts department. Students take courses offered both by the arts department and by our department. The history of medicine course is compulsory for all students; in addition, students can and do take SSOM courses in disciplines other than their main discipline. Exposure to interdisciplinarity is

76 Alberto Cambrosio

completed by two mechanisms: attendance at the fortnightly seminar series featuring North American and European speakers with various disciplinary backgrounds and informal exposure to fellow students and the disciplinary mix of faculty. As the latter remark implies, the presence and role of graduate students in an interdisciplinary program goes beyond the horizon of formal institutional arrangements. Graduate students play a key role in fostering interdisciplinary exchanges within the department. It could actually be said that in being exposed and reacting to the teachings from the various faculty members, they are not only carriers of information across disciplinary barriers but also, directly and indirectly, one of the loci where interdisciplinary synthesis takes place. In turn, the degree of interdisciplinary exchange and synthesis is not without influence on the content of the research produced by faculty members, a fact that points to the strategic link between production and reproduction of knowledge. Given this role, the quality of the students admitted into an interdisciplinary program is a very important part of its success. The department's policy is therefore to admit only a small number of highly motivated students. A judicious mix of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, both institutional and cognitive, has succeeded in our case in attracting precisely this kind of student. This, of course, does not imply that other arrangements, including the establishment of an interdisciplinary graduate degree in SSOM, could not constitute a viable option.4 The question of which faculty or department grants what kind of degree leads us into the second set of issues, that is, issues related to the location of SSOM at the interface between the medical and the social sciences. It might at first sight seem a bit odd that a department that is part of the faculty of medicine offers programs certified by departments in the faculty of arts. Is this a sign that "we do not really belong there," that our basic identity lies indeed with the social sciences? In my opinion, this is the wrong question, mainly because it mechanically applies to medicine an understanding of disciplinary organization that characterizes the social and the natural sciences. Medicine is organized in its own distinctive way, epitomized by the presence and role of clinical practice and teaching. The real question, then, is: how is the fact that SSOM is part of the medical school translated into research and teaching activities? This question can be reframed by asking how the goal of contributing to the medical field can be combined with the adoption of a social science perspective. Although no definitive answer can be given to what is essentially an ongoing, practical accomplishment, several points should be noted.

77 Social Studies of Medicine First, all the members of the department consider the fact that SSOM has arisen within the medical school as a major asset.5 In practice, this means that interaction with medical scientists in both research and teaching is seen as a major goal of the department. This interaction can take several forms, including the establishment of working relationships with specific units, such as transcultural psychiatry, or more ad hoc collaborations with individual medical researchers. Second, this interaction is expected to go beyond the niche traditionally ascribed to the social sciences within medicine (for instance, the behavioural sciences approach to such topics as clinical encounters), and to engage issues relevant to the production and assessment of medical knowledge. Third, such a perspective has a better chance of success if a comparative perspective is adopted in which the theory and methods of the three disciplines represented in the department are productively combined. This, in turn, points to the necessary link between the two aspects of the double interdisciplinary status of SSOM. The final point concerns the dynamics that resulted in the present cognitive and institutional structure of the department. The establishment in 1966 of a history of medicine department can be accounted for by the presence of the Osier Library of the History of Medicine, one of the finest academic collections in North America devoted to this topic. The subsequent evolution of the history of medicine department into a social studies of medicine department took place within an academic context characterized by similar developments, for instance, the emergence and growth of journals, associations, programs, and departments with names such as Social Studies of Science, Science, Technology, and Society, and, more simply, Science Studies. This is, however, not the whole story. Indeed, while medical anthropology has a very strong presence within SSOM, anthropologists have only recently joined the science studies bandwagon. The presence and importance of anthropology within SSOM can be explained by two parallel developments whereby, on the one hand, medical anthropologists have shifted their focus from an exclusive interest in the "exotic beliefs" of non-Western healers to the analysis of the content of Western medical practices and, on the other hand, an understanding of non-Western medical practices is increasingly being perceived as relevant to the understanding of Western approaches to health and illness. In addition, the medical school has become increasingly sensitive to health care issues in developing countries and to the multicultural aspects of health and illness in our country.

78 JillVickers

The development of SSOM has been affected not only by the modification of the academic landscape. Transformations in the role and practice of medicine can also be shown to have affected the way the department has redefined its goals and structure. This is certainly not the place to analyze such complex developments and interactions. The point in evoking these elements is not to give an analytic overview of the department's history but to stress that SSOM is the outcome of such a history. This has practical consequences. Growth by slow accretion has resulted in the establishment of organic interdisciplinary links between the various members of the department, despite and beyond varying degrees of commitment to the mother discipline. Correlatively, the definition of the relevant problem area(s) of SSOM has tacitly evolved out of experiential learning, rather than being legislated by ad hoc negotiations among the members of the department. To sum up: the experience of interdisciplinarity reported in this text is certainly peculiar, in the sense that it arose from a series of unique circumstances and is probably indissociable from the persons and institutions that are part of it. As such, it cannot be presented as a model for other units where the production and reproduction of interdisciplinary knowledge is equally seen as a desirable goal. It can, however, be a testimony to the fact that interdisciplinarity indeed can work in these two aspects of academic life.

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS ON THE BEAVER PATROL: C A N A D I A N S T U D I E S AS A COLLECTIVE SCHOLARLY ACTIVITY Jill Vickers

I have been involved in many interdisciplinary ventures in my career, including a unified liberal arts program and the development of women's studies and Canadian studies. What interests me, particularly, is the evolution of interdisciplinary fields as collective intellectual activities. I have chosen to explore this aspect of the interdisciplinary experience by examining the more than 450 theses and research essays produced by students in the Institute of Canadian Studies at Carleton University from 1957 to 1989. For most of this period, Carleton offered the only graduate degree in Canadian studies. I have found it useful to understand Canadian studies thesis research at Carleton as an interdisciplinary intellectual endeavour that has developed at the MA level in five basic periods. These periods and their chief characteristics are outlined in table i.

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Canadian Studies

Table i The Development of Canadian Studies at Carleton 1958-68 The Founding Era • multidisciplinary • comparative method the ideal • "Gentlemanly nationalism" • building infrastructure, for example, Carleton Library series 1969-75 The Political Era • politicization of some thesis research • nationalism aimed at defining Canada • preoccupation with Quebec, political violence • leftist in general orientation 1975-82 The Seedbed Era • focusing on fostering Canadian-centred scholarship in art history, music, law, film, linguistics, mass communications • helping disciplinary scholars fight to develop Canadian themes through graduate study in the Institute of Canadian studies • native studies and women's studies begin on an informal basis 1983-90 The Era of "New Scholarship" • formal program-areas are organized in native and women's studies ("hearing silenced voices") • epistemological issues emerge • fully interdisciplinary approach with methods course and comprehensives • affirmative action admissions for native and north-of-sixty students • organized research units in native studies and heritage conservation 1991-

The Establishment of the School (not dealt with here) • permanent faculty • heritage conservation program-area added • advanced summer school for scholars from abroad

The Structure and Origins of Canadian Studies at Carleton The first thesis completed in the Institute of Canadian Studies was "Love and Death in Canadian Poetry." Written by Tom Farley and supervised by R.L. (Rob) McDougall, this 1963 effort is characteristic of the origins of Canadian Studies at Carleton more than a decade before the nationalist political campaigns of Jim Steele and Robin Matthews in the late 19605. Claude Bissell, then president of Carleton, recruited Rob McDougall in 1956 to establish the program. Bissell recently recalled that his actions were stimulated by the founding of the Canada Council. In 1958, Carleton did not have graduate programs in the four disciplines Bissell expected to cooperate in the creation of the institute: English, history French, and journalism. In 1959, sociology, political science, economics, and geography were also

8o JillVickers

recruited. These eight were to form the basis of a limited multidisciplinary venture for about a decade. Before looking at the intellectual results of this first period I want to write briefly about the terms "multidisciplinary" and "interdisciplinary." In his 1983 remembrances of the founding of the institute, McDougall describes the difficulty of establishing research in Canadian studies, even in the calm era before the political agitations of the late 19605 and before cooperating departments had their own graduate programs about which to feel threatened. He recalls, What were intended to be the co-operating departments, the backbone of a multi-disciplinary Institute, found themselves ... faced with a fait accompli ... I remember ... facing a glum phalanx of department heads who wanted to know just how the blazes I proposed to make this thing work. I didn't know myself then, but I had to pretend I did. "Interdisciplinary" was a term not much respected in academic circles in those days, for it seemed to threaten not only standards ("mish-mash," "cafeteria style," etc.) but also the integrity of departments and disciplines.6

The ease with which McDougall and others of this founding era slipped between the terms "multidisciplinary" and "interdisciplinary" is obvious from this quote. None of the twenty-one theses and research essays completed in the founding decade was interdisciplinary as the term is now often understood (see, for example, Vickers 1992). Each could have been completed in a disciplinary program, assuming the department in question was hospitable to the study of Canada. But the objectives of the intellectual enterprise created by McDougall, his colleagues, and his students went beyond those of the disciplines. The program aimed at research that, as the early calendar entries state, "should not be narrowly nationalistic but should reflect the cosmopolitan origins and interests of the country." This meant encouraging "comparative studies, which will explore ... the relations between Canada and the parent states of Great Britain and France, between Canada and the United States, and between Canada and other member nations of the Commonwealth." "Gentlemanly nationalism" was to focus on a "selected area of study from a broadly humanistic point of view," but the comparative method failed to emerge in the completed theses. These theses were supervised by faculty from the cooperating departments whose intellectual approaches were those of the disciplines in which they had been trained. This disjuncture between the stated goals of the program and the supervisory practices of the volunteer faculty involved has lessened in recent years, but it remains a problem to this day.

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In this founding period, the institute briefly tried but failed to establish an undergraduate program in Canadian studies. However, it eventually inherited an undergraduate program when St Patrick's College was integrated into Carleton in the late 19705. When I joined the institute in the early 19805, there was still widespread disapproval of undergraduate interdisciplinary Canadian studies due to the belief that students needed to be grounded firmly in a discipline before doing interdisciplinary work. The excellent small program, led by such scholars as Patricia Smart, Parker Duchemin, Donald Smith, and Enoch Padolsky, was the "orphan child" of the Institute until recently, tolerated but largely ignored. The founding decade is unique in several other respects. The first is the extent to which its research agenda was apolitical, with no common passions apparent. The second is the largely "establishment" nature of the researchers and their projects. In this era, for example, male students greatly outnumber female students. Students' names are very British (there is even a John Wesley). From the topics chosen, it would seem that no student was exercised about the plight of women, the native peoples, or other marginalized groups. The basic goal was to legitimize the study of things Canadian at the graduate level. This founding era was also notable for the invention and establishment of the Carleton Library series, which helped create the infrastructure needed for scholarship about things Canadian to emerge. After a nationwide survey of opinion on priorities for reprint titles, the first volumes were launched in the spring of 1963 at a splendid party on the new permanent Carleton campus. My first personal memory of Canadian studies as an undergraduate in the 19605 was this series, which legitimized things Canadian in a world in which scholarship was usually about things non-Canadian. The Political Era, 1969-75

The appointment of Pauline Jewett as director of the institute in 1967 coincided with a politicization that was taking place in the universities. In this period, thirty-four of the fifty-eight theses and research essays fit into three categories - "Quebec topics," "leftist topics," and "becoming Canadian: movements and structures" - that justify my description of this as the political era. In 1983, remembering her term as director, Pauline Jewett said, "The years 1967 to 1972 were ... fascinating years with the democratization of university governance in full bloom. I recall with pride the role we in the Institute played in this process. We had a lot of fun too. And lastly, I should mention how important the young people

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were in keeping me on the left." Jewett's memory heightened some characteristics of the Institute's while forgetting others. She remembers a "rough balance between women and men" in the institute, for example. In fact, men continued to outnumber women almost two to one. She does not mention the first presence of francophone students. And although this was certainly the most political era of the institute, the majority of students produced research that was not political in character. Nonetheless, the new core seminar was intensely political and the issue orientation of the students' work produced a more interdisciplinary approach. Certainly, the comparative Commonwealth vision of the founding era was gone. Of special interest is the apparent insulation of Canadian studies research in the institute from the Steele and Matthews controversy over Canadian studies in universities, generated by the writings of Robin Matthews, for example. Matthews supervised only one research essay late in the period. No doubt some students made the linkage between their research and the political struggle for Canadian universities, but it is not apparent within the body of research produced in the period. Institute students were caught up in many other issues of Canadianization, and much of their research focused on Canadian culture and cultural institutions. At the end of this period, Davidson Dunton retired as Carleton's beloved and respected president and became director of the institute. The Seedbed Era, 1975-82

I have characterized the period covering the directorships of Davidson (Davey) Dunton (1973-78) and S.F. Wise (1978-81) as the seedbed era. It was marked by conscious attempts to use the structure of the institute to nurture Canadian research in a number of fields, especially those concerned with high culture. The point was to develop graduatelevel research and supervisory expertise to the point where viable disciplinary graduate degrees could be established. This was often done in a context of conflict about the legitimacy of Canadian research within the field itself. In art history, for example, the focus on Canadian and aboriginal art fostered through Dunton's "gentleman's agreement" with the department was resisted by some scholars trained in the European tradition. Having a popular ex-president to negotiate with the departments was a godsend. So, while research in the traditions of cultural history and political history continued throughout this period, new seedbed ventures were begun with art history, music, mass communications, law, linguistics and film. Although women's studies and native studies did not emerge formally in this seedbed

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era, early traces of them are evident, and it was Dunton's openness to nontraditional approaches to scholarship that allowed them to grow. In this era, for the first time, nonwhite Canadians examined their experiences in Canadian society, and there were equal numbers of female and male students. The graduate program was still small enough for there to be a single core seminar that was thematic in nature and served as the intellectual focus for student research. Nonetheless, the tradition of intellectual tolerance that characterized Dunton's institute meant that there was intellectual space for the new scholarship of women's studies and native studies to take root. It became increasingly apparent that studying aboriginal peoples and women as objects within the framework of traditional methodology, however interdisciplinary, was unsatisfactory. The pressure to develop self-study methods of research that would be viewed as credible by mainstream authorities began in the institute in the 19705. The Era of the New Scholarship, 1983-90

In 1983, a formal program area was established in the institute in Northern and Native Studies. The program had a grant from the Donner Foundation for an affirmative action provision to admit native and north-of-sixty candidates without undergraduate degrees. In 1984, a second formal program area was established in Women's Studies. Heritage Conservation was formally established as a program area in 1989. In the five-year period from 1983 to 1989, 152 theses and research essays were completed in the institute. Of these, forty-one were in Women's Studies and twenty-one were in Northern and Native Studies. Seven of the 21 in Northern and Native Studies were completed by aboriginal students and 7 were completed by white students from north-of-sixty. The conditions for the development of the new scholarship were present. The new scholarship takes the goals and methods of a culturally sensitive interdisciplinarity to its logical conclusion. The method of dispassionately studying cultures and people as objects is replaced by methods that allow the voices of previously silenced groups to be heard, indeed, that allow the groups to become involved in shaping the research. Woman-centred, native-centred, and northern-centred scholarship displaced the usual worldview of academia. Just as Canadian subjects and interdisciplinarity were suspect in McDougall's day, the new scholarship was suspect in the 19805, especially to those for whom power involves not having to hear new voices or learn the new methods. In this climate, Canadian studies has provided a context

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within which aspects of the new scholarship could develop and mature at the graduate level. The new scholarship has also been contagious and, in the 19903, racial and ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, and gays and lesbians are beginning the process of generating self-knowledge. Conceptualizing the intellectual activity of Canadian studies at Carleton as a whole is far more difficult than conceptualizing the periods as I have done to this point. About a third of the graduates are now teaching in the mainline disciplines in film studies, art history, mass communications, women's studies or native studies and some of the theses have been published as books or articles. The effect, however, has been diffused over many disciplines and fields. As a result, the research constitutes a solitary dialogue that does not feed into Canadian studies programs elsewhere, because the field has no pho and we do not train our instructors. We recruit faculty for Canadian studies long after they are trained, and hope they can do enough on-the-job retraining to cope in a field in which the students find it easy to be interdisciplinary. Similarly, our journal and our learned association are primarily concerned with providing and encouraging research on things Canadian in the disciplines. Important though this is, it means that Canadian studies, as a discrete interdisciplinary field, lacks arenas in which intellectual debates can take place and outlets where interdisciplinary graduate students can publish. The fate of the Carleton Library series reveals the problem. So successful was it in encouraging original work on Canada, that the series was, first, incorporated into the Carleton Press and then largely superseded by the new Carleton Contemporaries series. Ironically, there is now one seat for the School of Canadian Studies on the management board of the Press, which is dominated by the disciplines. The character of the intellectual activity in Canadian studies will require attention in the years ahead. Stimulated by federal government funding, there are now 167 Canadian studies centres and programs in twenty-seven countries abroad. Attempting to respond to this development, Carleton's senior management, once again by fiat, charged the Institute with developing a summer school primarily for foreign scholars seeking to legitimize their involvement in Canadian studies abroad. This has slowed development of the PhD program that is clearly necessary to consolidate Canadian studies as a permanent, interdisciplinary field of intellectual endeavour. Certainly our students increasingly view Canadian studies as a field that is a permanent part of the academic landscape. Perhaps this is a result of the free-trade accords, or the result of the dynamic effects of the new

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scholarship. Whatever the cause, in recent academic years, we have had over 400 students enrolled in a fully interdisciplinary undergraduate first-year course, Introduction to Canadian Studies. Two of the sections are taught by a graduate of the institute. She is part of the first wave of academics sufficiently trained in an interdisciplinary mode to teach such a course with verve and confidence. She is in fact an omen of the future. FALLING BETWEEN SCHOOLS: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY

John B. Robinson On the Very Idea of Interdisciplinarity

Interdisciplinarity in Canadian universities (and presumably elsewhere) is a bit like new information technology. It is increasingly felt to be important, even crucial, in addressing new kinds of problems not well served by traditional ways of doing things; there is more and more of it going on; no one really knows how it should best be implemented; and there are some who feel that it will not produce anything useful, or even that it is inherently undesirable. This last view often takes the form of the argument that interdisciplinary teaching and research are simply not rigorous, not grounded in an adequate understanding of the phenomena under examination, and are therefore a haven for weak and fuzzy thinking and research. At the same time, new interdisciplinary programs, centres, and research activities are proliferating. From the perspective of one who has spent his career doing interdisciplinary research and teaching in the environmental field, it is tempting to think of this situation as evidence that a significant shift is going on in the organization and delivery of knowledge. From this viewpoint, curricula and evaluation criteria for research based upon a classification and organization of knowledge and teaching that discourages interdisciplinarity and policy relevance are gradually changing to create an important niche for interdisciplinary work. In so doing, they are contributing to changes in the university's role in the larger society, in the way one thinks about education, and in the organization of knowledge itself. Whether or not this rather optimistic view is correct, the growing interest in and practice of interdisciplinary research and teaching in the university environment suggests a need for reflection. The

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purpose of this paper is to provide a brief tour of the interdisciplinary playground by a person who has been playing on some of the equipment. Throughout, I will comment from the point of view of the environmental studies field. Before beginning, it is useful to recognize that different forms of interdisciplinarity exist. For example, as we saw in chapter 2 of this book, there are important differences between at least three types of interdisciplinarity: (i) that which amounts simply to combining work from different disciplines; (2) that which is the nascent form of a new discipline; and (3) that which challenges disciplinarity in principle. These positions define a rough spectrum of increasingly fundamental challenges to traditional disciplinary research. All can be found in the field of environmental studies. I do not want to defend any of these general positions here. The point is simply that these very different approaches lead to different ideas about how interdisciplinarity should be pursued. Their existence means that interdisciplinarity is itself an essentially contested concept. Any attempt to reach consensus on one version of the meaning or significance of interdisciplinarity is misguided. There will continue to be different versions of and reasons for interdisciplinary work, and these cannot be forced into a single mould. At the same time, the differences are important. It may be, for example, that it is more useful for practitioners of interdisciplinarity to understand the distinction between different types of interdisciplinarity than to try to define their work in relation to disciplinary models.7 Practising Interdisciplinarity in Teaching

A central question related to interdisciplinary teaching is when it should begin. Should students obtain a disciplinary undergraduate degree before undertaking interdisciplinary studies at the graduate level, or is it appropriate to have interdisciplinary undergraduate programs? One's answer to this question probably strongly depends upon which concept of interdisciplinarity one holds. As a strong believer in challenges to disciplinarity in principle, I hold to the view that there is an important niche for undergraduate interdisciplinarity. In what follows I will assume the value of undergraduate as well as graduate environmental studies programs and provide a few comments from the perspective of eleven years teaching in such a program. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned in that period was the importance of providing a strong core of courses that were intended to provide a kind of conceptual glue to tie together the program for the students. The students in our program had a wide variety of

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interests and backgrounds and were pursuing a very wide set of personalized plans of study. Without some strong sense of something in common, their experience could be very isolating and the sense of a program lost. But the question, of course, is what that common glue or framework is to be. Given the diversity of topics within the field of environmental studies, it did not seem possible to think in terms of a common set of skills, concepts, or methods. A student pursuing natural area management has somewhat different needs and interests from one interested in energy demand forecasting. Any list of the minimum amount of knowledge required from the fields of, say, ecology, biology, chemistry, economics, political science, sociology, philosophy, and so on, soon begins to outrun the capabilities of a four-year undergraduate program, even if no allowance is made for the opportunity to pursue individual interests and needs through electives. The balance we struck in the Environment and Resource Studies Program at the University of Waterloo was to think of the program as consisting of three types of courses: substance courses, skills courses, and context courses. We provided for the first of these by requiring some basic understanding of ecology and environmental issues in first-year courses and requiring a two-term project or thesistype course in each of the last two years, where the student could pursue his or her specific substantive interests. In the second area, the main skills we considered important were basic numeracy and the ability to write well and make clear oral presentations. These skills were pursued in almost all our courses, while other more specific skill courses, such as field ecology, were also made available. Finally, in the areas of context we required two one-term upper year courses in the history and philosophy of environmental thought and spent some time trying to teach the basic language and concepts from fields considered generally important. This mixture of requirements left enough room for students to pursue their own specific interests in elective courses in our department and elsewhere, including off campus. To my mind, what is important here is not the specific mix of courses or program design options we chose but the need to strike a balance between two sets of factors. First, it is important to find a middle ground between the need to provide minimal information on the huge range of subjects related to environmental studies and the need to permit enough flexibility in the program to allow students to pursue their own interests. Second, it is important to distinguish, and find a balance, between mastering a body of knowledge on the

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one hand, and, on the other, learning enough about the context of that knowledge and some of the key concepts and language, such that the knowledge can be pursued and retrieved as required. The existence of these two sets of competing demands means that interdisciplinary teaching programs, at least in environmental studies, require a different design and structure than seems to be common in disciplinary programs. In particular, it seems inescapable that such programs must be significantly more labour intensive (that is, they must involve more one-on-one contact between faculty and students) than disciplinary programs. In turn, this raises important questions about how interdisciplinary teaching is evaluated (more on this below). Research In some ways interdisciplinary research is much easier than interdisciplinary teaching. Certainly it is less threatening to the traditional departmental structure of the university, which is organized around teaching and the granting of primarily disciplinary degrees. Individual faculty, after all, are supposed to be free to pursue their own research interests. And it is probably fair to say that the incidence of interdisciplinarity in research is both higher than is apparent from the titles or affiliations of researchers and growing rapidly. All this being said, there are significant obstacles to interdisciplinary research in the environmental field. Only one will be mentioned here: the problem of communication across disciplinary borders. Two related concerns, evaluating interdisciplinary research and the institutionalization of interdisciplinarity, will be discussed in separate sections below. It is almost commonplace to say that interdisciplinary research can be the most frustrating and also the most rewarding of experiences, sometimes both at the same time. What seems to be crucial in ensuring that the latter characteristic is present is to make a conscious effort to encourage and allow time for enough general communication among team members that they can develop a comfort level and translation capability with other team members from different disciplines or different theoretical, methodological backgrounds.8 That is, it is important that participants in interdisciplinary collaboration learn enough about each other to permit mutual comprehension and the development of mutual respect for each others' areas of interest. In this context, it may be worth noting that many terms act as code words in interdisciplinary discourse, serving to convey different

89 Falling between Schools

meanings to those with different theoretical and methodological backgrounds. Based on the experience of sitting on a research adjudication committee that spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, and medical sciences, I have learned that such words as "data," "model," "experiment," "validation," "testing," and "theory" mean rather different things to different people. And since the differences do not just require participants to learn new words and concepts but also to learn new and different meanings of wellestablished terms, communication requires considerable effort. That being said, it is also useful to point out that interdisciplinary communication is not always a struggle. I have been pleased to discover that researchers from different backgrounds are willing to defer to others' judgements about aspects of an interdisciplinary project in which they lack expertise, precisely because they lack expertise (they do not, for example, engage in disciplinary infighting about the issue in question). This in turn contributes to a positive culture and to communication among researchers and within adjudication committees. Evaluating Interdisciplinary Research

A continuing concern in the development of interdisciplinary research projects is what criteria should be used to evaluate them. By definition such research cannot be evaluated in terms of purely disciplinary criteria.9 What standards of theoretical rigour or methodological adequacy can be used? In practice, I believe, the problem evaluating interdisciplinary research is less difficult than is sometimes assumed. In my experience as a researcher and adjudicator, it is not so very difficult to distinguish good from bad interdisciplinary research if the communication problems mentioned above are addressed.10 This judgment presupposes, however, the existence of an interdisciplinary process of evaluation involving researchers who themselves span a range of backgrounds or at least have considerable interdisciplinary experience. Even when such interdisciplinary evaluation processes exist, the question of formal metacriteria used to evaluate interdisciplinary research still needs to be addressed. The difficulty, of course, is in identifying candidate metacriteria. In the interests more of starting the ball rolling than of offering definitive solutions, I will suggest three metacriteria for the environmental studies: (i) the degree to which the research contributes directly to addressing real social and political problems, (2) the degree to which the research contributes

90 John B. Robinson

to the development of theory about the interaction of human and natural systems, and (3) the degree to which the research is selfconscious about general epistemological critiques of disciplinarity. The first of these criteria is justified in the environmental studies context by the applied nature of the field. Environmental studies is by definition applied; it exists because of the need to address urgent social problems not well served by traditional disciplinary analysis. The need to produce "useful knowledge" is a central requirement of the field. However such an applied focus is not sufficient. It is also necessary, I believe, that environmental studies research be grounded in a rigorous attempt to develop some theoretical understanding of the interrelationships between human and natural systems. This requirement implies an attempt to combine some kind of integrated understanding of human activities (itself based on a wide range of social scientific and humanistic understandings) with an equivalently integrated approach to biophysical phenomena and the manifold forms of interaction among them. As yet such work is in its infancy. Finally, I believe it is crucial that interdisciplinary fields like environmental studies take some time to examine the philosophical underpinnings of the challenge they pose to disciplinary approaches. A high degree of epistemological reflexivity is required of all good interdisciplinary work. This requirement need not predetermine the position taken on epistemological critiques of disciplinarity. The Institutional Context of Interdisciplinarity The development of criteria for evaluating interdisciplinary research and teaching is of no use if those criteria and interdisciplinarity itself are not institutionalized in the university environment. A key issue here has to do with processes of performance evaluation and promotion. Interdisciplinarity is likely to be possible for most scholars only when it is institutionalized in such a way as to free those scholars, at least in part, from the demands of purely disciplinary criteria of evaluation. That is, as long as interdisciplinary work is carried out within departments organized along disciplinary lines, there are serious problems both in recruiting scholars for such work and in assessing it in those departments. The problems are particularly serious for scholars who do not yet have promotion and tenure. Not only are such scholars more vulnerable to criticism from more senior colleagues who are critical of interdisciplinarity, but the pressure to publish, primarily in disciplinary journals, is overwhelming. Such scholars simply do not have the leisure to pursue research that is not directly linked to publication in

91 Falling between Schools

the kinds of journals considered important by their departmental and faculty promotion and tenure committees. The solution to this problem does not lie in creating large numbers of interdisciplinary departments. Even if this were not ruled out by financial considerations, it would not be realistic. By far the bulk of academic appointments will continue to be in disciplinary departments for the foreseeable future. The challenge is to roster the interdisciplinary programs that do exist but also to make it possible for interdisciplinary work to receive credit in disciplinary environments. The typical and perhaps still the most effective manner in which this is done is for faculty who have interdisciplinary interests to attach themselves in part to whatever interdisciplinary centres, programs, or institutes exist on campus. This link provides a kind of institutional home for interdisciplinary work and some essential moral support, but it is of little use and sometimes actually unhelpful for performance evaluation in the home department. Strong support for interdisciplinarity at senior administrative levels does help, but it does not resolve the problem of evaluation if interdisciplinarity is seen by those in the home department as inherently weak or as detracting from important disciplinary work. There is a strong need for more creative institutionalization of an interdisciplinary culture in the university environment. In the meantime, the only practical solution for most faculty, especially those in line for tenure and promotion, is to make sure that publication in disciplinary journals continues. Fostering Interdisciplinarity: The Eco-Research Program

I want to end with some general comments regarding the federal EcoResearch Program, which was funded under the federal Green Plan and provided more than $40 million to support research projects, chairs, and doctoral fellowships in environmental studies in Canada. Several characteristics of the program deserve particular mention here. First, the program was administered by a tricouncil secretariat consisting of representatives from each of the three funding councils (the NSERC, SSHRC, and MRC) supported by a sixteen-person adjudication committee consisting of four representatives from each of the three funding-council areas, and four representatives from the "policy" community. The result was the evolution of a truly interdisciplinary adjudication process. Second, three of the key criteria for evaluation of the research projects were (i) that they addressed issues that were central to at least two of the funding-council areas, (2) that they produced policy-

92 John B. Robinson

relevant research, and (3) that they involved outreach and dissemination plans that went beyond standard academic publication to actively include other interested parties in the undertaking of research and in the distribution of results. None of these criteria are typical; all required an approach to research that not only cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries but also required innovative and unconventional approaches to undertaking and disseminating research. Finally, given the large amount of money that was available through the Eco-Research Program - until the program was eliminated - it acted as a significant stimulant to environmental research in Canada. Through two rounds of competition, the tricouncil secretariat received over 150 letters of intent for research grants, hundreds of doctoral fellowship applications and dozens of applications for Eco-Research Chairs. Because the research-grant applications involved interdisciplinary teams of up to 40 researchers, a considerable part of the academic research community in environmental science and environmental studies in Canada was involved as applicants to the program. It was single-handedly creating a form of interdisciplinary, indeed intercouncil, communication not previously seen in this country. The Eco-Research Program represented a kind of top-down interdisciplinarity, driven by the requirements of the funding program. When the funding was cut, the program ran its course. Whether it succeeded in producing an ongoing culture of interdisciplinary research and teaching of the type anticipated remains to be seen. Clearly, however, it sparked a lot of activity, some of which may continue into the future. A key question is whether this activity will have been successful in stimulating the kind of institutionalization of interdisciplinary environmental research and teaching that is needed if the legacy of the Eco-Research Program is to survive beyond the period when Green Plan funds were available.

5 Bridging Two Cultures

However difficult interdisciplinary research may be within and among the social sciences, it has long been recognized that between the natural and technical sciences, on one side, and the social sciences, on the other, lies something akin to a cultural divide. C.P. Snow coined the phrase "the two cultures." Were he involved with the funding of research today or with the organization of most modern universities, he would probably still use the phrase. Even among the universities most seriously committed to fostering interdisciplinarity, rarely are the natural and social sciences combined in the same administrative unit. We asked three researchers to comment upon their experiences in bridging the two cultures, and we deliberately chose people whose original expertise was in the natural sciences and who now worked in an interdisciplinary vein more comfortably located in the social sciences. Fienberg and Tanur are mathematicians, specifically, statisticians. Messing is a biologist with training in ergonomics, and Miller is a biologist who has worked with ethicists and in the field of public policy for many years. All three have had extensive experience working at the margins of their field on research that combines social and natural sciences, and in Miller's case especially, a public policy dimension as well. As such, all are atypical of their colleagues and, even more than Eichler (see chapter 3), fit the classical definition of the marginal person. In none of these cases has the experience of interdisciplinarity been disheartening. That said, Messing speaks about the need for

94 Bridging Two Cultures

preparedness in integrating research from the two cultures. She notes how slow she was to recognize how much was involved when a sociologist was added to a research team investigating questions about occupational health. The basic assumptions brought by each party to the joint effort were different; the manner in which each researcher positioned herself in relationship to the research was profoundly different. The tradition in the natural sciences is for researchers to extract themselves from the process of research as much as possible; for many social scientists and humanists, this is undesirable, assuming it is feasible at all. One of Messing's comments resonates with other accounts we have heard. She speaks of natural scientists and social scientists alike as "waiting for someone to make the point" when they encounter each others' research. Fienberg and Tanur draw attention to how much management is involved even for interdisciplinarity to be established and certainly for its success. Management is not synonymous with university administration in this case, but rather refers to the deliberate efforts of individuals to foster activities that bring researchers together often and long enough that they can understand each other and move on to more significant issues. In this way interdisciplinarity itself is, in their terms, fostered. Fostering includes more than establishing new research; it includes ensuring that the initiatives taken by the various researchers will be accorded legitimacy and that a genuine conversation can ensue. Often when interdisciplinarity is discussed in terms of the two cultures, it is assumed that interdisciplinarity means the bridging and eventual combination of two or more disciplines, with or without attention being paid to the community of nonuniversity people who might be involved in the research. The importance of Fienberg and Tanur's contribution is to draw attention to how fundamental an interdisciplinary challenge might be, even in this context. The work of statisticians and survey researchers is often thought of in instrumental terms, but these contributors illustrate what lies just beyond instrumental interdisciplinarity, that is, a questioning of the categories used by survey researchers and of the status of categorization. Instrumental and conceptual interdisciplinarity are often intimately bound together, even in situations where one might not expect them to be. Indeed, Fienberg and Tanur go so far as to suggest that beneath their smooth institutionally supported surface, disciplines have - and should have - the character of interdisciplines. Miller has had the experience of seeking to integrate nonacademics into the research enterprise, and not surprisingly, she finds considerable resistance to integration. Her contribution reminds us that

95 Interdisciplinary Collaboration

registers are riot just something akin to different languages. They also reflect different structures of authority. Those who are challenged often regard their challengers as usurping their power. They defend the boundaries of their community and the entitlements of membership within it as if they were defending a territory. Questions about control are intertwined with simpler institutional questions and with intellectual issues as well. As we suggested, there are two quite different notions of "discipline" in the literature, one of which implies control and punishment. Both are relevant in any study of interdisciplinarity. E A S I E R SAID THAN DONE: BIOLOGISTS, ERGONOMISTS, AND SOCIOLOGISTS COLLABORATE TO STUDY HEALTH EFFECTS

OF THE SEXUAL

DIVISION OF LABOUR

Karen Messing

Our group was first involved in an interdisciplinary research project as a result of a request coming from women's committees in the two major Quebec trade unions. The committees had received several requests for help due to the changing role of women in the workplace. In factories, there has long been a pronounced sexual division of labour resulting in very different working conditions in women's and men's jobs (Kergoat 1982; Cockburn 1985; KauppinenToropainen, Kandolin, and Haavio-Manila 1988). Jobs have usually been designed with only one sex in mind. Since the average woman differs physiologically from the average man, despite considerable overlap, jobs designed for men may present difficulties for women (Ward 1984). Thus, when equal opportunity legislation was passed in Quebec, it appeared that, paradoxically, it might constitute a threat to women's jobs. In one textile factory, twenty-seven women were thrown out of work when sex-typed jobs were abolished, obliging them to transfer to jobs requiring unaccustomed physical efforts. After several such problems arose, the women's committees asked whether women who try to enter nontraditional jobs requiring physical strength might risk health problems and failure to perform adequately. They requested that our research group examine several nontraditional jobs in order to suggest changes in their physical characteristics. We requested and received funds for an ergonomic study. At the suggestion of the peer review committee, we included a sociologist, "Anne," on our team. I will describe here how I, as a biologist with

96 Karen Messing

training in ergonomics, experienced the participation of a sociologist before and during this collaboration. I will also briefly describe another joint project with a different sociologist, "Marie," and some of the difficulties and possibilities that emerged from our attempts at interdisciplinarity. Anne and Marie may perceive these experiences very differently; I tell the story from my own point of view. The collaboration with Anne on nontraditional jobs started with several obstacles to real interdisciplinary collaboration. The project had been fully developed and funded as an ergonomic investigation; under that description agreement had been obtained from the companies and unions involved, and the team of biologists and ergonomists had been working together for several years. Thus, the project had some inertia as a natural sciences investigation. In addition, Anne was a postdoctoral fellow who had yet to publish her first paper. She was still a bit unsure of herself as a sociologist and was hesitant to push for her point of view. We had arranged to study the sexual division of labour in a cookie factory, a poultry-processing plant, and a municipality. The project was planned using standard ergonomics techniques, which rely on observation of work activity complemented by questions put to workers (Guerin et al. 1991). The aim is to identify difficulties by observing how the task is done. In particular, we observe how what is actually done differs from the prescribed job (Teiger and Bernier 1992). Questioning the workers on these differences will usually reveal the problems they face. For example, a construction worker refused to wear earplugs even though he knew there could be long-term danger to his hearing from the noise of his drill. When questioned, he said that he would face an even higher risk of accidents if he was unable to communicate with his coworkers or hear their warnings. Similarly, a laboratory technician who stood beside her stool all day and then complained of swollen ankles remained standing because supplies to which she needed constant access were stored under her bench in the place her knees were meant to go. This information has been used to suggest changes in workplace design or procedures. In the cookie factory, we planned to use this approach to identify solutions to the exclusion of women from certain tasks. We planned to observe job preferences of men and women to reveal the constraints of these tasks. We hoped that knowledge of the constraints would permit us to suggest ways to make sex-typed jobs more accessible to the "other" sex and more easily done by all workers. These two purposes, desegregation and job improvement, did not necessarily coincide: workplace participants were interested either in reducing

97 Interdisciplinary Collaboration

musculoskeletal disorders or in promoting the integration of women in nontraditional jobs, usually the former. However, in the cookie factory a risk of musculoskeletal problems coincided with a problem in the sexual division of labour. For several years, the factory women's committee and the union president had tried to end sex-typed work in the plant. They had already succeeded in getting women into the job of packing individual cookie packages into boxes. However, women still refused to do stacking - piling five rows of big boxes onto a cart. In 1989, a male worker exercised his legal right to refuse to do dangerous work, saying that stacking constituted an unacceptable risk because of the difficulty of lifting heavy boxes up to the top row. A year later, when a second man refused the same task, our research group was asked to see whether the job could be made more acceptable. The study was later enlarged to include the entire production line. No one anticipated any problems, since it all seemed very logical. Women's occupational health is a result of the interaction between women's bodies, the physical constraints in the workplace, and women's specific situation in the workplace. Hence, we needed biology to study the bodies, ergonomics to study the physical constraints, and sociology to study the social situation of women entering an allmale workplace. How the Project Evolved

The first time I realized that the integration of sociology was going to be more difficult than collaboration among natural scientists was when I met Anne just before she joined the team. She asked me how I saw her role in the project, since I had written it up, and the more questions she asked, the more I realized that I had no idea of what she could do and that our team was totally unprepared for the integration of a whole new field in a preexisting project that arose out of over ten years' work together. To be frank, it had never occurred to us that she would really want to study anything herself; we saw her as providing us with tips on how to treat the women or on unsuspected social aspects of the project. We knew that we had to do research to understand what happened to women's bodies, but we had not realized that sociologists had to do field research to understand the dynamics of a situation. Anne had to explain to us many times that she needed to gather information from workers on their perceptions of the situation of men and women and their attitudes to change.

98 Karen Messing

Our entry into the plant was accepted by the employers with great difficulty, and we were constantly afraid that the employers would deny us access. When Anne proposed to do in-depth interviews with many workers, we were reluctant to try to negotiate them, since we feared that asking the employer to pay for so much time off would endanger other aspects of the study. Also, we could not understand why she wanted to do these interviews and why she chose the questions she did. We already knew that men and women did not want to do the same jobs; we saw the problem as residing in the jobs rather than the workers. Since interview time was precious, we also resisted including many questions on workers' sociocultural attitudes in the short questionnaire on the physical and technical requirements of work, but we finally compromised. We included questions on whether workers would like other jobs in the factory and why, and questions on their opinions of desegregation. Anne conducted longer, semistructured interviews, but only with two workers: the union leader and the chief of production. The rest of the team measured dimensions of the work stations, weights manipulated, and the pace of work activities. They identified physical and postural constraints from video recordings of the work activity. In the middle of the study, the head office of the company announced that the factory would be progressively shut down and the personnel transferred to other divisions. This announcement ended any hope of contributing to desegregation in this factory but the study was continued in the hope that the results could be applied elsewhere. Time constraints became even more critical, because we were not sure we could complete the study before the shutdown and because it was more and more difficult to obtain interview time when positions were being cut daily. However, interest increased in the sociological aspect of the study, since the ergonomic aspects had somewhat lost their point. Also, the whole team was affected by the workers' emotional reactions to the closing of a factory where many of them had worked for over twenty years; social aspects of the situation assumed more importance. Harmonizing Disciplines

The final paper on the cookie factory combined both ergonomic and social aspects of the situation. Work postures in men's and women's jobs were described, but also social constraints on these jobs. Writing the paper, however, was both more exciting and more painful than other joint papers. We must have traded ten versions of the paper

99 Interdisciplinary Collaboration

back and forth. It took time for each of us to understand the points that the other was making. Even when we finally understood, it was hard to appreciate the importance of these points. When I was finally satisfied that the paper was rigorous and informative, Anne felt that the sociological aspects of the study were not sufficiently developed. But when she did develop them, I felt the paper became wordy and disorganized. It was only when I collaborated with "Marie" on another study and had the same reactions that I realized that my problem was with sociology and not with Anne. Our problems in understanding each other were both alleviated and exacerbated when Anne presented her results to other sociologists. The applied, hands-on character of the research was not usual for sociologists. It belonged to no obvious sociological tradition, since it was not really participant observation, nor was it a survey of attitudes. Because of the study context we had only local contacts and could not situate what had happened in the plant within the company or the industry. The study did not really fit into either ergonomics or sociology. Anne would come back from talks with sociologists somewhat demoralized because she felt she was not conforming to the standards of her discipline. She would try to fill newly perceived holes in her work by proposing additional steps for the project. The ensuing discussions within our group were both enriching and frustrating for both sides. The final paper reflected both the multiple perspectives and perhaps a bit of the confusion remaining from the interdisciplinary confrontation. We are both proud of it. We had some trouble thinking of an appropriate journal to which this hybrid ergonomics-sociology paper could be submitted. Women's studies journals were a possibility, but they are usually edited by social scientists. The premise of the study, that women may have trouble doing nontraditional jobs because of biological differences, was accepted with great difficulty by social scientists in general and with even greater difficulty (understandably) by feminist social scientists. We had to explain and situate the biological differences before even starting to explain the study itself. Even then one sociological journal thought biological differences were irrelevant, although to me they were the whole point of the study. We did succeed in publishing the study in a well-known sociology journal, and the subsequent study resulted in five papers, three in my field and two in Anne's. We can hope that our attempts at interdisciplinarity will not have a negative effect on the career of a promising young social scientist. Over the same period, we have been collaborating with Marie, an established researcher in sociology, on a combined ergonomics-

ioo Karen Messing

socioeconomic study of the health and social costs of strategies used by women to reconcile work and family responsibilities. In this case it is Marie who has the final authority on what is written, and I have seen how a grant request, which appeared meaningless to me and unrelated to what we wanted to do, was accepted readily by a group of social scientists. Marie says she feels the same about my writings; she always feels that she is waiting for the point. I came closer to identifying the problem that sociologists have with us when I gave a guest lecture in one of Marie's sociology courses. I spoke for an hour about the application of biological techniques to the study of infertility. I outlined explanataions for the various environmental aggressors and their possible effects on human reproduction, together with explanations of the details of the male and female reproductive systems. This is an area on which I have published papers and I felt confident and knowledgeable, sure that I was educating the class. However, at the end, I felt that the class was waiting for something else. Marie eventually responded to their needs and asked, How did I feel about the problem of infertility? Who was responsible for these problems? How should they be solved? I had a great deal of difficulty answering these unexpected questions because they seemed out of place in a classroom. I felt somehow that it was wrong for a professor to engage in such speculations in front of students, although to Marie and the students it had been the whole idea behind asking me to speak. In the natural sciences we are trained to subtract ourselves from the research process, in fact, not only ourselves but all of society. As I have explained elsewhere, new theories of science as a social process probably imply that scientific researchers should identify their political attitudes rather than seeking to suffocate them (Messing 1995). However, this idea is lightyears away from being accepted by natural scientists, as can be observed in a recent series of articles in the official journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.1 Conclusions What conclusions can I extract from our experience and generalize for interdisciplinary collaborations, particularly those between natural and social scientists? First, our interactions with social scientists have been of great importance for evolving my thinking about women's occupational health. It would be impossible to work on health effects of women's work without interaction with those who have studied the sexual division of labour. In addition to the exchanges mentioned here, I have been helped by exchanges with

ioi Interdisciplinary Collaboration

French, Quebec, and Canadian sociologists and anthropologists and with an Italian psychologist, all of whom asked many important questions I would never have thought of on my own. This has enabled us to identify methodological issues of great relevance to my field (Messing, Dumais, and Romito 1993). Second, it is important to think hard about involving young scientists in such collaborations. Although they contribute exciting new points of view, their own careers may be slowed, and their acceptance in their own disciplines may be compromised. Some way of protecting them should be incorporated in granting-agency guidelines. Third, the difficulties of interdisciplinary collaborations should not be underestimated. Every PhD thesis involves learning the language of a discipline, the rules for scientific discourse in that language, and the cultural expectations of the scientific institutions involved. We know that bilingual conversations are hard to follow, playing soccer by European and American rules at the same time is impossible, and "cross-cultural" communication between men and women is fraught with obstacles (Tannen 1990). Interdisciplinary collaboration involves some multiple of these difficulties. Fourth, interdisciplinary collaborations are more than the sum of their parts. To be worth the effort, they must break new ground and yield new ideas. Unfortunately, no granting organizations or other scientific structures (associations, journals) are prepared for this. My own experience with the two interdisciplinary fields of women's studies and environmental studies has made me aware that both areas need to synthesize contributions from both natural and social sciences and that neither has mechanisms for doing so. Women's studies meetings in Canada are still dominated by social scientists, and meetings in environmental studies are still led by natural scientists. Fifth, I must admit that the barriers are higher on the natural sciences side than on the side of the social sciences. Many of my colleagues will remember the hours they spent in undergraduate laboratories while their fellow students in the social sciences were (they say) drinking beer. They perceive social scientists as windbags who do not base their assertions on any solid foundation of fact. They view "real" science as outside social, political, or cultural forces and relegate mention of such forces to a maximum of one sentence in the introduction or conclusion of a published paper or grant application. It is therefore difficult to get funding for interdisciplinary projects from granting agencies whose peer review committees are drawn from the natural sciences. Finally, interdisciplinary collaboration is necessary in research applied to real-life problems. We have done most of our research in

1O2 Stephen E. Fienberg and Judith M. Tanur

the context of a union-university agreement that provides academic resources to the community (Messing 1991). Women workers do not consult the curriculum vitae of a professor when defining their problems. Projects arising from the workers' milieu occupy multidimensional space and cannot always be sliced neatly along grantingagency guidelines. In view of the importance increasingly being accorded to "strategic" and applied research, some ways of harmonizing scientific institutions with interdisciplinarity must be found.

SURVEYING CASM

AN

INTERDISCIPLINARY

Stephen E. Fienberg and Judith M. Tanur Inter discipline within Inter discipline Surveys provide information for basic research in the biomedical and social sciences, for government policy planning and implementation, for business and legal decision making, and for setting political agendas and the evaluation of their success. Survey research employs samples of individuals to collect such information, using structured questionnaires, and studies the properties of the methods used to ascertain responses. Thus, survey research is itself an interdiscipline, drawing ideas, practitioners, and problems for economics, demography, marketing, political science, public health, sociology, statistics, among others (Converse 1987). In the 19805, surveys became even more frequent, in part because computer and telephone technology made their administration and analysis apparently simple. At the same time, the results of surveys became even more important, both in public life and in the academy. Survey researchers have long understood that the survey interview and the questionnaire upon which it is based form a complicated measuring device. The answer to a question depends not only on the true state of the world for the respondent but also on how the question is asked, by whom, under what circumstances, and on the respondent's inclination to respond. Hence, there is a long tradition of research on these issues of nonsampling errors, from Payne's The Art of Asking Questions (1951) through Schuman and Presser's Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys (1981) and beyond. Among the issues that have been studied are the effects of question wording and ordering, the response alternatives offered and their ordering, characteristics of the interviewer and the respondent and of the interaction between them (in both the statistical and the interpersonal

103 An Interdisciplinary CASM

senses), mode of administration of the interview, and many other aspects. Much has been learned, but few overarching theories or predictive frameworks have been developed. A little over a decade ago, the users of several key large-scale sample surveys began to question whether the survey process (including the questionnaires) that was capturing information on such diverse phenomena as employment and unemployment, crime victimization, political attitudes, and health-care utilization, was doing so accurately. Researchers recognized some common elements in the questions they were raising about the measurement of these phenomena, elements involving recall, comprehension, and estimation on the part of the survey respondents (for example, see Turner and Martin 1984). The then recent literature in the cognitive sciences (especially cognitive psychology) reported on fundamental research into these same concepts and processes (for example, Ericsson and Simon 1980; Neisser 1982; Tversky and Kahneman 1973, 1974)- The recognition of these common elements led to the weaving together of strands of cognitive and survey research to create a new interdisciplinary movement that was deliberately named "Cognitive Aspects of Survey Methodology" so that the acronym, CASM, would serve as a constant reminder of the broad interdisciplinary chasms that required bridging (Jabine et al. 1984). Research in the interdiscipline has had several foci: • applying the methods of the cognitive laboratory to help understand the processes respondents go through as they answer survey questions; • using theories developed in the cognitive sciences to model the asking and answering of questions in a survey setting; • enriching those theories with results from studies of survey instruments; • offering large-scale surveys as vehicles for workers in the cognitive sciences to test their theories in broader generality than is possible in a laboratory. As we look back upon the CASM movement, we now see it as an institutionalized response to perceived problems in the survey domain. Some history of the movement will make this point clear. It was a fostered movement rather than one that appeared spontaneously in interaction between individual researchers. In what follows, we describe this history of fostering and then reflect on interdisciplinarity more broadly, based on our experiences and personal perspectives.

104 Stephen E. Fienberg and Judith M. Tanur A Brief History of the CASM Movement Although there were many conferences exploring issues at the interface of survey research and psychology towards the end of the 19703, the CASM movement in the United States had its roots in the 1980 conference organized by Albert Biderman as part of the redesign activities for the National Crime Survey (Biderman 1980). The statisticians, cognitive psychologists, and survey researchers attending the conference focused on issues primarily related to the recall of incidents of crime victimization, but it was clear to many that the issues being discussed had broader applicability. In 1983, the Committee on National Statistics of the National Research Council organized a seminar on "Cognitive Aspects of Survey Methodology," which addressed not only the problems arising in surveys and how modern cognitive theories might be applied towards their solutions but also how surveys might be used by those in cognitive research to expand their thinking beyond the walls of their laboratories (Jabine et al. 1984; Fienberg, Loftus, and Tanur 19853, b, c). We describe the seminar in detail below. A parallel set of conferences and research activities took place in Germany at the Zentrum fur Umfragen, Methoden, und Analysen (Hippler, Schwarz, and Sudman 1987). Among the important outcomes of the activities in the United States was the joining of several systematic programs of research under the CASM banner (see, for example, Jobe and Mingay 1991; Tanur 1992; Tanur and Fienberg 1992) and the creation of three U.S. government laboratories to explore cognitive aspects of the surveys conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Bureau of the Census (Dippo and Herrmann 1991; Martin 1991; Sirken 1991). These laboratories carry out applied research, such as pretesting questionnaires, as well as such basic research as investigating respondent comprehension of concepts embodied in surveys and the cognitive issues involved in proxy responding. Camp CASM What seems to us unusual about the interdisciplinary movement to study cognitive aspects of surveys is the fact that it was a strongly fostered movement rather than one that arose spontaneously from the research interests of its potential practitioners. The arrangements for the seminar on "Cognitive Aspects of Survey Methodology" clearly illustrate what we mean by "fostered." For months prior to

105 An Interdisciplinary CASM

the seminar, the chair and staff laid plans for a week of total immersion. Great care and thought went into selecting a group of participants who would not only represent the several disciplines involved but who would also be compatible, congenial, and open to new ideas. To facilitate interaction at the seminar, the participants exchanged cv's beforehand. Further, staff arranged for most of the participants to be interviewed in their homes by Census interviewers using the standard questionnaire for the National Health Interview Survey. This allowed everyone, even those who were already in the survey business, to begin the seminar with a better understanding of the tasks survey respondents are asked to perform. Each participant made a commitment to attend the seminar for its full week's duration. The aim was to sequester the seminar participants for the duration of the seminar and thus to create a kind of hothouse atmosphere in which people would be forced to talk with one another, willy-nilly, if for no other reason than for lack of other outlets. Such activities as communal meals, both on- and off-site, recreational breaks, a special hospitality room in which participants could meet informally for refreshments and conversation (at any time, but especially late into the evening), and a traditional Eastern Shore outdoor spiced-crab feast, complete with newspaper-covered tables and wooden mallets, nurtured a feeling of camaraderie. Indeed, jokes about "Camp CASM" abounded. We planned the seminar to explore both the broad implications of the cognitive sciences for survey research and vice versa, and to explore immediate practical applications of the cognitive sciences for a specific survey, the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). To accomplish these twin aims, the staff organized a series of crosscutting small groups prior to the seminar, in such a way that each group was itself interdisciplinary and so that each participant would have the opportunity to work with a large number of others. The groups met for morning and afternoon sessions, as well as over lunch, alternately assembling in the configuration that considered basic research contributions and the configuration that considered aspects of NHIS and how the cognitive sciences could be brought to bear on its improvement. The initial activities of the seminar included an introductory session the first evening at which each of us had the opportunity to describe our research interests and speculate on possibilities for the interdisciplinary effort. An important additional orienting device was a videotape of two actual family interviews. This videotape not only provided participants with first-hand experience with the procedures used and the difficulties arising in standardized survey interviews,

106 Stephen E. Fienberg and Judith M. Tanur

but it also provided us with a common experience and point of reference. Indeed, this videotape was part of the body of evidence used in Suchman and Jordan (1990, 1992). Follow-up activities for the seminar similarly fostered the development of the interdiscipline. In order to disseminate the ideas developed during the week's retreat, a volume was published (Jabine et al. 1984). There was even a winter Camp CASM reunion, about seven months after Camp CASM ended, at which the participants presented CASM-related research ideas. These sketches of proposals for research in the interdiscipline became the most important feature of the seminar volume, putting into concrete form the thinking of the participants. Indeed, several of the sketches formed the basis for formal proposals that were later funded. At the first evening's get-acquainted meeting of the seminar, one of the participants complained about the lack of professional payoff for interdisciplinary research. As a participant at the earlier conference, she had written a paper that demonstrated that landmarking (tying the timing of a survey respondent's reported activity to some well-known and well-remembered public event) could improve the accuracy of survey reporting. She had, however, experienced great difficulty in finding a publication outlet for that paper, although she had finally succeeded in doing so (Loftus and Marburger 1983). However, the extensive bibliography of work following the CASM mode is strong evidence that the interdiscipline has earned legitimacy. Continuing to Foster an Interdiscipline When camp was over, the campers could easily have dispersed and gone back to their usual lives, ignoring the excitement of the interdisciplinary collaboration in the press of their day-to-day activities. This did not happen, we believe, largely because two organizations continued to foster the CASM initiative, the National Science Foundation and the SSRC. Nongovernment survey research in the United States had long been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and especially by its interdisciplinary program then called Measurement Methods and Data Improvement (MMDI). Its program director at that time, Murray Aborn (a psychologist by training), advised by an interdisciplinary review panel, provided support not only for the original CASM seminar but also for numerous basic research projects in the infant interdiscipline, including many proposed by participants in the original seminar (see Aborn 1989, 19913, b). In a multiplier effect,

107 An Interdisciplinary CASM

these early participants interested their colleagues in the interdiscipline, thus broadening the base of researchers involved in applying ideas from the cognitive sciences to survey research. Funding was also provided for the start-up of the first government cognitive laboratory at the National Center for Health Statistics in response to a proposal from an enthusiastic CASM camper. In 1984 SSRC (with funding from MMDI) organized a working group to explore the need for a committee on cognition and survey research. The working group, which included both CASM campers and others new to the effort, reported in the affirmative and crafted a proposal to MMDI, which awarded three years' funding. The resulting SSRC committee met regularly to encourage research and trade ideas, and held eight workshops. With additional funding from the Russell Sage Foundation, it summarized its work in a volume entitled Questions About Questions: Inquiries into the Cognitive Bases of Surveys (Tanur 1992). Reflections on Interdisciplinarity By the end of the 19805, CASM had become institutionalized in the United States, with regular research activities in universities and in separate survey research centres and with the establishment of cognitive laboratories in three government agencies. Papers from the interdiscipline appear in such diverse publications as Applied Cognitive Psychology, The Journal of the American Statistical Association, The Journal of Official Statistics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Science and are presented regularly at professional meetings of all the parent disciplines and at such specialized meetings as the annual research conference of the U.S. Bureau of the Census. CASM itself has come to mean different things to different people. Some have linked it to the long tradition of research on questionnaire design; others have focused on specific problems to which they want answers; while yet others have used the CASM framework as a launching pad for new and systematic research programs. For many survey workers, the infusion from the cognitive disciplines represents mostly an addition to their tool kits for designing and testing survey instruments and procedures. Others call for broader theoretical views from the cognitive sciences to inform the entire survey enterprise. Those who were involved in bringing work from cognition to survey research, at least from the United States, understood that much past research could be reinterpreted from the modern cognitive perspective and that this research formed a part of the foundation of the survey research enterprise as it stood around 1980.

io8 Stephen E. Fienberg and Judith M. Tanur

But the tools used in the earlier research and the language used to describe the phenomena of interest were different from those that emanated from cognitive psychology. Even though the discipline of psychology was represented repeatedly in the survey research enterprise, in different ways and from different perspectives from the 19305 to the 19808, the psychological work that entered earlier took a markedly different form than did the psychological work entered in the CASM movement of the 19805. For example, the influential work of Norman Bradburn and Seymour Sudman brought to bear research from social psychology to attitude measurement and questionnaires more broadly (for example, Bradburn, Sudman, and Associates 1979; Sudman and Bradburn 1974). We need only to look at these earlier publications and contrast them with the research of the same pair of authors, working together and in collaboration with others in the new CASM paradigm to see the differences (for example, Bradburn, Rips, and Shevell 1987; Huttenlocher, Hedges, and Bradburn 1990; Sudman, Blair, and Menon 1992). The CASM movement is also congruent with critical stances in sociology and anthropology, for example. Analysts are urged to avoid imposing their own category-systems upon the worlds of informants. For example, several researchers have questioned the taken-forgranted tenet of survey research that standardized interviewing techniques produce reliable and valid data from respondents. Suchman and Jordan (1990, 1992) point out that the very act of standardization gives rise to interactional troubles for the respondent when he or she tries to understand and answer questions appropriately. Although the resulting confusion is often camouflaged by the coding conventions of a closed-ended questionnaire, the validity of the data thus generated is questionable at best. Standardization of the answers after the fact is of course essential for statistical analysis and interpretation. The Suchman and Jordan recommendations encourage surveyors to permit respondents to tell their stories in ways much closer to their own words. But questioning the efficacy of standardized questionnaires is not the only instance of CASM researchers taking a critical stance. Another tenet of survey research is that in household surveys, another household member, a so-called proxy respondent, can report for absent members of the household on such matters as employment and consumption and thereby produce data that are good enough for the estimation purposes at hand. Recent basic research (for example, Miller and Tucker 1993; Tucker and Miller 1993) calls into question whether family members know enough about the activities of their spouses, parents, and children to render such proxy reporting valid.

109 Ethics of Health Science Research

A truly interdisciplinary area of research thrives on the periodic infusion of new ideas from the outside, not simply from the codification and development of its own methodology. At various points above, we have noted that survey research, which is inherently interdisciplinary, has roots in statistics (for technical structure), measurement methods (coming from various areas), and the substantive research area of a given sample survey. Thus survey research has exemplified the form of external influence, with CASM being the most recent example of infusion from the outside. But interplay with other sciences and disciplines is also a long tradition in statistics itself, with strong influences originally coming from the physical sciences and biology (Fienberg 1992; Stigler 1986). In the twentieth century the sources of these influences expanded to include agriculture, engineering, medicine and public health, and various social sciences (see, for example, Clogg 1992, and especially the accompanying discussion by Holland). Thus we can conceptualize statistics itself as an interdiscipline. At the outset, we described CASM as an interdiscipline within the interdiscipline of survey research, but we now see at least a third level of interdisciplinarity. Perhaps the nested group - statistics, survey research, CASM - is not unique in this respect. We wonder whether more of our usually accepted disciplines have the characteristics of interdisciplines under the surface. What we seem to be reflecting upon here is the very nature of disciplines, how they arise, and how they change over time. We firmly believe that any field of intellectual endeavour thrives on the periodic infusion of new ideas, whether or not that infusion changes the field drastically or even spawns an interdiscipline. For us, the excitement of CASM is not just in bringing together ideas at the interface of seemingly different disciplines but in watching the evolution of new ideas that take on lives of their own. INTERDISCIPLINARITY AND THE ETHICS OF HEALTH SCIENCE RESEARCH WITH HUMAN SUBJECTS IN CANADA

Judith Miller This case study describes my experiences with the National Council on Bioethics in Human Research, an institution that strives for interdisciplinarity in ethics review as a means to protect research subjects. The council was designed to provide ongoing support to local research ethics boards across the country and to the research community more

no Judith Miller generally. It offers an excellent opportunity to explore interdisciplinarity, for three reasons. First, the policies guiding ethics review originated from a desire to move beyond any one discipline. Second, multidisciplinary committees developed the policies governing ethics review and are now responsible for providing support to the local committees that assess the ethical acceptability of research protocols. Third, within the council, it was possible for me to learn about the problems and benefits of interdisciplinarity, especially through its multidisciplinary committees, which included community members. In this paper I will explore briefly some reasons why true interdisciplinarity is rarely achieved. The paper will focus on the development of the research ethics review of proposals involving human subjects in the health sciences and will look at an interdisciplinary expert panel on the ethics of research in anaesthesiology. I will conclude by considering future directions for interdisciplinarity in the ethics review process. Society has elaborated ethical principles and controls in many contexts to assure that those who serve as subjects for medical research assume burdens voluntarily, in an informed manner, and only in proportion to potential benefits. The development of structured codes of ethics for medical research stemmed from instances of abuse and the consequent recognition that some means of collective decision making was necessary and that the physician or investigator should not simply be trusted to act in the best interest of patients and others who serve as subjects. Medical research ethics began to be examined more from the perspective of the patient and subject and less exclusively as a professional obligation.2 The Nuremberg Code (1947) and the Helsinki Declaration, adopted by the World Medical Association in 1964 and modified in 1975 and 1983, are the key international accords. Expanding upon these, the World Health Organization and the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences has produced and, at the time of writing, was updating some proposed international guidelines that address special needs encountered in research in developing countries.3 As well, the Council of Europe (1990) has developed guidelines on medical research. Consistent with these international agreements, many individual nations, including Canada, have elaborated their own systems of ethics review. The challenge in a society like Canada has been to set and implement standards in a way that respects a multiplicity of values and, as far as possible, the independence of both subjects and researchers. A favoured method of establishing norms has been to place trust in committees that are representative of many disciplines and many parts of society. Arthur Caplan, head of the U.S. National Commission

in Ethics of Health Science Research

on the Protection of Human Subjects has coined the phrase "When in moral doubt, let a committee hash it out" (1987). The consensus arrived at by reflection and exchange on ethical matters in carefully structured committees is generally believed to provide an acceptable basis for ethical conduct of research. In Canada, multidisciplinary committees of the Medical Research Council (MRC) developed and then revised the Guidelines on Research Involving Human Subjects (i987).4 These guidelines endorse the underlying principles described in the United States in the Belmont Report, namely, respect for persons, justice, and beneficence. Considering their roots in the Nuremberg Code, formulated in response to the Nazi atrocities, these are hardly surprising first principles. The guidelines emphasize informed consent, selection of subjects to distribute risks and benefits fairly, and assessment of potential burdens and benefits as the practical means to realize these principles. A great deal of attention has been devoted to how to protect vulnerable populations who cannot give fully informed and voluntary consent. The 1987 revised guidelines acknowledge that a decentralized ethics review system relying on autonomous review by local Research Ethics Boards, would benefit from information exchange and ongoing support, as well as from a system of evaluation. The MRC wanted to promote and encourage the work of the local boards.5 In response, the National Council on Bioethics in Human Research (NCBHR) was founded in 1989. The goal of the council was to support the interpretation and implementation of MRC guidelines and to foster their application for all human subjects of research in Canada. Although the majority of council members are health-science professionals, the council's terms of reference explicitly required that its membership include at least one lawyer, at least one philosopher, and community members. The council was intended to serve an advisory, consultative role in its liaison function with research ethics boards, helping them exercise the best ethical judgment possible. The consultative process was intended to be bottom-up, grounded in the local boards across the country. The council was mandated to work towards maintaining high ethical standards by defining appropriate guidelines and by consulting with and advising institutional research ethics boards, investigators, and research granting agencies. The council was also to foster the education of health professionals and the public in research ethics. The local research ethics boards assess the ethical acceptability of proposed health-science research with human subjects. The participation of community members who are not health science professionals

112 Judith Miller

is generally viewed as a key element of a credible research ethics review process, one that can take into account the perspective of potential subjects and thus better protect them. Indeed, the MRC guidelines state that "The values of the particular community are the matrix of ethics review. The Research Ethics Boards must contain members who can reflect community values. Lay members affiliated with a hospital or university board are often suitable, but the board should ideally include non-affiliated individuals" (MRC 1987, 45). The guidelines also call for the participation of clinicians, scientists, nurses, mental-health experts, ethicists, and lawyers. Multidisciplinary committees, then, were intended both to develop policies to guide the ethics of research and to interpret and translate those policies at the local level. Does the multidisciplinary mix called for in the local boards and on the council ensure true interdisciplinary decision making? Do people communicate across the boundaries of their disciplines? Or do they simply break problems into component parts with the ethical segment designated to the ethicist, the legal to the lawyer, the scientific to the scientist? Although the intent is to create synergy and to meld perspectives from a variety of disciplines, this is far from easy to achieve.6 The experience of the council casts light both on how to work towards an interdisciplinary approach and on potential obstacles that might be encountered. In my view, the barriers are particularly great where disciplines are unevenly represented and there is a tendency for the perspective of the major discipline to dominate. Fundamental differences in orientation and underlying assumptions of various disciplines can also generate cross-disciplinary tensions. Thus, for example, health professionals and sociologists on council have framed the issue of the role of the public in ethics review quite differently. Health professionals have sought a focused and practical approach; sociologists tend to see a broad contextual analysis as essential. Representatives of the different disciplines have struggled to find a common meeting ground. In understanding the difficulties in arriving at a shared formulation, I find helpful Renee Fox's analysis of the difficulties that may occur when individuals from different disciplines attempt to work together in bioethics (1990, 213). She emphasizes, for example, the divide that is likely to result between bioethicists and sociologists because bioethicists start from principles of individualism and autonomy, and sociologists from the principles of relatedness, reciprocal obligations, and community.7 Comments on the multidisciplinary composition of small working groups from a participant at a council workshop on the ethics of

ii3 Ethics of Health Science Research

research involving children similarly illustrate potential crossdisciplinary tensions. The participant noted: I believe this [multidisciplinary] mixture of participants rather slowed the workshop down and ... [decreased] the focus ... at the reporting stage. This reflects the ethicists' habit of creating statements which are largely interpretive and observational, which is rather distinct from the writings of clinical researchers who tend to be "creative." "Creative ethics" has the same dubious implications as "creative financing," but I think we should be aiming at producing change in the problems that beset us as well as at confirming the ethics of our current behaviour.

In my experience, another risk in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary efforts occurs when a committee includes only one representative of a discipline. That individual may easily be seen as the expert in that field and become responsible for norms and their interpretation within the area. Relinquishing authority to individuals in other disciplines often raises issues of territoriality, particularly in areas historically characterized by strong professional autonomy. The expert from a minority discipline can be viewed as a competitor who will usurp power and who does not understand, rather than as a resource to facilitate interdisciplinary cooperation. In Europe the presence of a large proportion of members who are not health professionals on some national ethics committees reduces this problem, but in Canada relatively few nonprofessionals are involved.8 In support of the importance of a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach, the council emphasized "that the contribution to bioethics played by philosophers, working hand-in-hand with physicians and investigators, is vital, now and historically ... NCBHR wishes to stress the importance of the multidisciplinary nature of bioethics and of the linkage of theoretical and practical insights in bioethical decisions in which all of society, scientists, humanists, and social scientists, have a role to play" (Hurteau and Miller 1989, 193). Multidisciplinarity was seen only as the first step toward interdisciplinarity, which was intended to evolve slowly in both the council and in the local boards. Whether and how it would evolve was not a question often addressed. Involvement of community members in ethics review reflects a special case for interdisciplinarity. If the system is to be truly interdisciplinary then community members should be able to play a very active role. Problems in sustained and effective participation of community members in both the national and local committees indicated that, at most, multidisciplinarity was being achieved. The lack of a

114 Judith Miller

defined relevant discipline confuses and limits the role of community members; their particular "expertise" is not recognized as authoritative in the same manner as professional expertise might be. Community members others who are not health professionals need to be well briefed if they are to participate in the discussion at all. Particularly where the workload is heavy and where only a few members are not health professionals, such briefing can be seen as inefficient and laborious. The council struggled to define the role of the community members. Concern was expressed about the appropriate role of public members. Do they represent the public? How is this possible, and how can they liaise with any constituency? Should they be politicians? Media people with an ear to the public? What specifically should public members bring to research ethics review and policy? The initial descriptions of public members were negative: not a healthscience professional, not engaged in research, not affiliated with a research institution. The professional and institutional members regarded them as a source of "helpful ignorance." These descriptions do not seem likely to attract strong public participation or even to identify where and how to recruit public members. After much soul-searching the council divided its public members into two categories, designated professionals in law and ethics and community members. It defined the following minimal characteristics as desirable for community members: a commitment to bring a public perspective (a perspective outside the health sciences) to the council to help achieve its mandate; background and interests that would broaden council's approach to its mandate and responsibility; time to devote to the council's work; and a willingness and ability to work in multidisciplinary endeavours. The intent in appointing a lay person was to choose someone who may have had an acquaintance with health care as a member of the public, but who brought a perspective different from those who work in the field of health care or human experimentation. Seen in this light, strong public members could broaden council's perspective and assure better understanding of the subjects' position, preventing "group think" and bringing a critical public eye to deliberations. To date, however, public members on the council have mainly been experts in disciplines outside the health sciences, like sociology, communications, and medical history. The council considered that it made an effort to find community members who are less academic or professional, to bring a more truly public perspective, the perspective of the average citizen, to the debate. For example, it consulted with the local boards across the country to identify potential community members. Confusion about

115 Ethics of Health Science Research

the role and contribution of public members remained, however, and hampered the process. Even in bodies with members from several disciplines and from the community, it is easier to classify a problem within a particular disciplinary category and then assign it to the disciplinary representative, who will most likely develop a disciplinary response. While this approach must be resisted if true interdisciplinarity is to be achieved, time and organizational pressures often work against interdisciplinary efforts. The council's expert panels that responded to queries from the local boards illustrated one approach to interdisciplinarity. The council required these panels to include a clinician, pertinent experts from within and outside council, and a member of the public. The difficult questions posed by local boards to the council's panels reflected usual concerns in research with human subjects. They encompassed both ethical issues and matters of process. From the ethical perspective, the council was asked, for example, about the acceptability of anencephalic infants as organ donors, about the use of human fetal tissue for research with Parkinson's patients and about the ethical principles that should guide research involving children. On the procedural and administrative side, expert panels were asked how long records must be kept, to whom a new local board should report, and how to find community members. In some instances the panels found that it was possible to separate ethical from procedural issues, but quite often the two were blended. Typical of this situation was a query raised by a local board as a procedural issue: Could minority ethnic groups be excluded from a clinical trial? Although the council was not empowered to provide legal opinions, often the legal context was extremely important in such an issue and had to be explored to some extent. This was true, for example, in addressing research with children and also with subjects in anaesthesiology, where informed consent is often problematic. Yet the primary focus of the council was intended to be only on ethical advice and procedural mechanisms for applying ethical principles within as broad and interdisciplinary a context as possible. Continually, expectations outstripped the council's mandate and its collection of professional expertise. Take a specific example: the ethics of research in anaesthesiology. This issue was referred by a research ethics board to the Expert Panel on Consent, a committee that included clinicians, lawyers, a medical historian, and a philosopher. The question posed was, Is research permitted in instances where the subject cannot give free and informed consent? From an ethical perspective, the questions were,

n6 Judith Miller Is the ethical principle of individual autonomy overriding here? Or does beneficence for future anaesthesiology patients, as a class, also factor in? From a legal perspective, the questions were, What is and is not legally permissible with a subject who is unable to give informed consent? Are there substitute protections to authorize such research without the individual's consent? This query could also be tackled procedurally: What approaches can be developed to assure that the research is scientifically sound and that those who may become suitable subjects are given an opportunity to give consent in advance of the research? The formulation of a draft response often fell to an expert in what was perceived as the core discipline concerned with the problem. Yet that only raised the further question of whether a strictly disciplinary perspective would suffice and whether others could bring the benefit of their own experience and reflection to bear. In theory, and sometimes in practice, the draft/reply process allowed for responses that were truly interdisciplinary. Even though multidisciplinarity is called for and often accepted, it is not uniformly practised. At the time of writing, the composition of some local research ethics boards in Canada did not comply with the MRC guidelines. This was an area of concern for the NCBHR, of course, but the issue also fell under the auspices of the MRC, and thus the two bodies were dealing with the same question. At a recent conference at Laval on "Les comites d'ethique des hopitaux: Objets et problematiques" (Hospital Ethics Committees: Goals and Problems), held in September 1992, some of the participants questioned the need for involvement of non-health science professionals in either clinical or research ethics. Questions about the usefulness of nonprofessional members were still being raised, then, in spite of the fact that if collective decision making in ethics review is to be realized, individuals must be encouraged to work in multidisciplinary teams, to learn to communicate better across disciplines, to appreciate views from other disciplines, and to tolerate the delays for such communication in exchange for the gains. The incorporation of a broad panoply of disciplines and experience in research ethics boards can lead to better decisions that are more reflective of the complexity of society and the full range of human experience. To be sure, explaining a discipline to outsiders is difficult, especially when there is resistance from among those with professional or expert qualifications, but the process can expose underlying assumptions and stimulate development and evolution within the contributing disciplines. I view education as an important first step to moving from multidisciplinarity to interdisciplinarity in research ethics review. All those involved must develop sufficient grounding

H7 Ethics of Health Science Research

in pertinent areas - health science research, ethics, law, local values, or the social sciences - so that decisions emerge from the communication and so that each participant is valued as an important resource. The experience of the NCBHR was that the issues arising in ethics review are often a melange of ethical, legal, administrative, and scientific norms. The council emphasized the ethical norms and the processes to implement them. I would argue that the ultimate aim in the ethics of research is a true interdisciplinarity where all these aspects merge synergistically in a multifaceted decision to protect human subjects. Although this is far from easy to accomplish, as experience with the council demonstrated, the rudiments of the necessary institutions are in place, and the opportunities and potential benefits enormous.

6 Evaluating Interdisciplinarity

INTRODUCTORY

REMARKS

The granting councils in Canada have taken some cautious steps towards bridging the various disciplinary communities and certainly now encourage applications that do so, but this has happened only in the last five years. One such initiative was a program to support research on the environment, which Robinson described briefly in chapter 4. It is worth noting that this program came into being not at the instigation of the granting councils but as one element of a government-wide initiative to support environmental improvement called the Green Plan. Not surprisingly, then, when the government money ceased to be available, the initiative was rapidly brought to a halt. The granting councils all supported the initiative, but none was willing to do so at the cost of jeopardizing its regular, more disciplinary-oriented research programs. It is worth exploring what happened in the Eco-Research initiative a little more fully. Under the Green Plan, money was made available, and the three granting councils - SSHRC, NSERC, and the MRC - came together to spend some of it to support research. A special adjudication panel and secretariat was established to deal with this funding. As Robinson noted, the panel was comprised of four representatives, one from each granting council and one from the federal department of the environment. All applications were assessed by subcommittees composed, in turn, of one member from each group. The success of any application for funding rested upon whether these members

119 Evaluating Interdisciplinarity

could agree among themselves, because a low score from any one of them would reduce the total score for the application and thus its chances for success. There was no shortage of applications for this interdisciplinary competition, but several things became clear in their adjudication. First, if the actual word "interdisciplinary" had been eliminated from these applications and if they had been judged exclusively on the content of the research, many would not have been visibly different from applications likely to be submitted to one or another of the research councils. This was less true in the case of applications for very large grants, because it was a formal requirement that large grants span at least two of the research councils' mandates, but even in this case participation from more than one field was likely to be token participation. Second, applicants tended to view interdisciplinarity as requiring a cobbling together of a variety of research studies and perhaps also a plan for jointly managing these studies. Third, all the adjudicators spoke about all aspects of each application, sometimes not taking into account the particular expertise of individual members of the committee. What might have been truly groundbreaking in a disciplinary context was likely to be undervalued when the application was considered from a nondisciplinary stance. Conversely, research tended to be funded only if it was intelligible to all members of the committee, which eliminated some applications that were highly promising precisely because of their contributions to a particular subfield or debate. Finally, all members of the committee, which served for four years, expressed disappointment with the quality of the applications overall and little hope that truly innovative or ground-breaking research would develop. While all members developed a reasonable fluency in disciplines other than their own and familiarity with various interdisciplinary registers as well, none was convinced that the program had sponsored research likely to be significant in its own terms. The existence of the program, and of the research undertaken as a consequence of it, was widely considered to be more important than the results of the research. The program brought people together, it was often said, and its main contribution lay in changing the orientation of graduate students to their own work and to the significance of the environment. The Eco-Research program was one of several joint initiatives taken by the granting councils in Canada, but it was not the only interdisciplinary effort within any one of them. Another major initiative was the National Centres of Excellence program, which will be described by Elaine Isabelle in this chapter. This national program was matched by several provincial initiatives, which draw their funding from some

lao Evaluating Interdisciplinarity

of the same sources. There are also provisions for major collaborative research within each funding council's mandate. Little would be served by providing a detailed description of all these programs, although two of our contributors, Gerda Wekerle and Elaine Isabelle, draw some important lessons from their individual experiences with a couple of them. What is interesting is how little the various programs resemble each other in terms of their interdisciplinary component. In one case, for example, interdisciplinarity means something akin to partnership between university researchers and others (mainly industry and governments). To be sure, practioners from the various disciplines are likely to be involved, but within the adjudication - and thus in the phrasing of the applications - the benefits that are seen to accrue from the research flow not from synergies between various fields of study so much as from the combined efforts of a large, diverse group, with all members focused on a single objective. In this particular program, the individual research studies function independently and are expected to produce their own results. In another of the interdisciplinary initiatives, by contrast, great emphasis is given to the development of a single research problem; whether the researchers come from different disciplines is less important than the fact of their collaboration. The point of these two examples is a simple one: even within the three granting councils' attempts to promote interdisciplinary research, "interdisciplinarity" tends to have quite different practical implications, so much so that there may be different definitions at play. In the context of the research evaluation conducted by the granting councils, "interdisciplinarity" seems to be a convenient way for expressing all the various goals for research that cannot easily be encompassed in the regular granting programs, for a number of quite different reasons. In this context, it is useful to return to the conception of interdisciplinarity provided in the introduction to this book, a conception that centred on the challenge offered by researchers to whatever aspect of disciplinary (or interdisciplinary) research they took exception to. In sponsoring interdisciplinary research, it appears as if the granting councils are not different from the researchers they support. They also seem to view interdisciplinarity as, first and foremost, a challenge to routine ways of conducting research and thus as having neither specific content nor unique standards for adjudication. We will return to this discussion at the end of the book. For now, it will be useful to hear from two people with extensive experience evaluating interdisciplinary research. Gerda Wekerle's experience in chairing the new interdisciplinary adjudication committee within SSHRC was most positive. Although this committee also acted as "informed amateurs," encountering barriers between interdisciplinary

121 An Interdisciplinary Committee

fields as well as resistance from the disciplines, it seemed able to foster a common language that overlapped in some significant degree with that of the applicants. Furthermore, quite often applications that displayed conceptual interdisciplinarity came before this committee, since they had no other obvious committee home within the granting council. Dealing with these applications put the doctrinal disputes within disciplines into perspective. The committee did have a special mandate that undoubtedly influenced its work. Treated as the committee of last resort when the granting council cannot make an easy assignment of an application to another committee (as is the case with interdisciplinary adjudication committees in other granting councils), this committee was likely to encounter both the most incoherent and, as well, the truly ground breaking proposals. As anyone who has experienced the drudgery of adjudicating literally hundreds of applications knows, finding something easily discarded can be a relief. But the real pleasure lies in discovering something exceptionally promising. The quality of interdisciplinary work is very uneven. The worst is likely to stand out, while the best is likely to exceed normal expectations. In the first chapters we described interdisciplinary research in terms of the challenges offered by researchers. This approach places the burden on researchers to initiate and foster interdisciplinarity. Elaine Isabelle sees things from the opposite side of the fence, as someone who has encountered both the internal worlds of two granting councils and all the variety of research applications brought before them. She provides a necessary caution to the analysis offered in this book by stressing that interdisciplinarity can easily be a "topdown" phenomenon, fostered outside the universities or by those responsible for funding or using research. In this instance, researchers are prodded into interdisciplinarity, not the reverse. And it is the granting councils, university administrators, governments, or clients for the researcher who engage in the difficult negotiations, or boundary work, when trying to translate one disciplinary dialect into another or to establish a common language. AN INTERDISCIPLINARY COMMITTEE WITHIN A DISCIPLINARY RESEARCHFUNDING STRUCTURE: THE EXPERIENCE OF THE F I R S T TWO YEARS

Gerda R. Wekerle

When the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada announced a review of its grants adjudicating process in 1988

122 Gerda R. Wekerle

in the Courtney Report, I convened a meeting of my colleagues in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. As chair of the faculty's research committee, I had been attempting to encourage my fellow faculty members to submit grant proposals but met with limited success. Our meeting revealed that most faculty members had a hard time reconciling their research interests and approaches to research with their perceptions of the granting council's priorities and existing structures. In particular, the organization of adjudicating committees into fourteen panels grouped by conventional academic disciplines was viewed as inimical to interdisciplinary research. An Interdisciplinary Faculty Founded in 1968, the Faculty of Environmental Studies of York University encouraged and demanded the conscious reexamination and breaking down of disciplinary boundaries through its hiring of faculty members whose research interests crossed disciplines. These scholars participated in the creation of new fields such as environment and behaviour, deep ecology, eco-research, peace and global studies, health studies, and women and environments studies. Research frequently emphasized the links between theory and practice, knowledge creation and knowledge use in the wider community. Similarly, our students were drawn from a wide range of fields in the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities, and from professions such as architecture, design, nursing, and public health. Environmental Studies initially developed as a graduate faculty of approximately 350 students pursuing a master's degree; small undergraduate and PhD programs were added in 1991. The faculty encouraged its students to make linkages across disciplinary boundaries and paradigms and to aim for a synthesis of knowledge and perspectives. Faculty members were given a similar challenge. Faced with the list of SSHRC'S standard adjudicating committees, my colleagues and I were often at a loss as to where to send our research grant applications. Our work did not readily fit the existing categories, either because it crossed several disciplines, because it was applied research directed to effecting broad social or policy change, or because the work was situated in newly defined and emerging fields that did not fit existing problem definitions in the disciplines. A visit to York University by the then-president and executive director of the granting council gave us the opportunity to respond to the proposals for change put forward by the Courtney Report and to argue the need for greater responsiveness to interdisciplinary research. We proposed that if the granting council was to be responsive

123 An Interdisciplinary Committee

to our needs as researchers, it would need, at a minimum, to set up an interdisciplinary adjudication committee where research that was interdisciplinary might find a home and a sympathetic hearing. The Courtney Report

The Courtney Report had proposed that interdisciplinary grant proposals be evaluated by a new committee composed of the chairs of the existing disciplinary committees. In our view, this proposal had a serious flaw: it did not deal directly with the issue of how interdisciplinary scholarship was to be fairly evaluated within the context of a structure organized along disciplinary lines. A new committee comprised of the chairs of existing disciplinary committees would create a multidisciplinary committee of scholars with a demonstrated commitment to scholarship within their own disciplines, not a committee hospitable to interdisciplinary scholarship. In our submission to the granting council I argued that My colleagues and I favour an interdisciplinary committee composed of scholars with a demonstrated interdisciplinary perspective, interdisciplinary experience, and interdisciplinary institutional affiliation. The Council's proposal of a multidisciplinary group of committee chairs does not address the need to have an adjudication committee which reflects the culture of the community of scholars whose work they are evaluating. Interdisciplinary scholars are very different in outlook and flexibility of thinking from a group of scholars from various disciplines.

We argued further that In the current system, anthropology has an adjudication committee ... [but] there are far more scholars in interdisciplinary studies in Canada than in anthropology. This includes consumer studies, social and political thought, international development, environmental design, environmental studies, and women's studies. We are not well served by the present system, nor will we be better served by the Courtney Report's recommendations. We would be pleased to assist the Council in establishing the terms of reference and composition of a new interdisciplinary committee.

After taking into account feedback from the academic community, the granting council implemented many of the recommendations of the Courtney Report in 1991, with the modification that a new interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary grant-adjudication committee be established. I was asked whether I might be interested in chairing

124 Gerda R. Wekerle this new committee. The opportunity to be involved at the beginning of a new committee and to help establish the ground rules and committee culture was an exciting prospect. For the first two years, I chaired the interdisciplinary committee. Our experience of establishing a new interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary committee within SSHRC'S existing disciplinary-based structure and the response of the Canadian scholarly community to the opportunity presented by such a committee are the focus of my comments. An Interdisciplinary Committee within a Disciplinary Culture Interdisciplinary programs were not new to the granting council. Socalled strategic grants programs and strategic partnership development grants with private sector partners were designed to encourage interdisciplinary research. The Eco-Research program required collaboration by scholars from all the three granting councils' areas of concern. However, all these programs were targeted to specific policy-related topics. None of them allowed a wide-open definition of research. By establishing a new interdisciplinary committee, the granting council in the social sciences and humanities signalled to the research community that interdisciplinary research warranted the same legitimacy as more traditional disciplinary research programs. The adjudication process must be understood in context. In December each year, members of grant-adjudication committees are sent proposals and outside assessors' evaluations of each grant proposal. In March, members of all the grants adjudication committees come together, often in an Ottawa hotel, for a period of from two to five days, depending on the number of submissions to individual committees. It is an intense and demanding process that requires committees, ranging in size from 4 to 8 members plus a chair, to evaluate between 50 and 200 grant proposals and make fair and equitable decisions in allocating research funding to their peers, while keeping within a tight deadline. The Manual for Adjudication for Committee Members states the criteria for the selection of committee members: The Council seeks to appoint to its selection committees active and productive scholars with a proven research record in one or more areas of the social sciences or the humanities ... The prime considerations in structuring selection committees are the scholarly stature of the individual nominees and the overall competence and credibility of the committee. In addition committees must have appropriate representation on the basis of areas of expertise,

125 An Interdisciplinary Committee university, region, language, and gender ... although each committee should be representative of the community it serves, individual members are not expected to act as representatives of any particular group or region of the country.

In the new interdisciplinary adjudication committee, what constituted the "community served"? And how could the selection process ensure the "overall competence and credibility of the committee" when the boundaries of the committee were unspecified? The initial committee, 1991-92, included a psychologist specializing in the history and philosophy of psychology; a scholar who combined a background in Asian studies with research on popular culture, literature, law, and women's studies; a researcher in education whose specialities included language arts, hermeneutics, aboriginal people, and feminist analysis; an environmental psychologist in an architecture faculty whose research focused on the built environment, women and environments, and development studies; an urbanist and planner; a scholar who combined environmental studies, philosophy, energy policy analysis and computer modelling; and a chair whose research bridged feminist studies, environmental studies, and social policy. In the second year of the adjudication process, the composition of the committee was similarly broad and included a researcher on motor development and sport psychology who also specialized in child and adolescent learning; a scholar who combined research on the philosophy of science and technology, feminism and development, Canadian studies, and ethics; a philosopher who specialized in the philosophy of law; a scholar who combined work in communications, literary theory, and popular culture; and ongoing committee members who were from the fields of environmental psychology and environmental studies. All the committee members were interdisciplinary, representing in their own academic careers models both of scholars who bridge disciplinary boundaries and of researchers actively engaged in the development of new fields of intellectual discourse. Unlike the existing disciplinary adjudication panels, however, members of the committee did not necessarily know one another, even by reputation. While we all had multidisciplinary research backgrounds, our fields and areas of research did not necessarily intersect. This meant that we could not rely on existing network connections or shared understandings of what constituted "good" or "important" research. (In the first year of the committee's work, I felt fortunate that I had previously met three of the six committee members.) As a newly established committee, we also could not rely on existing practices

126 Gerda R. Wekerle

to guide us. This put the onus on the committee to become a working group and to develop a shared committee culture within a tight working schedule. My own sense at the beginning of the process was that in evaluating grant proposals sent to the committee, we had to establish, as a group, a tolerance for the differences among us and particularly a spirit of tolerance of differences in theoretical frameworks, paradigms, and methodological approaches. I believe that we were able to achieve these objectives. In both adjudication periods, the granting council's officers and outside consultants sat in on and closely monitored the deliberations of the committee. They told us that they were impressed by the committee process and its ability to deal fairly with a very wide range of proposals. One committee member suggested that we operated as "informed amateurs"; that is, members might not be specialists in a particular field, but the wide research experience represented on the committee meant that we could evaluate proposals intelligently without becoming caught up in ideological disputes. We suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that perhaps the granting council should make every committee an interdisciplinary committee. At the least, we proposed, one or two members of each disciplinary committee should be an interdisciplinary "outsider" to leaven the mix and provide an outside, perhaps less engaged, perspective. Since participation in the grants adjudication process is often motivated more by a sense of duty than pleasure, I also felt strongly that there should be elements of fun: I knew we were doing something right when I came down the corridor to our meeting room one day and heard peals of laughter coming from my committee. This contrasted with the grim faces and the reports of "doctrinal disputes" that I received from committees meeting in adjoining rooms. When committee members chose to have lunch and even dinner with one another, despite three days of ten-hour meetings in the same room, I had another indication of the development of a common culture. The Research Proposals

In the material sent to potential applicants, the granting council listed the interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary committee with no explanation of what this meant or might encompass. Applicants themselves decided whether their proposal fit the committee's focus. As a result, the topics and range of proposals sent to the committee came as a complete surprise to all of us. They included proposals in the humanities and social sciences, but also some proposals that were oriented to medical topics. We did not expect the large number of proposals

127 An Interdisciplinary Committee

received that could be roughly classified as "comparative literature," despite the existence of both a literature and a linguistics committee. In the absence of any guidelines to applicants about what constituted an interdisciplinary / multidisciplinary proposal, we accepted all proposals self-nominated as such. The committee categorized the kinds of proposals we received in the first year. These included proposals where the field itself was interdisciplinary and represented a new object of study belonging to no existing discipline, for example, peace studies or feminist studies; some proposals applied to a specific paradigm or perspective on a discipline, for example, feminist studies within geography; other proposals drew from or compared one or more disciplines, for example, studies utilizing literature and philosophy; other proposals represented subfields within a discipline, for example, economic psychology; and, finally, some proposals represented multidisciplinary collaboration among researchers from a number of different disciplines. The committee engaged in lively debate as to whether specific proposals were or were not interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary. We recommended that the granting council require of all applicants a statement indicating why the application could not appropriately be submitted to any of the other committees and that each applicant make a case for the interdisciplinarity or multidisciplinarity of the proposal. Further, the committee stated, "Committee 15 will welcome, for example, proposals which (a) draw significant connections between or among disciplines; (b) are from scholars working in fields of research which are not tied to particular disciplines; (c) are from scholars working in fields which question the concept of disciplinarity." In the 1992 Guide to Applicants, the granting council asked applicants to explain why their proposal could not be submitted to other committees and to describe in what ways the proposal qualified as inter- or multidisciplinary. An analysis of thirty proposals submitted to the interdisciplinary committee in the second year found thirty-six reasons for applying to the committee. Eighteen proposals included more than one discipline as the focus of the program. Eight argued that the field or method was interdisciplinary. Eight stated that the applicant had been rejected by existing disciplines or that her or his work fell outside the dominant paradigms that served a gatekeeping function. Only two proposals were from interdisciplinary teams. Applications came from a broad range of researchers; they did not represent one community of scholars. Proposals submitted to the committee fell into five major categories:

128 Gerda R. Wekerle

1 proposals that challenged disciplinarity; 2 proposals that took a tool-kit approach, adding something different or unorthodox to a fairly conventional project; 3 proposals from scholars who worked at the intersections of several disciplines, where the objectives of the research are to create a new field and a new place for creative thought; 4 proposals that were multidisciplinary, drawing on the resources, knowledge, and techniques of different disciplines; 5 proposals in areas that were inherently interdisciplinary, in the sense of conceptual interdisciplinarity discussed earlier in this book. Conclusions

In its policy discussions at the end of the 1992 adjudication process, the committee highlighted the importance of committee selection criteria and composition to maintain an environment that would be supportive of interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary research: Every effort should be made to maintain a breadth of membership on the Committee. Members should themselves be engaged in interdisciplinary work and have an openness, receptivity, and tolerance for other perspectives. Both the humanities and the social sciences should be represented on the Committee. Representatives from the sciences and environmental studies should be considered. Committee members who have played a bridging role among and between disciplines should be recruited. In some cases, this committee becomes the court of last appeal for people who work against the prevailing paradigms in their own disciplines, reflecting the turmoil and turbulence within the disciplines. Thus, Committee 15 serves a safety valve for Council.

In its ongoing evaluation of the changes implemented from the Courtney Report, and especially the establishment of the interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary committee, the granting council officers have continuously voiced the concern that establishing such a committee might (i) reduce the pressure on disciplinary committees to be tolerant of diversity and divergent paradigms and (2) become a dumping ground for lower-quality proposals. The committee was asked to address this concern. The response was as follows: "As with most other committees, we had some very high quality proposals and some second-rank proposals, which were not funded. As the rationales from applicants show, the Committee is also seen as a safe

129 Centres of Excellence

haven, shelter, port, or gestation chamber for original and highquality proposals." SSHRC had taken a risk in setting up an interdisciplinary adjudication committee with a very broad mandate. Allowing it to evolve its own practices and culture in response to the submissions from interdisciplinary scholars gave the committee a sense of energy and flexibility that is essential in dealing with fields that are rapidly changing.

N E T W O R K S OF C E N T R E S OF EXCELLENCE: OPPORTUNITIES FOR INTERDISCIPLINARITY Elaine Isabelle

The Networks of Centres of Excellence program was recommended to the federal government by the National Advisory Board on Science and Technology. As a key element of InnovAction, the Canadian Strategy for Science and Technology, the program provided $240 million over a period of five years to establish fifteen networks involving centres across the country, determined on the basis of an arm's-length peer-review process administered by the three federal university granting councils. Aimed at strengthening university-industry linkages and stimulating cutting-edge fundamental and long-term applied research in areas important to future industrial competitiveness, the program was based on the rather novel concept of bringing researchers and the private and public sector together through networking, as opposed to the single-site geographic centres that have characterized other centres of excellence programs throughout the world. The overriding criterion for selection was the excellence of the research program, which carried fifty percent of the weight in the review process, but linkages and relevance to future industrial competitiveness were also necessary conditions that carried forty percent of the weight. I was responsible for the implementation of the Networks of Centres of Excellence program following its announcement by the Canadian government in May 1988. The views expressed here are my own and are subjective. The program has been one of the most intensely monitored experiments in the funding of university research; an evaluation framework was in place even before awards were announced. I will leave the analysis and evaluation to the professionals who are carrying it out. I have simply tried to reflect on the experience and on some of the lessons I learned as a program administrator.

130 Elaine Isabella The Concept of Interdisciplinarity

The Networks of Centres of Excellence competition was an interesting experience from an interdisciplinary point of view. Although the program announcement clearly stated that the program was open to "all disciplines" and identified the creation of linkages as a major objective, the concept of interdisciplinarity per se was mentioned only peripherally in the document. Under the final selection criterion dealing with administrative and management capability networks were to "demonstrate proof of an administrative structure capable of managing a complex multidisciplinary, multiinstitutional program." Thus interdisciplinarity was not articulated as an objective nor was it mentioned as a desirable component of the scientific program or the linkages and networking. It was simply assumed that it would be an element to be managed in a successful network. There was a strong element of pragmatism involved in thinking about how successful networks would be constituted. The centres were to be driven by research needs; if the problems or challenges to be addressed required skills beyond a single discipline, this was to be reflected in the make-up of the team. After all, we were supporting fundamental and long-term applied research focused on future industrial competitiveness, and we knew very well from our experiences with strategic programming that this type of research usually requires a variety of skills. Even in the evaluation framework, the concept of interdisciplinarity was somewhat elusive. However, by the time the evaluation assessment was completed, the interdisciplinarity of research projects emerged as an indicator of the behavioural impact of the program on researchers and on the research community in general. It is interesting to note that, throughout the exercise, there was an implicit assumption on the part of officials who had designed the program that the program would change the behaviour of academic researchers. From a granting-council perspective, the strategic and partnership programming of the councils had been encouraging this type of behaviour for some time, and the winners would likely be those researchers who had responded to these incentives. Indeed, one journalist had asked me early on in the competition to speculate on the natural science and engineering researchers who might be expected to lead the proposals, and I had suggested that he should scan the lists of previously granted strategic and university-industry awards; in retrospect it was good advice, since they were virtually all there.

131 Centres of Excellence The Administrative Impact

Federal support of university-based research comes through the MRC, NSERC, and SSHRC, three distinct agencies that correspond to the major families of disciplines: the medical sciences, the natural sciences and engineering, and the social sciences and humanities. The first experience in interdisciplinarity took place at the tri-council steering committee, which was made up of the presidents of the three participating councils. Its members held advanced degrees in internal medicine, marine biology and literature, and they came together to oversee the implementation of a program that they had not designed but that they were to administer jointly. The presidents of the three granting councils were no strangers to each other and had little difficulty in quickly achieving a clear and open communication. There simply were no difficulties at this level, and consensus was quickly and easily reached on all the critical issues. It was agreed that the program would be administered out of NSERC and that experienced program staff from the three councils would be needed to manage a national competition involving peer evaluation across all disciplines of learning. This interdisciplinary team would be essential to ensure that the customs and sensitivities of the three communities would be respected. It would provide the necessary linkages into the infrastructure of the three agencies. As director of the competition, I proceeded on the model I knew - the model used by NSERC - relying upon program officers with graduate degrees and administrative skills supported by clerk/secretaries. Two of the three funding councils operated on much the same model and had no difficulty in providing experienced officers and clerks for the team. The MRC was managed differently, and it did not have program officers as we knew them. We did, however, succeed in finding a program officer knowledgeable in the area of medical research from the federal department dealing with health care delivery. Like our presidents, we found a common ground in our programmanagement skills and in the ambitious task before us, and we quickly overcame our differences in disciplinary background. Furthermore, as we worked out the details of procedures and guidelines, application and referee forms, we consistently found ourselves with a broader base of experience than each of us had individually. We consulted the program documents from the three councils in designing our materials and were able to pick and choose what we thought would be most effective. Although we thought the materials reflected new hybrids, some applicants perceived the materials we prepared

132 Elaine Isabelle

to be very much in the natural science mode. Thus although the program staff felt broadened by the experience, the same perception did not necessarily hold for the researchers. But then we were not competing with each other, and they were. Communicating with Potential Applicants

The next step after the program announcement and call for proposals was providing information to potential applicants. From day one, it was clear that researchers in the social sciences and humanities felt disadvantaged by the program criteria. The program objectives and criteria had been determined before the program was handed over to the granting councils to administer, and there was no flexibility on these issues. Although the first sentence of the objectives declared a complete openness'to all disciplines, the criteria zeroed in on new industrial products and processes and on advanced-technology developments and made no reference to the social and human context in which such developments are fostered. As program managers, we had to offer advice on how this contradiction might be resolved. There were those who accused us of making it up as we went along, and they were not far wrong. It was a new program; the time frame was highly compressed; and the problems were solved as they came up. I personally believed that the best chances for the social scientists and humanists lay in their coming together in interdisciplinary networks with researchers in the natural, engineering, and medical sciences, and I actively promoted that idea every chance I got. Furthermore, I was convinced that the medical and natural science proposals would be strengthened by the inclusion of a human-science element. In the targeted programs at NSERC, there was a growing awareness that science and technology had to be managed and that this might require social science expertise. Later, this awareness led to a joint initiative between the two councils in the management of technology. Some strategic grant selection panels were also beginning to grumble that economic assessments were needed to help them decide if research was relevant and should be supported. And who was not preoccupied by the social, ethical, and legal implications of biotechnology and of biomedical research? Somewhat to my surprise, I found that this type of suggestion was not always well received by researchers. I was told in no uncertain terms on more than one occasion that there was "sufficient strength in our discipline in Canada to go it on our own in this competition." It was clear that there was a problem of status associated with teaming

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up with disciplines beyond the immediate family. To suggest that researchers in a given discipline ought to team up with researchers from another discipline was very delicate. In addition, the further away from the family of disciplines, or the traditional groupings, the suggested collaboration was, the greater the threat seemed to be. I had the distinct impression that the discipline was a sort of alter ego that was getting in the way. Furthermore, there seemed to be a hierarchy of disciplines. The higher up the scale one went from the social to the natural sciences, the stronger the self-concept of researchers and sense of community seemed to be. In retrospect, it is interesting to reflect that the same suggestion to form interdisciplinary teams was not made to researchers in the natural sciences and engineering or in the medical sciences. The sensitivity of social scientists and humanists is therefore not difficult to understand, since it was mirrored by the insensitivity on our part. Frequently throughout the period leading up to the deadline for submissions, the issue was raised of how wide the net should be cast or how big the ideal network should be. Consistently the response of the program staff was that these decisions should be both conditioned by the program objectives and driven by the research needs. If skills beyond those of a single discipline were required to address the research challenges, the necessary expertise would have to be available to the network. As mentioned earlier, it was essentially a pragmatic approach. On the other hand, I do not recall much preoccupation on our part or on the part of researchers with skills that might be required to ensure that the right questions were being asked. Reviewing the Proposals

The international committee that reviewed the proposals was an experience in interdisciplinarity in itself. A committee of twenty-two members, including five medical researchers, four engineers, four life scientists, four physical scientists, three social scientists, one historian, and one earth scientist was chaired by a psychiatrist and former chairman of the Science Council of Canada. SSHRC nominated four members; the MRC, five members; and NSERC, twelve members. These numbers were based on the disciplinary distribution of proposals received. Nonetheless, social and medical science were somewhat favoured in order to ensure adequate coverage in spite of the relatively small numbers from each of these areas in the competition. Only NSERC nominated industry members, and there were four of them. Ten members were drawn from the international community.

134 Elaine Isabelle

By any standard this international committee was very large, with very diverse membership. When one considers the breadth of disciplines represented, it was gigantic. The members had been carefully selected because of their stature in their disciplines, but also because of their breadth and their experience with peer review and with industrial interactions. They functioned remarkably well together in a very short time. Once again, there was far more in common than one would have dared anticipate. There were no serious divisions between members, although it was clear that the more esoteric the vocabulary of a discipline, the less likely members from other disciplines were to participate in the debate concerning a proposal. And the level of esotericism seemed generally to follow the notion of hierarchy mentioned earlier. The interdisciplinarity of the committee clearly brought value to the process. Some of the most crucial contributions in the attempt to find consensus came from other points of view. Provided strong disciplinary input is provided - and in this case the discipline-based assessment came from written assessments and from site visit reports - interdisciplinary adjudication clearly enhances the quality of peer review. Some Preliminary Conclusions

Some four thousand Canadian researchers participated in the competition, and the funded networks included in excess of five hundred researchers. An analysis of the disciplinary affiliations of the applicants or the funded networks has not, to my knowledge, been done. My comments are therefore impressionistic opinions rather than facts based on an exhaustive analysis. It is my strong impression, however, that the teams that entered this competition were in general more interdisciplinary than any research teams submitting to the granting councils up until that time. It is also fair to say that the outreach tended to be primarily within the family of disciplines that were comfortable with each other and spoke a similar dialect. Nevertheless some new alliances did occur, and some networks did extend beyond the groupings observed to date. There were a few attempts, all unsuccessful, to gather absolutely everyone together in a democratic, all-inclusive network. These attempts simply failed to meet the overriding criterion of excellence; the ability to be selective and to be coherent was a major issue in this competition. Looking at the funded networks, one finds that the engineers did team up with other types of engineers and with physical and life scientists and that the physical scientists included other physical

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scientists, engineers, and, at times, medical scientists. While the medical sciences networks included primarily other medical and life scientists, one network included a geographer. The geneticists teamed up with social scientists active in the demographic and social aspects of heredity. In addition, the psychologists and sociologists teamed up with the researchers in business administration, economics, and geography. In every case the outreach was viewed as a strength in the adjudication process. On the negative side, the biotechnological and biomedical networks did not manage to include legal or ethical components, and the technology-driven networks did not include expertise in the assessment and management of technology or in the economic and social aspects of their programs. However, in fairness to the researchers involved, it should be noted that the time frame for submission in this one-time national competition probably precluded such breakthroughs in interdisciplinarity. Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say that attitudes, traditional barriers, and concerns about status also played a role. It will really be interesting to see how the experiences in interdisciplinarity that did occur function, and how they enrich the networks that embarked upon them. It will also be interesting to see if some new alliances develop as the networks evolve and mature. These experiences will provide the real case studies in interdisciplinarity. Much has happened since this case study was written. The Networks of Centres of Excellence program has gone on to Phase II, with a goal to mobilize Canada's research talent in the academic, public, and private sectors and apply it to the task of developing the economy and improving the quality of life of Canadians. The selection criteria have evolved to require "demonstration of a multidisciplinary, multisectoral approach in the research program, to the extent feasible" and "evidence of nontraditional training strategies which promote multidisciplinary approaches to research and encourage trainees to consider the economic and social implications of their work." It is interesting to note that of the four new networks funded in Phase II, three bring together the human sciences with either the natural sciences and engineering or the medical sciences, and they do so in a significant way.

7 Changing the Map

INTRODUCTION

We argued in the introductory chapters that interdisciplinarity raises complex issues, and this complexity has been demonstrated through contributions from twelve researchers. It should now be evident that interdisciplinarity includes a wide variety of differently oriented research, even a variety of research by the same researcher. Eichler and Andrew spoke about the different kinds of interdisciplinarity in their own work; a cursory glance at the publications of other contributors would suggest they are not alone in this respect. Surveying the contributions here, it is also evident that interdisciplinarity arises in quite different situations and that it may even be instigated "from the top down" by a university or granting council that applies the criterion "interdisciplinary" in the hope that researchers will produce something interesting to meet it. Often interdisciplinarity must be fostered, the contributors have all argued, and it must secure both institutional support and funding if it is to become established. These are not easy tasks, nor are they accomplished readily simply by asserting that interdisciplinary research is desirable. Different terminologies, registers, and cultures constitute barriers to interdisciplinarity, a point we will expand upon momentarily. Other kinds of barriers exist. Jasanoff (1990) and Gieryn (1983) use the term "boundary work" to describe the way in which scientific disciplines cordon off research falling within the proper scope of their discipline

137 Changing the Map

from other research that does not. They argue that disciplines spend considerable time engaged in boundary work, distinguishing between those granted authority to speak within the disciplinary register and others outside it. Our contributors have relied implicitly on the notion of boundary work. They all draw attention to how disciplinary distinctions are played out and to the often poor reception offered to interdisciplinary research by the existing disciplines. Yet interdisciplinary researchers also engage in boundary work of their own, either in establishing the coherence of their own programs of study or in seeking disciplinary status for their subject matter. Robinson speaks, for example, about boundary work in stressing the importance of establishing a common bond even (and perhaps especially) within an interdisciplinary field of study. Truax distinguishes between two new fields of study, partly in terms of how each has conducted and has been more or less successful in its boundary work. Miller notes how difficult this boundary work can be in practice, how often it constitutes a means of exclusion. Eichler, Andrew, and Messing all speak about the way that terminology, categories, and styles of research are used to carry out boundary work. Some of the contributors also asked whether university-trained researchers should be the only ones to chart the path of research. Miller's contribution is especially important in this regard because the ethics committees she helped establish contained nonacademic members whose "fit" was always difficult. In arguing that research is not the sole prerogative of academics and professionals, she echoes a concern often raised within women's studies. But including nonacademic or professional people in the research, in any capacity other than as subjects to be studied, has proven quite controversial in all fields and difficult every time it has been attempted. In choosing the contributors for this book, we purposefully selected people to represent as many variants of interdisciplinarity as we could think of, including the various types of conceptual interdisciplinarity we discussed in the introductory chapters. While we will have much to say in the next chapter about conceptual interdisciplinarity, only rarely do our contributors speak about it at any length directly. Eichler and Andrew do, of course, and interestingly, so too do Fienberg and Tanur when they raise questions about the categories taken for granted in statistics. But for the most part, when the daily problems of research are being discussed, questions of a more fundamental nature are put aside. To be sure, there are other researchers whose efforts are exclusively directed to interdisciplinarity in the more fundamental sense described by Kroker or

138 Changing the Map

Gusdorf, whose ideas we have discussed in earlier chapters of this book. For whatever reason, they are not well represented here, but this has not been our choice. In fact, what has been surprising to us is that the currents of thought so prevalent in the literature about interdisciplinarity today, including both postmodernist and poststructuralist critiques and those discussed by Kroker and Gusdorf, are also not represented as fully as one might expect in the research community. This does not mean that these currents of thought are without their impact even among those who fail to speak of them in this book. Rather, we have come to believe that in cases where postmodernism, poststructuralism and the like are not themselves the subject of the research, the effect of these interdisciplinary challenges is likely to remain obscure. In the rigorous process of applied and focused research, broader philosophical assumptions are taken for granted. They are made explicit only through a very close reading of research questions, structures, and protocols. So much different research; so many conceptions of interdisciplinarity; so much at stake in the most far-reaching of them. How can we speak about the phenomenon of interdisciplinarity? To answer this question we must return to the task undertaken for this book. Our concern, we reiterate, is only with problems encountered in doing interdisciplinary research. Given this task, we can safely put aside questions about whether any particular piece of research deserves the label "interdisciplinary," and the task of constructing a grand edifice of theory that integrates all these various pieces into a single picture. Except as they generate problems for researchers, we can leave aside debates about the relationship between the two notions of disciplinarity, debates touched upon in the introduction to this book. We need not answer whether there can be any "unified knowledge," for example, or whether interdisciplinarity must contain a radical critique of knowledge to be worthy of the label. For our purposes, it is sufficient to acknowledge that many differently oriented researchers conceive of their work as being interdisciplinary. This book is addressed to interdisciplinary researchers, whoever they may be. But, that said, the needs of interdisciplinary researchers with respect to the conduct of their research are very different, depending upon the way each understands interdisciplinarity. The problems encountered by the researcher attempting to bridge two disciplinary traditions will not be the same as those encountered by someone seeking to establish a new field of study or someone launching an epistemological critique of disciplines. It will make little sense to deal

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with all kinds of research problems as if they were the same. Instead, in the introductory chapters, we have identified some common variants of interdisciplinary research, showing how they are different from each other. In this chapter and the next, we will examine these variants in much more detail in order to identify the problems likely to arise in each case. Our goal is to see how these problems might be resolved. Are there also problems common to all variants of interdisciplinary research? Our contributors have suggested that there are, and we take up this view in the last chapter, when we focus on how interdisciplinary research might better be supported in the universities and by the granting councils. In this chapter, we deal with three variants of interdisciplinarity that have in common a conception of disciplines as branches of knowledge. In one variant, researchers try to combine work from more than one discipline. In another, the emphasis is on creating a new field of study, on an emerging discipline. The third example of interdisciplinarity occurs when researchers attempt to reorient their existing disciplines, aiming their questions at their colleagues in the hope that the prevailing method, approaches, and topics of research within the discipline can be changed. We say that all three variants are "changing the map," because all seek to alter the content of, and balance among, the various branches of knowledge. In the next chapter, we will deal with variants of interdisciplinarity that call into question the "branches of knowledge," the epistemological status of knowledge and the basic premises of research in both the natural and social sciences. INTERDISCIPLINARITY AS RESEARCH INVOLVING MORE THAN ONE DISCIPLINE

Increasingly, researchers are being encouraged to incorporate insights from the literature of other disciplines in the design and conduct of their work. Team research is also being encouraged, and members of the team are intended to reflect different disciplines. The EcoResearch program described by both Robinson and Wekerle is an example of promoting team and interdisciplinary research, as is the National Centres of Excellence competition discussed by Isabelle. But, as we have noted, there are other funding programs in the three research councils that require researchers to bridge disciplines. Universities, not to be outdone in this regard, now also encourage the formation of research centres on particular topics in order to promote cross-disciplinary work. Several contributors in this book illustrated

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another source of this variant of interdisciplinarity, the researcher herself. Balka is a good example of someone who individually seeks to combine insights from more than one field of study, in her case more than one interdisciplinary field of study. She is not alone in this regard. There are many reasons why disciplinary combinations are encouraged by universities, researchers, and granting councils alike. At the very least, the social semioticians discussed in the introduction would find a great deal of supporting material and some new insights from their colleagues in women's studies who are also dealing with language and social relations. Often, disciplinary boundaries - whatever their intellectual and institutional uses - are neither consonant with the intellectual needs that drive research nor particularly compatible with the open ended inquiry that research is supposed to encompass. Nonetheless, this variant of interdisciplinary research is not without its problems, some sufficiently serious as to endanger the capacity of the researcher to carry out the work or to throw into question the viability of the final effort. For example, interdisciplinary teams often apportion work as if they were themselves granting councils, without regard for their original objective of integration or synthesis. The only occasion that their members actually bridge the disciplines is in the management of the research. Each project operates as a separate and independent component of the research. In this context, interdisciplinarity is a convenient means of garnering research support and little else. To avoid this situation, a first step would be to identify the problems that create it. There are three such problems: we call them the translation problem, the language problem and the reception problem. The Translation Problem

The first problem arising from the combination of two or more fields of study is often discussed in the literature on interdisciplinarity. We call it the translation problem, but most of the contributors to this book make reference to it by some other name: they refer to cross-cultural differences or differences in language, for example. In our usage, "translation" refers to the movement of information from one discipline to another. It is a necessary first step in the development of integrative or synthetic work. Robinson cites the translation problem as the reason that interdisciplinary research requires so much time in its initial stages. Eichler speaks about the categories and templates of analysis characteristic of each discipline, which must be altered or redrawn if two or more

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disciplinary traditions are to be brought together. Andrew notes that the practices of research differ in the various disciplines, and Messing illustrates how people from the various disciplines can talk past each other, failing to communicate even about the significance of their respective contributions. Another example of the translation problem will be useful to illustrate the difficulties it poses for interdisciplinary research. There is a kind of research that goes by the title of "law and society." In this research, sociologists need to be able to converse with lawyers about the core issues of their common project. They need to be confident that they have understood the "black letter" of the law properly and that information about the law has not been distorted. It takes some years to train a lawyer about how issues are conceived and dealt with by the law, however. Sociologists cannot expect to acquire this training by reading a few court cases and articles from the law journals. They are very likely to misread the issues raised by lawyers or legally trained researchers, even after they have been working with them for some time. In turn, social scientists need to convey to lawyers something about the assumptions that guide their work, so that the results of sociological studies can be interpreted appropriately by lawyers. On examining how the courts have dealt with social science evidence and with social scientists as expert witnesses, it becomes clear that even among lawyers accustomed to working with social science, something frequently goes amiss. Lawyers regularly fail to appreciate what is being said or the degree to which confidence in the results is justified according to the standards of social science. Even legal academics, who regularly work with social scientists, lack exposure to the theoretical debates that give meaning to the concepts regularly used by social scientists and to the debates that spawn research. In this context, it is not unreasonable to think of lawyers and sociologists as speaking different languages and of their interaction as requiring, in the first instance, translation. Each disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) community has, as we have noted, a different way of speaking about the topics and the conduct of its research. This different way of speaking is made up of the technical terminology, but also of the manner in which information gains credibility, the order in which information is presented, the points of reference considered to be appropriate, and the implicit agreements about what needs to be said and what can profitably be taken for granted. Messing made this point when she discussed how researchers with one sort of disciplinary training kept waiting for researchers from other disciplines to get to the point. The problem is not simply one of different terminologies but of understanding the

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significance of what is being said in each case. Without the handy reference points embedded in the arguments of each discipline, others fail to make the connection between the words being uttered and the meaning intended. We spoke in the introductory chapters about the register of each discipline. Our contention now is that a process of translation is required whenever two or more registers are involved. The metaphor underlying our discussion of the translation problem is taken from language, and the difficulties of communicating between registers is easily compared to that of translating from Chinese to English. Interestingly, the translation problem in interdisciplinarity represents the more difficult case. In this instance, registers are normally invisible even to those accustomed to dealing with more than one of them. As noted, they reflect what are normally taken for granted as the appropriate orientation, ways of speaking, and practices within the disciplines. They are also directly associated with how any community defines its boundaries, inculcates its members, and excludes others from the benefits and perquisites of disciplinary status. Thus, it is quite commonplace for a researcher encountering translation problems for the first time to express surprise or dismay upon discovering that she has often encountered the barriers to disciplinary collaboration but never actually noticed that different registers were involved. We all tend to believe that the information generated through research stands on its own and that it is capable of being assimilated by anyone who wants to do so. The toxicologist who sits on the expert committee with the agricultural economist believes that the research studies they both draw upon speak for themselves. The members of the council discussing ethical guidelines for medical research generally believe that anyone with professional or academic training can understand the research and deal with its problems, as Miller noted. This is a fundamental premise of scientific work of all kinds, but it is mistaken. The mistake lies in not recognizing the translation problem from one disciplinary register to another. It can be said that information takes its meaning from the context in which it is generated and the situation in which it is understood. This is especially true when information is evaluated within a particular, but often unstated, theoretical framework. The uninitiated will believe that he or she can read an economic analysis and draw conclusions, but lacking the requisite knowledge about the disciplinary conventions and assumptions that shape the research and its data, she does not really hear what is being said. Another, simpler example will be useful. The same statistic - or response to a survey question or documented facial expression - can be understood in

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many different ways depending on the situation. This is why people often say that "statistics lie." Similarly, the same research conclusion will probably have a different meaning to a layperson than it does to those active in the field. This was evident, for example, in a study of scientific controversies when it became clear that statements made by scientists about "harm not being demonstrated by a particular pesticide" meant that the pesticide was safe. The scientists, by virtue of their disciplinary training, knew that little could be concluded from this statement alone about the actual safety of the pesticide. They knew how to interpret the scientific statement, but it had a profoundly different meaning in everyday language. Scientists read the report as indicating little about safety, in contrast to the reading of the same report by policymakers and the general public (for more details, see Salter 1988). Removing single sentences, arguments, concepts, or conclusions from their original context or register and placing them within a new register changes their meaning, often dramatically. Conclusions drawn from research also need to be read against the background of the methodological assumptions that went into its design. Choices are always made in the conduct of research that limit and shape how its conclusions should be understood and, more importantly, the degree to which such conclusions should reasonably be generalized. Without knowledge of these choices, the conclusions of the research are easily misunderstood. For example, reputable sociologists might reasonably decide to trade off the methodological rigour gained from sample surveys for the kind of rich, detailed information possible only from lengthy interviews or observations. An outsider to the discipline might well dismiss the results as lacking in rigour because no quantitative data were included in the report. Too often in interdisciplinary research, insufficient attention is paid to methodological decisions, as if there was only one convention governing good research and only one acceptable methodology for conducting it. It is also assumed that the material will be read with appropriate degrees of confidence in the results, even when the reader has limited access to the prevailing methodological conventions within the discipline or to choices made by the researcher. All these situations frequently occur in interdisciplinary research because of the different registers involved. They are all part of the translation problem. The Language Problem

The translation problem is made more difficult by what we call the language problem. The language problem arises because the same

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words are used in quite different ways in different disciplines. Andrew makes this point most explicitly in her discussion of agent and agency, but almost all the contributors refer to the language problem, the misunderstanding of key terms. A few examples will illustrate the problem. Philosophers, sociologists, and biologists each mean something quite different when they use the word "values." Similarly, there is a significant debate within sociology about "empirical research" (often associated with "positivism"), but it bears little resemblance to the debate about empiricism or positivism in philosophy, the research described as empirical by economists, or the casual reference to empirical research among natural scientists. Political scientists use "regulation" in two distinct ways, one dealing with the role of the state in the process of capital accumulation and the other dealing with governmental administrative agencies. A listener needs to be acquainted with the particular register being invoked to know which meaning is intended. The language problem has three quite different dimensions. First, what is at issue can be different dictionary definitions of words. As Andrew and Robinson both discovered to their chagrin, words are often used as if they have one meaning when different meanings are in fact implied or intended by the various disciplines. This dimension of the language problem is not the product of a careless use of words so much as it is the unintended by-product of conceptual clarification, which occurs within any field of study. Having systematically developed the terminology and conceptual framework for their own work, researchers assume that their concept, in all its rigour, is applicable across disciplinary boundaries. Researchers find it almost inconceivable that their carefully chosen terminology could be the source of a simple confusion. Second, as many scholars appreciate (but too few acknowledge), many terms used in disciplinary research are, as Connolly suggests, "essentially contested concepts" (Connolly 1983). These individual words serve as battlegrounds for competing paradigms and normative commitments. For example, the term "democracy" is an essentially contested concept insofar as no dictionary definition is likely to resolve the deeply rooted conceptual and normative issues that lie behind any particular use of the term. When different people use "democracy," they speak as though the term is universally understood as having one meaning, or at least some consistent points of reference. In fact, however, their real intention is to marshal support for a particular meaning of "democracy," one that can be understood only as part of their larger political, normative, or intellectual analysis.

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It is easy to demonstrate the play of essentially contested concepts within disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates. Indeed, we have already suggested that "interdisciplinarity" might be an essentially contested concept in its own right. Some proponents of interdisciplinarity, whose work we surveyed in the introductory chapters, have invested the term interdisciplinarity with much more than a definition. They conceive of interdisciplinarity as reflecting a stance towards human knowledge, political and normative commitments, and a new paradigm for research. Finding any agreement among these people about a definition of interdisciplinarity is impossible, because what is at issue among them is something other than a definition. Indeed, any definition would be beside the point because each proponent of interdisciplinarity in fact seeks to reorient what researchers do in profoundly different ways. Yet each group claims the term "interdisciplinarity" as the label that reflects its particular point of view. Indeed, it may be that terminological battles about the ownership (and thus the meaning) of particular words all but displace the more fundamental issues at stake. The existence of essentially contested concepts in all disciplines complicates the language problem considerably. In many cases, there appears to be little benefit in seeking out an appropriate definition to effect a translation from one disciplinary context to another. One cannot translate a word that has no meaning, a word that is really only a vehicle for a conflict over paradigms and social values.1 The third dimension of the language problem arises as a result of borrowing terminology between fields of study. Andrew spoke of this explicitly, but all contributors acknowledged how frequently terminology is borrowed from one discipline or interdisciplinary field for another. In part, this borrowing is a result of the attempt to achieve conceptual clarity or a careful reading of a wide literature. But often it has another purpose. Terminology is often borrowed from one discipline for another to generate fresh insights for a debate that appears to have become stagnant. In this context, the borrowed terminology serves mainly as a metaphor. In the 19608, for example, theorists in the social sciences reached into the vocabulary of physics to arrive at a new way of appreciating social phenomena - namely, general systems theory. A similar example today is "chaos theory." In both cases, it does not matter whether the terminology of systems or chaos theory was used as the physicists would have understood it. In the new context of social science, the borrowed terminology is used for its suggestive and explanatory power in order to deal with matters that physicists seldom consider. In this and many other cases, familiarity with the original meanings of the borrowed terminology

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lends credence and legitimacy to the effort, but it is not always essential to know the original meanings, because the terms are used so differently in their new context. The Reception Problem

The third problem arising when interdisciplinarity refers to combining insights from two or more disciplines might be called the reception problem. This problem is also referred to by most of our contributors. They note that even the most obscure academic articles are written with an audience in mind and contribute to an established literature. Interdisciplinary work of the type being described here - involving academics from different disciplines focusing on a single topic easily falls between the cracks. It is "outside the lines." It finds no easy audience in the literature either because it appears to deal with issues that are not being debated or because it draws on methodological and paradigmatic assumptions that are unfamiliar (and thus not likely to be acceptable) to the established disciplines. Even if the audience is willing, however, and the academic journals receptive, there remains the problem of standards by which the research can be assessed, as Robinson and Wekerle discuss at length. We might all agree that disciplines should tolerate their own heretics, as Fienberg and Tanur suggest, and that disciplines should come to terms with the implications of their own orthodoxy by being open to what is unusual or new, but it is still important to note that not all heretics herald new discoveries, as Wekerle discovered, and not every unorthodox study represents solid scholarship. How then to ensure quality control in a situation where both the standards of quality and the imposition of control are themselves subject to question? The optimism of Wekerle and Isabelle notwithstanding, those on the receiving end of the reception problem know how frequently research is rejected when it is unfamiliar to the adjudicators. Finding Solutions

The three problems - of translation, language, and reception - confound the research and confuse the researcher who wants to draw upon work in other disciplines or to work in close collaboration with researchers having different intellectual traditions. There is no easy resolution. Contested concepts are not likely to be eliminated. Registers are essential to the development of disciplines, even if they also impose barriers to others and controls upon their own participants. The borrowing of terms has had quite beneficial results, even if their

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new definitions satisfy no one in the originating discipline. Disciplines do need their heretics and challenges from their margins, even if the price is discomfort and even if the occasional publication of research is later deemed insubstantial or flawed. If disciplines can be compared to communities, as we have done, then it is easy to see how much time is required, and why. Crosscultural research always takes much time. Indeed it is conventional wisdom in anthropology that any field-study in a new culture cannot be completed without the researcher submerging himself or herself in the community for at least two years. Several contributors to this volume have suggested that an equivalent amount of time is required to socialize oneself and others to interdisciplinarity. Alternatively, researchers can deal individually with the complex problems raised by bridging more than one discipline (or interdiscipline) if the focus of their own work is very narrow but the work itself is part of a long term commitment to a subject matter. Narrowly focused research carried out over an extended period serves the same purpose as the time and care taken to establish a research project by members of a team comprised of different forms of disciplinary expertise. Balka is a good example of someone who pursues a single topic over an extended period by drawing on various disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) traditions. Notwithstanding her journey through several interdisciplinary fields of study, her own research has been kept constant, and as such, it provides a foundation for assessing and assimilating material of quite different kinds. It is as if she were a professional translator whose tasks encompassed only one narrow field of endeavour. Similarly, a researcher who deals with government regulation, for example, might well traverse the literature in many fields of study, because all deal with some aspect of regulation. Over time, this researcher might become familiar with the profoundly different ways that the subject of regulation was addressed in each case. By keeping the focus of attention narrow and by addressing a single problem over an extended time, a single researcher can develop the translation and language skills necessary for interdisciplinary work, and in this manner, the researcher will be able to integrate the various contributions of the different disciplines. NEW FIELDS OF STUDY EMERGING

AND

DISCIPLINES

A fair proportion of interdisciplinary work has a longer-term objective than simply combining two or more disciplines in a single program of research. Quite often, the intention is to establish a new field

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of study, either an new interdisciplinary field or even a new discipline. Vickers provides an excellent survey of the steps likely to be required before a new field of study can be said to stand on its own. It will be worthwhile to review the progression of an emerging field of study. We have suggested, and Vickers' analysis confirms, that interdisciplinarity often first develops in contradistinction to established disciplines or fields of study and that its proponents usually take a critical stance towards some aspect of the prevailing orientations of the disciplines from which they originally drew their expertise. Developing this critical stance is only the first step in creating a new field of study, however; it is not sufficient in itself to bring the new field into being. Women's studies, Canadian studies, gerontology, criminology, kinesiology, biochemistry, information science, cognitive science, management science, communication, environmental studies, and social and political thought are all examples of new and emerging fields of study that are now becoming or might someday become disciplines in their own right. In each case, researchers took the first step by locating lacunae in the research agenda of their discipline or problems in its orientation, and they identified publicly what they considered to be amiss. In each of these fields, a literature was first developed concerning the "errors and omissions" of the established discipline(s). But if these fields are to become disciplines, as some have now done and others will surely do in the future, their researchers also have to establish distinctly new approaches capable of responding to the challenges they themselves have posed. Robinson and Cambrosio provided examples of how this was done in a teaching context in two universities. They spoke of establishing a menu of courses to support flexibility in orientation, even as core material was presented to students. In the context of research, the problem of establishing the core of a new field of study is more difficult than it is in a teaching context, however, because intellectual coherence cannot be established by pasting together a collection of course materials. Robinson refers to the problem of shaping intellectual coherence as finding a common bond. The Transition Problem

If we spoke earlier about a translation problem, the task of finding a common bond might be called the transition problem. The transition problem arises because it takes time and considerable intellectual effort to develop the level of coherence necessary to sustain a new

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field of study, even assuming the institutional barriers and disincentives can be overcome. Not only must the translation, language, and reception problems of interdisciplinarity be addressed, but the researchers must address the question of how they would order and carry out research differently. And in doing so, they must agree among themselves. Reaching agreement is a serious problem, but it also provides the vitality associated with interdisciplinarity, as Fienberg, Tanur, and Truax have pointed out. In their case studies, they illustrated how various researchers staked out their claims to defining the field even as they conducted more mundane and conventional research. Their claims were never accepted at face value but became highly contested in their own right. Vickers also made reference to sharp debates in Canadian studies, but an even better example of the highly contested nature of any common bond might have been women's studies where, as Eichler has noted, debates about the intellectual core of the new field have been particularly vigorous. It is, after all, not immediately selfevident what the core concerns of women's studies might be. Reasonably, this new field of study could focus on the material conditions of women, as indeed it did when most women's studies programs were first established. But since that time, other visions of the field have been proposed, including some that would place epistemological issues right at the centre of the field. Moreover, while initially most researchers in women's studies were content to draw upon the conventional methodologies of their disciplines of origin, today debates rage about whether there is an appropriate methodology tailored to the specific needs of women's studies. Few would dispute the status of women's studies as a distinct field of study, perhaps even a discipline. Women's studies is, however, still wrought with conflicts about what its prevailing approaches, topics, and methodologies should be. As such, women's studies represents an intellectually exciting field, one in which the common bond cannot yet be taken for granted. This is the positive side of the transition problem. In the process of transition, unfortunately, researchers from an emerging field of study must also engage in controversies about the legitimacy of their efforts, the quality of their work, and about the capacity of the university or granting councils to handle yet another new field of research. In the context of the academic wars, those proposing new interdisciplinary areas of study are perceived as threatening the intellectual foundations of the established disciplines and as seeking to usurp the prerogatives of disciplinarity. Truax dealt with the institutional side of the transition problem quite specifically

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when he compared the course of events in two interdisciplinary fields of study and demonstrated how important institutional factors and individual entrepreneurialism (for lack of a better word) were in shaping the eventual status of each field. All contributors, but especially Cambrosio, Miller, and Fienberg and Tanur, were quite cognizant of the institutional problems of transition, and each drew attention to how the eventual status of any field of study reflected a negotiation within an institutional context. It is worth examining the negotiation more closely to see how the transition problem is actually handled. We will do so using several examples. In the early stages of communication studies, the debate focused on the appropriate label for this new field. It took the form of a conflict over "communication" versus "communications." What was at issue was not, of course, the single letter "s" but the degree to which this new field of study should deal with all social relations ("communication") or just institutions such as the media and telecommunications ("communications"). It would be easy to laugh about this issue were it not for the time and resources that went into the debate. It was later proposed that the communication association change its name to the "Communications and Cultural Studies Association." This proposal reflected an attempt by a few members of the group to again reorient the field towards particular topics, methods, and approaches that were becoming more prevalent. These members thought that fundamental questions about social science should be encompassed within this new field of study as central themes. The proposal to change the name of the field was rejected, but the debates about names were strangely symbolic of the larger issues being negotiated at the time. In some universities, environmental studies was established by people who felt the need for a critique of science. In their view, environmental studies should be "holistic," in contrast to the natural sciences with their high level of disciplinary specialization. Environmental studies should focus on relationships within the environment, they suggested, and as such, should not privilege human interactions over nonhuman ones. It was also argued that environmental studies should provide a venue for raising questions about how science is conducted, how research is done, and how students might best learn. Today, environmental studies has become a very popular program within several universities and with both governments and students. Indeed, in some locations, it has now acquired departmental or faculty status. With this development, interestingly, have come new expectations of the field, specifically that natural science will be included

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in the curriculum and that natural scientists will participate as faculty members. Environmental studies now incorporates both a critique of science and the unrepentant practice of science. The older members of the environmental studies programs are faced with deciding which methodologies should be taught as examples of "holistic" research and how routine curriculum decisions should be made without losing sight of the interdisciplinary impetus of the program. Because answers to these questions are highly contested within environmental studies, there is a real possibility that the result will be two very different kinds of environmental studies programs, one involving a close working relationship with scientists and the other rejecting any relationship at all. The critique of law faculties, referred to in the introductory chapters, set off a similar controversy about a decade ago, because practitioners of the discipline of law did not appreciate being told that theirs was a flawed approach. Since that time, however, conventional legal academics have learned to work alongside their critics, and vice versa, so that almost all law faculties now contain members on both sides of the debate. Indeed, it might be argued that the erstwhile protagonists in the controversy take great pride in the diverse composition of their law faculties. A different kind of controversy has arisen since, however. It concerns the prevailing orientation of the newly emerging literature on law. Two intellectual camps have now developed, one called "law and society," and the other, "law and economics." Both involve the integration of law with the social sciences, but different social scientists are involved in each case. The researchers in these two new fields have quite different views both about law and about society, views so different that the two groups have each sought recognition as a separate academic society. Two sets of conferences and journals are supported. Those engaged in law and society rarely attend meetings of the law and economics group, and vice versa. In this context, the question arises whether anything could force these two groups - each originally critical of the conventional approach to the study of law to negotiate a common bond for their research. Or is the distinction between law and society and law and economics now inevitable, their common disciplinary origins irrelevant, and the resemblance in their names just coincidence? At the frontier of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities are such new fields of study as the cognitive, information, and management sciences. In each, as Fienberg and Tanur illustrate in

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their case study, the intention is to create a new field that is a hybrid of natural and social sciences. This is a much more difficult task than was attempted in the Eco-Research program, where all that natural and social scientists had to agree upon was a broad program of research and the worthiness of particular applications. It is a more difficult task than that undertaken by Messing, where each discipline's specialists had different tasks to perform and contributions to make. In hybrid fields, the working conventions of very differently oriented disciplines must be brought together into a single intellectual enterprise, one with a discernable common bond. The question to be addressed in this instance is how the theoretical nature of many studies in the social sciences and the humanities can be combined with the experimental bias of science? Furthermore, how is the businesslike and pragmatic orientation of a field like management studies to be brought together with a research enterprise that is normally part of natural science? At issue is whose methodologies should prevail and whose standards should be used in the adjudication of their research. The questions raised in these examples of emerging new fields of study are often considered by universities and granting councils, who deal regularly with the transition problem. They cannot be resolved from outside the community of scholars actually engaged in the process of creating a common bond, however. Moreover, should the common bond eventually accepted not be satisfactory to some researchers, debate will begin anew, most likely within the context of yet another, newer field of study. To the extent that a common bond can be identified, the new field of study itself takes on many of the attributes of an established discipline, complete with its own register. It then imposes its own limits and constraints and socializes its new recruits. It establishes "rules," tacit understanding about the centrality of some debates and the marginality of others. The new field focuses on some methodological approaches to the exclusion of others, approaches that were perhaps unorthodox originally but are now rapidly becoming part of a new orthodoxy. Interdisciplinary fields of study easily shade into disciplines. When they do, the original critiques that gave rise to them lose their intellectual force. The new field attracts its own critics, who may well cast their comments as a new interdisciplinary challenge. Nothing in the status of interdisciplinarity ensures that a common bond will necessarily be developed, however. The transition problem is serious, and it has many forms of resolution. A comparison between Canadian studies and women's studies is instructive. Canadian studies

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has been exceptionally well supported through government programs. There is a Canadian Studies Association in Canada; there are Canadian studies programs at some universities (often established only after considerable controversy), many Canadian studies associations internationally, and several journals. Canadian studies and women's studies have many of the same institutional attributes as emerging disciplines. But women's studies is characterized by continuing debates about its common bond, while our observations suggest that Canadian studies is not. To our knowledge, no one has suggested that Canadian studies ought to be viewed as having a particular constellation of topics, perspectives, and methodologies comparable to a discipline, whereas in women's studies, these suggestions are commonplace. No one claims that Canadian studies has its own register or that it should have one. As Vickers indicates, Canadian studies draws its considerable strength as a field of study from the fact that it integrates two or more disciplinary approaches. By contrast, many suggest that women's studies offers a new paradigm for social research. We think that this comparison illustrates two quite different variants of interdisciplinarity. Women's studies is an emerging new field of study, perhaps even already a discipline. Canadian studies is more like the variant of interdisciplinarity we first described: it is based on the identification of lacuna within the established disciplines and involves scholars from various disciplines working from within their own disciplinary traditions on joint initiatives that bridge and integrate disciplinary perspectives. One point remains to be made about the establishment of new fields of study through interdisciplinary challenges. Reference has been made to the controversies generated by the emergence of new fields and to the manner in which these are played out in universities and other contexts. In effect, those engaged in new fields have a selling job to do to gain institutional support for their efforts. This requires them to address audiences outside their own community of scholars, as a first priority, and to marshal arguments that others, who are not necessarily sympathetic, might find compelling. As a result, their work is often presented in highly idealized terms. Vivid images are drawn to convey the reasons for the new field. Rhetorical strategies are employed. These actions have a cost. They reorient researchers away from the task of seeking a common bond and even of doing research. Interdisciplinary researchers also find themselves having to live up to the ideals and images that they themselves have created for purely strategic reasons. This, too, undermines the credibility of interdisciplinary research. Having to defend the new field of study as "solid" and intellectually coherent, even while solidity

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and coherences are being developed and negotiated, is a difficult task. And it is not surprising that rhetorical strategies should be adopted by proponents of the new field to deflect criticisms, even at the price of the scholarship they would otherwise be engaged in. INTERDISCIPLINARY CHALLENGES TO EXISTING DISCIPLINES

In theory, the challenge of interdisciplinarity should be welcomed by the established disciplines or fields of study as a means of ensuring their vitality. All the contributors to this volume agree. Intellectual ferment has the advantage of attracting participants to conference sessions, recruits to the field, and submissions to the journals. At its best, it undermines orthodoxy and leads to innovation and new insights. In practice interdisciplinarity is not nearly as well appreciated, as all the contributors, and especially Isabelle, Miller, and Fienberg and Tanur, have also noted. Even in disciplines that are relatively open to the challenge of interdisciplinarity, the response is often only to create new subfields - a seemingly endless proliferation that incorporates members of the emerging community of scholars within the larger enterprise without any debate about the significance of their challenge. In Canada, for example, political economy was simply added to political science as a subfield, while political scientists went about their business as usual. There is a strong argument to be made that disciplines should be forced, or at least encouraged, to come to terms with questions and challenges raised by their members. Wekerle hints as much, as do Fienberg and Tanur. But there are equally compelling reasons why they should not. After all, responding to every interdisciplinary challenge is time-consuming and not always productive. It draws resources away from the conduct of research towards debates about its significance, and the debates seldom convince people who are otherwise unsympathetic. Nothing offered here will resolve the tensions just described within any established discipline or field of study. It is, as Cambrosio emphasizes, a matter of negotiation or, as Jasanoff calls it, of boundary work. Only time will tell whether the criticisms offered to the established disciplines in the name of interdisciplinarity will be incorporated (reshaping the discipline) or shunted aside, perhaps given legitimacy but insulated from the discipline as "subfields," or whether they will spawn hybrid fields or, alternatively, be rejected out of hand. To the extent that their challenges and criticisms are rejected by their disciplines of origin, those engaged in interdisciplinary work within their own disciplines are

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forced by others to seek formal disciplinary status for their new fields of study. Dealing with the Challenges

We have called this chapter "Changing the Map" because all three variants of interdisciplinarity discussed in it have the effect of changing the content of the disciplines or the relations among them. Thus far, we have focused on the researchers or, more particularly, on the challenges they offer and the problems they are likely to encounter as a result. In this last section, we have focused on interdisciplinarity as a challenge to orthodoxy. To conclude, it will be helpful to look at whether the fate of the interdisciplinary challenge is circumscribed by the character of the disciplines or fields of study at which it is aimed. It may be that the capacity of disciplines to incorporate the challenges of interdisciplinarity bears only a limited relationship to the attitudes of their individual members. Instead, the reasons for the reaction to interdisciplinarity might be found in the character of different disciplines or fields of study themselves. It seems logical that this should be the case. Some disciplines seem to be quite closed to new approaches or challenges of any kind, while others openly embrace the debates engendered by interdisciplinarity. To explore this issue further, it will be helpful to recall some of the characteristics of disciplinarity or fields of study outlined in chapter 2. We argued earlier that it is possible to categorize disciplines or fields of study more broadly, in terms of how tightly or loosely bounded they are, that is, in terms of how much latitude they allow around the kinds and numbers of topics covered and methods of analysis used and the degree of variation permitted in the disciplinary register and in the self-professed community of scholars. A tightly bounded discipline allows very little variation, while a loosely bounded one permits a great deal of flexibility. We have also suggested that disciplines tend to be primarily research-driven or theorydriven, by which we mean that the main corpus of work in the discipline is concerned either with incremental research or with theoretical issues. Intuitively, we would expect those in tightly bounded disciplines to react differently to interdisciplinary challenges than their colleagues in theory-driven, loosely bounded disciplines. At the very least, a positive response to interdisciplinarity would seem to require some willingness to deal with broad theoretical issues and to tolerate dissonance within the discipline. If reactions to interdisciplinarity are tied up with the character of a discipline, it is unrealistic to expect disciplines to change simply in

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response to persuasion. From the individual researcher's point of view, there is often little to be gained by challenging the character of a tightly bounded and empirically driven discipline, especially if the result is only that his or her own research suffers. Moreover, researchers who challenge such disciplines cannot represent the original disciplines faithfully in interdisciplinary research that combines two or more disciplines, because by doing so they are even more likely to be isolated by their erstwhile colleagues. For these researchers, the best choice is often to find a new field of study. New disciplines are often created by researchers at the margins of their field, by intellectual heretics, in other words. It is our view that the intellectual landscape is considerably improved in the process. Incentives such as strategic granting programs are not likely to have much influence in promoting interdisciplinarity if disciplines, by their nature, have little tolerance for interdisciplinarity in their midst or for close working relationships with others. We should not be surprised to find, as Isabelle noted, that for some academics applying to the National Centres of Excellence Program, "interdisciplinarity" meant only bringing together colleagues from closely related subfields or establishing managerial links between the natural sciences, perhaps with a small representation from the social sciences and humanities. The point has also been made that the character of a discipline or field of study is not given in its subject matter or methodology. It has been suggested, rather, that the character of a discipline is the result of the way it is practised at any point in time and that its character is a matter of negotiation between those who hold intellectual and institutional power within the discipline and others who, for whatever reason, seek to challenge it. Thus far, we have spoken of this negotiation, or boundary work, primarily in terms of how disciplines react to interdisciplinary challenges and how, in turn, new fields of study establish themselves as intellectually coherent. But researchers in all fields of study have something vested in the larger picture, in seeing the whole "map" as reflecting their own notion of what is acceptable or desirable as the organization of knowledge. Relations among disciplines and between disciplines and variants of interdisciplinarity are as much of interest to most researchers as the circumstances within their own discipline. We referred earlier to academic wars, which are easily understood as reflecting conflicts over the scarce resources of the university, and to the even scarcer resource of stardom in the intellectual community. We are now suggesting that something else is at stake in academic warfare, that is, conflicting images of the proper organization, or

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map, of disciplines and fields of study. We have observed that it is not uncommon for physicists or economists to pass judgment on sociology, or vice versa, even though researchers in these disciplines are unlikely to be well acquainted with what they criticize so freely. Virtually all members of the academy feel they are adequately prepared by their own discipline to determine the proper organization of knowledge. As Messing states so eloquently, however, not only is interdisciplinarity characterized by a state of unpreparedness (as people encounter registers, research practices, unfamiliar to themselves), but successful interdisciplinarity requires acknowledgment of how unprepared the average researcher is to move beyond the confines of his or her familiar discipline or field of study. The reception given to interdisciplinarity also reflects something more than the character of any discipline, as a consequence. It reflects the capacities of researchers in all disciplines or fields of study to see themselves as "unprepared," or as "informed amateurs," without answers about how the intellectual landscape should be structured. The importance of having adequate resources, institutional support, and incentives to support interdisciplinarity lies here. Each factor can tip the balance between a situation where researchers refuse to countenance changes in the intellectual landscape and a situation where long-standing conventions, grounded in disciplinary experience, can be cast aside to make room for new fields of study or approaches to the established disciplines. Additional resources, institutional support, and incentives can be of considerable assistance in persuading researchers to reconsider their intellectual landscape, their view of the proper relations among fields of study, and their own positions as members of disciplinary communities. Segregating those who want to pursue interdisciplinary work from their disciplines of origin and from the mainstream intellectual community only entrenches the existing character of the disciplines and the current map of the intellectual landscape. It does so by removing those in the best position to change it. Were the world not rapidly evolving and continually casting up new problems to be addressed, a stable universe of disciplines and a well worn map might suffice. But stability can easily be counterproductive in these times.

8 Charting New Territories

In the last chapter, we discussed the challenges posed by interdisciplinarity and their possible effect on researchers previously involved in specific disciplines. We suggested that there are three such challenges: the combination of two or more disciplinary traditions, the creation of new fields of study, and the incorporation of the interdisciplinary critique within the perspectives, methods, or topics of the established disciplines. However, there is another quite different kind of challenge posed by interdisciplinarity which both the concept of disciplines and the essence of the research enterprise attract attention. This second type of challenge, which we discussed extensively in the introduction, takes at least three different forms. There may be (i) a general or metatheoretical critique of the organization of knowledge into specific disciplines; (2) a critique of the "voices" represented in and through research; or (3) a critique of the relevance, social commitments, practicality, and audiences for research. These challenges cannot be resolved simply, but neither are they easily ignored. It was noted in the last chapter that this second type of challenge was addressed only indirectly by our contributors. It is surprising that many of them did not discuss the second type more directly, for their writing in other contexts would suggest a different course of events. However, the fault lies not with the contributors nor even with our instructions, we believe, but lies instead with the orientation of this book, which is to the practical problems of conducting interdisciplinary research. Even someone holding the most radical of the views expressed in this chapter - for example, someone offering a

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critique of the research enterprise or of the privileges of academics who engage in it - nonetheless faces mundane problems in actually carrying out the work. Highly theoretical accounts become considerably less relevant when, for example, an attempt is being made to discern the pragmatic problems of research. But we would be amiss if we were to follow the example of our contributors and discuss only the less radical challenges offered by interdisciplinarity, for in large measure, the force of the interdisciplinary challenge draws its strength from fundamental discussions about the shape and organization of knowledge. Often this discussion is about "interdisciplinarity," but it is also often carried out without reference to interdisciplinarity per se, for example when it occurs in studies of research methodology or in the sociology and philosophy of science. In this book, with its emphasis on the practical problems of doing research, we cannot do full justice to the more fundamental challenges posed by interdisciplinarity, regardless of how important they are. What we can offer is an overview of these challenges, an indication of what it is about disciplines and about the prevailing organization of knowledge that causes so much complaint. THE G E N E R A L OR MET AT HE O RE T I C AL CRITIQUE

Some interdisciplinary critics, Gusdorf and Kroker among them but also some researchers in fields such as women's, environmental, and communication studies, are opposed to the very notion of intellectual divisions reflecting disciplines. They believe that any attempt to distinguish between the topics, perspectives, and methods of the various disciplines precludes a more integrated study, one that is focused on the relationships among economic, social, and ecological phenomena. They argue that all research has philosophical and political dimensions that are easily lost to view if research is conducted with a disciplinary orientation. Indeed, some commentators go so far as to argue that the problems encountered in the pursuit of knowledge stem directly from the limits imposed by the creation of the disciplines. Interdisciplinary scholarship should be, for these critics, scholarship that operates on a very general or metatheoretical level. Metatheoretical scholarship involves taking issue both with the categorization of knowledge through disciplines and with the role disciplines play in establishing regimes of knowledge. At issue in this scholarship is not which paradigms should be represented within any particular discipline or new field of study but whether any one

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paradigm should be paramount at all. Indeed, it is suggested that particular paradigms become dominant only in conjunction with social and political power in society. Furthermore, it is argued that there is more than one defensible notion of truth and no a priori basis for choosing among the alternatives. Also at issue in the metatheoretical critique are two prevailing notions: that researchers live in a free marketplace of paradigms and ideas and that researchers have freedom to choose whichever direction they wish to explore. Interdisciplinary critics who take up the radical stance argue that particular paradigms are always aligned with and give expression to particular interests in society. Consequently, any choice of paradigms takes place within a network of constraints that determine what will be considered acceptable as research and as knowledge. Invisible but nonetheless important boundaries are drawn between what deserves systematic study according to the prescribed methodologies of science and the humanities, on one hand, and what falls outside the realm of research and into the domain of popular knowledge, superstition, social values, or folklore, on the other. For example, neither everyday knowledge about health remedies nor nonmedical knowledge about human well-being is considered to be knowledge in the formal or academic sense. Even though most people would agree that the less formal knowledge makes useful contributions to society, it is relegated to the status of folklore. Interdisciplinarity, seen from this perspective, concerns the attempt to understand why only science, but not folklore or popular understandings, has the status of knowledge. Interdisciplinary scholarship attempts to establish the legitimacy of different kinds of knowledge and of different methodologies for research. Dealing with the Metatheoretical Challenge

It is not our intention to deal with all the arguments raised by specific metatheoretical critiques. This would require a different book. It is appropriate to address the question here of their effect on the various disciplines and on disciplinarity in general. For this purpose, the map of disciplinarity we provided in chapter i will be useful. Recall that disciplines and new fields of study were distinguished in terms of two dimensions of their work: the degree to which they were tightly or loosely bounded and the relative dominance of theory or empirical research in each case. Neither dimension of disciplinarity is a permanent feature of any discipline, nor are disciplines without their internal conflicts, we suggested. Nonetheless, we argued that at any place

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and point in time, each discipline displays a predominant character. We want to return to this discussion of the character of disciplines to explore further the reactions to the kind of interdisciplinarity we have just now described, the kind that focuses on a metatheoretical challenge to the organization and definition of "knowledge." At first impression, we would not expect metatheoretical critiques to have much impact - regardless of their merit - in disciplines that are either tightly bounded or incrementally driven by empirical research. The idea that the existing organization of knowledge into disciplines can be questioned and that disciplinary specializations such as economics might be cast aside in favour of a fundamentally different approach to research is simply not considered reasonable by the vast majority of economists, among others. Interdisciplinarity in its most fundamental sense is rejected completely by many researchers. But a limited version of the metatheoretical critique is more commonly considered to be reasonable and worthy of response. At issue in this limited version are the prevailing paradigms of particular disciplines. Thus, for example, a more limited, but nonetheless metatheoretical, challenge launched in the name of interdisciplinarity might take the form of a criticism of the assumptions of neoclassical economics, a criticism centred on the prevailing paradigm in the discipline. Even though this limited form of metatheoretical critique is much more likely to be heard within a discipline such as economics (especially since it is occasionally offered by economists themselves) paradigm conflict seems, at first impression, to be downplayed within disciplines. In disciplines such as economics or psychology, which are tightly bounded and empirically driven, very little time or attention is normally devoted by people actually active within them to questions about the prevailing assumptions of the field. When broad issues about the orientation of these disciplines are raised, they seem to be debated only at the outer margins of the field. A quick glance at recent conference programs in both psychology and economics lends credence to this impression. First impressions can be misleading, however. In fact, paradigm debates do occur in fields characterized as tightly bounded and empirically driven. In the last two decades, for example, the dominant paradigm in economics has shifted, from Keynesian to neoclassical economics, and some economists today suggest that yet another new paradigm (a "techno-economic," or "evolutionary" paradigm) is or should be emerging within economics. This development is what Kuhn referred to when he spoke of a "paradigm shift" (1969).

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A paradigm shift occurs most often, we would argue, when debate about fundamentals of the discipline cannot be encompassed within the normal course of events. It occurs most frequently in tightly bounded and empirically driven disciplines, in other words. This is because, within such disciplines, new questions cannot be dealt with routinely. Because they occur so infrequently, such questions, if taken seriously, call for a breaking with routine, a dramatic reworking of the discipline. Their implications for the tightly bounded discipline are very great as a consequence. They require that basic premises embedded within the register of the discipline (and thus all but invisible to its practioners) be changed. By contrast, we suggest that the impact of metatheoretical critiques is most likely to be muted in disciplines or new fields of study that are theory-driven and loosely bounded. To be sure, disciplines such as sociology easily encompass debates about paradigms within the mainstream of their academic work. In such disciplines, aspects of the perspective, method, and range of topics are always under debate. Notwithstanding the inclusion of many academic papers on methodological issues in the programs of conferences and the pages of the journals, the everyday occurrence of paradigm debate within the loosely bounded, theory-driven discipline tempers the effect of any particular critique. Debates about fundamentals are just routine, merely part of the expected landscape. As routine, they are as easily taken for granted as other aspects of the register. Moreover, there is not one but often several different metatheoretical challenges occurring at any one time (that is, different aspects of disciplinarity are often open to question simultaneously). Because none has an a priori claim to superiority, there is no particular reason why any one of them should reorient the discipline. In sociology today, for example, if someone proposes to cast aside conventional research conventions in favour of a poststructuralist approach, why should it matter if debates about proper methodologies are commonplace and various other radical options are also "on the table"? In a loosely bounded and theory driven discipline, it is simply expected that multiple versions of the intellectual landscape will be on the table, each competing for adherents among the next generation of graduate students. In this case, it is appropriate to question whether the term paradigm shift can be used meaningfully. The two dimensions of disciplinarity (loosely or tightly bounded, theory- or empirically driven) also suggest an explanation for the intellectual fashions that seem to occur in the social sciences and humanities. There is ample evidence of such fashions. For example, our rough survey of the social science journals found many articles

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on interdisciplinarity written some time ago; now after almost a decade of neglect, interdisciplinarity has again become a topic of interest. Similarly, there was almost nothing written about government regulation for many decades in law, economics, or political science. Then a plethora of material on regulation appeared in the journals about a decade ago. Today regulation still commands attention, but only one or two themes predominate. At a more theoretical level, in many social science and humanities journals one can discern a preoccupation with the work of Jiirgen Habermas at one period of time, Althusser at another, Foucault at yet another. There was a time when systems theory featured prominently in sociology, anthropology, and political science; it does not today, but is reemerging strongly in the field of economics. To our knowledge, no one has mapped the rise and fall of these intellectual currents within disciplinary debates, journal articles, and conferences across a variety of social science and humanities disciplines, but we have little doubt that other observers share our perception that they exist. It seems appropriate to call them fashions, because they reflect not only currents of thought but also the changing affiliations of researchers within particular fields of study. The term "fashion" has a pejorative tone. It implies that social scientists and humanists are dilettantes waiting for the latest theory or metatheoretical critique to emerge and that there is a bandwagon effect in the intellectual development of the social science and humanities disciplines. It also suggests that interdisciplinary critiques, especially of a very general or metatheoretical sort, will soon disappear. Some of this criticism is justified. At its worst, the intellectual trajectory of the social sciences and humanities has some of the characteristics of a bandwagon. But here we are not concerned with the individual researcher who discovers one theorist after another and who jumps on whatever intellectual bandwagon is in motion. We believe, in fact, that this aspect of intellectual fashion is relatively infrequent. Most systems theorists or followers of Habermas remain committed to their perspective long after it has gone out of style. Yet something is occurring that gives rise to the perception of fashions and bandwagons. We suggested earlier that highly theorydriven, loosely bounded disciplines (and interdisciplinary fields of study) are very likely to be responsive to metatheoretical critiques but that by their nature they offer the researcher few, if any, established methods or criteria for assessing the various challenges being made. Interdisciplinary challenges of a metatheoretical sort play themselves out without resolution. We believe it is the character of

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some disciplines - as loosely bounded and theory-driven - within the social sciences and humanities that allows this to happen and that consequently gives rise to the perception that they are subject to intellectual fashions. In a discipline that is loosely bounded and theory-driven, nothing requires resolution of debates about paradigms or even debates about the status of knowledge and the viability of the research enterprise. Without resolution, the debates simply play themselves out, exhausting the participants. A new theory or approach is like a wake-up call. A third observation concerns recent developments in a number of disciplines best described either by the term "postmodern critique" or by reference to poststructuralism or to the work of the French theorists such as Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida. We are aware that it is possible to see this array of critical work as being very similar, at least in its effects, to other metatheoretical challenges posed by interdisciplinarity. In this sense, we might argue that the current preoccupation with postmodernism is itself an intellectual fashion. To make such an argument, we need not debate the merit or the substance of issues being raised by the postmodernists. Rather, we might simply draw attention to the role of postmodernism (and other similar metatheoretical accounts) operating as a critique in a number of different disciplinary contexts and suggest that it too might well be superseded by other metatheoretical work. But what makes these particular metatheoretical critiques of disciplinarity so interesting, however, is the work of Michel Foucault, which has influenced many of them. Foucault's work contains a new and compelling analysis of the phenomenon of disciplinarity itself. It is one that brings into the foreground ideas about the disciplines of knowledge as a form of social control. Furthermore, Foucault's work is interesting because so many different disciplines have responded to it, including some, such as literature studies, that have historically been tightly bounded in their approach. This situation raises a number of questions: Is there a metadisciplinary critique (therefore an interdisciplinary challenge) so fundamental in its scope and intent that it must either be rejected or encompassed in full measure? In an academic world organized by disciplines, what happens when disciplinary traditions are fundamentally destabilized, as opposed to merely challenged? Can a metatheoretical critique such as the one we are discussing propel a discipline from one place to another on the disciplinary map? Are there disciplines and new fields of study so theory-driven and so loosely bounded that a metatheoretical critique might dissolve their common bond altogether? In such

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a case, do disciplines disappear or is the result only that new fields of study emerge? These are questions that cannot, as yet, be answered. It is far too soon to judge the eventual effect of Foucault or the poststructural or postmodern work on disciplinarity. Our second observation, then, is that some specific metatheoretical critiques may prove, over time, to have the capacity to force a significant change in the disciplinary map even when theory driven and loosely bounded disciplines are involved. Indeed some social science and humanities disciplines are currently so theory-driven and so loosely bounded that they not only encompass a paradigm debate in their normal routines but can also be fundamentally unsettled by it, because their common bond seems to dissolve in face of the critique. After all, what is to hold sociology or women's studies together if one questions all current bases, including both intellectual and institutional ones, for establishing them as discernable fields of endeavour? Thus far, in discussing the metatheoretical interdisciplinary challenge, we have made reference mainly only to disciplines. Interestingly, there seems to be no reason to distinguish interdisciplinary fields of study such as environmental studies from conventional disciplines such as psychology with respect to the analysis we have offered. In saying this, we echo Fienberg and Tanur's contention that disciplines constitute interdisciplines just under the surface. Each of these interdisciplinary fields is itself potentially subject to the same radical challenge from interdisciplinarity as are disciplines, and for the same reasons. Even though the contours of the new fields of study are not yet fully developed and even though vigorous debate about their common bond is typical, the new fields of study develop within and take their shape from existing notions about how knowledge should be organized into distinct fields or branches. Thus, it is not surprising to find within new interdisciplinary fields of study the same challenge or critique that comes from outsiders in the case of economics or psychology. There are, for example, people within environmental studies who call themselves deep ecologists or who question the tenets of conventional research. There are within women's studies many who advocate a profound alteration of the prevailing methodologies of research or who call themselves poststructuralists or postmodernists. In the case of the new interdisciplinary fields of study, this debate about fundamentals often takes place within the field, not at its margins. It takes place simultaneously with the debate about the common bond, the bond that otherwise is understood to distinguish the new field of study from others. For

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example, it is argued by some in women's studies that the postmodern approach should be adopted as the common bond of the field, distinguishing it from other fields, even as this critique offers a radical commentary upon distinguishing any one field from another at all. It was suggested above that loosely bounded and theory-driven disciplines are often the disciplines where the radical interdisciplinary challenge has least impact. Debate about fundamentals is routine and easily incorporated in such disciplines. New fields of study are often loosely bounded, theory-driven disciplines. When they are, they too incorporate the radical critique as part of the intellectual landscape within the field. In the case of newly emerging fields of study, however, what is also at stake is defining the common bond of the field. And in this case, the radical critique itself is one way of constituting a common bond. This is the paradox of interdisciplinarity. INTERDISCIPLINARITY AND OTHER VOICES

There is a second kind of fundamental challenge posed by interdisciplinarity. It is sometimes argued that disciplinary research in general has neglected particular populations, either as researchers or as subjects for research. Important issues, points of view and life experiences have been ignored in the normal course of disciplinary research (Smith 1974, *979/ 1990)- It is argued, for example, that history would look very different if the experiences of women had been taken into account. Similarly, the sociology of a native community would be a different sociology if it had been developed from the standpoint of native people. It is easy to conflate this particular challenge with the metatheoretical critiques just described, because the two have often been developed in conjunction with each other as part of a single theory. Nonetheless, there are important differences. One kind of interdisciplinary challenge need not necessarily be accompanied by the other. In the metatheoretical critiques just discussed, the focus of attention is the phenomenon of disciplinarity. In this second interdisciplinary challenge, which we propose to call "other voices," the challenge is not necessarily to disciplinarity per se, but to the research practices of scholars. Research practices are flawed, it is suggested, because most research claims to encompass the universality of knowledge about human and natural phenomena. But disciplinary knowledge offers a very partial view of social, natural, and technical phenomena. The

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scholarly community appears to produce "a" singular knowledge, when there are multiple possible understandings, each shaped within a different paradigm and each responsive to the viewpoint of the people engaged in research. Interdisciplinary critics draw attention to the fact that a worker's understanding of the dynamics of the production process in manufacturing is likely to be different from that of the plant owner or even of the academic researcher. It is suggested that each has a different kind of knowledge, none less worthy or valid than the others. Similarly, the understanding of the native person, steeped in his or her own culture, should be considered to be only a different kind of knowledge from that of the nonnative anthropologist. Because universities recognize only one kind of knowledge and because the university offers special status to its own members, interdisciplinary critics argue, university-based knowledge is privileged and deeply biased. Those who propose the "other voices" version of interdisciplinarity argue that university researchers must abandon their current commitment to any single understanding of phenomena and permit other approaches to knowledge (women's knowledge, native knowledge, and so on) to have the same status and legitimacy as traditional academic research within academic discourse. Although this second interdisciplinary critique deals with substantive issues about the content of knowledge and research, those who raise it often focus their attention on specific methodological issues concerning the research process. For example, it is argued that the content of research (research agendas, issues studied, sources of information used, and so on) should be changed; a different group of people should be engaged in carrying out the research. Women, racial and ethnic groups, indigenous people, or working people should be included as full-status participants in conducting research. This would mean that different kinds of studies would be conducted. Borrowing techniques from one discipline and applying them in new ways might be important. To capture other voices and to engage new people in the research process, it may well be necessary to put aside any pretensions of objectivity and to learn how to hear what otherwise might not be represented in research data. Thus, for example, women's studies often borrows techniques from literature and applies them to social science research in order to elicit a different kind of information from study populations comprised mainly of women. But the methodological implications of this approach to interdisciplinary research can be even more fundamental. The research population itself - disadvantaged peoples, cultural minorities, community or women's groups, for example - might be included in

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actually designing the research, a situation that would require university-based researchers to reevaluate their role in research. Interdisciplinarity has two distinct meanings in the context of this second interdisciplinary critique. In one sense, it refers to a notion of the research process that is inclusive with respect both to the people engaged in research and to the methods drawn upon to conduct it. It refers to attempts to dissolve the boundaries between the researcher and subject of research and between conventionally very differently oriented research methodologies. In another sense, interdisciplinarity refers to the dissolution of the barriers now existing between disciplinary (academic) and nondisciplinary (practical or everyday) knowledge. It involves a search for adequate methods to secure the inclusion of currently nonacademic knowledge in academic research. No one is suggesting that either of these forms of interdisciplinarity can be easily accommodated in research. Rather, the argument is that scholars should be engaged in finding adequate methods so that interdisciplinarity can be accommodated while still maintaining the scholarly integrity of the research process. RELEVANCE, PRACTICALITY, AND AUDIENCES

There is no need here to canvass all the issues in the debate about the relevance, practicality, and social commitments of academic research. Applying the criteria of relevance or social commitment to research does not in itself render the research interdisciplinary, except in the simple sense of the term. Historians, sociologists, and political scientists have always done practical relevant research, drawing upon the normal conventions for research in their own disciplines. They testify or work for royal commissions, write material to order for policymakers, industry, and local communities, all without necessarily violating the conventions of historical or social science scholarship. It is unexceptional that they do so. Interdisciplinarity enters this picture only to the extent that the nonacademic audiences for such research seldom appreciate (or even understand) disciplinary distinctions, and consequently they tend to regard the resulting research as interdisciplinary. For these audiences, it matters little whether practical research is interdisciplinary because it involves scholars from two or more disciplines or whether a new field of study is created or whether disciplines simply adjust their boundaries to encompass the broader range of topics of interest to nonacademic audiences.

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There is, however, another, more interesting sense in which practical, relevant research might be interdisciplinary. Like research designed to incorporate other voices, practical research is interdisciplinary to the extent that it breaks down the traditional barriers between academic and nonacademic scholarship and seeks to incorporate the latter within the realm of scholarship in the academy. In the case of the other voices critique, the intention is to incorporate people who are normally outside the conventional research process into the actual design and conduct of the work. This is quite a radical project, given prevailing assumptions about scientific method and scholarship even within the social sciences and the humanities. It has significant implications for the design and conduct of research. But there is another, more mundane way that research and nonresearch populations can be brought together. It is in the combination of science (including social science) and public policy. Policymakers need good science, it is often argued - in conducting assessments of the risks of dangerous chemicals, for example. They need to have data on pay inequalities in order to derive new pay equity policies. They need to have information about the changing ethnic composition of the population in order to tailor social policy to the needs of the public. They need to hear from economists. From an outsider's point of view, it would seem that the marriage between science and public policy would be an easy one, certainly of benefit to all. This kind of interdisciplinarity seems to be generally accepted as beneficial, and it can be accomplished with a minimum of fuss by people who are inclined to do so. Both Miller and Isabelle attest to the positive evalation of this kind of interdisciplinarity, and in the very delimited context of their particular committees they also argue that the experience of interdisciplinarity has been successful. Robinson would agree, based on his experience with the EcoResearch adjudication committee. Yet there is more to the story, and this is only hinted at in the various contributions. In practice, the relationship between the research community and policymakers is likely to be a troubling one. Few researchers oriented to the scholarly exercise actually participate in giving policy advice, and those who do often express profound dissatisfaction with the result (Salter 1988). Meanwhile, policymakers make great efforts to distinguish between the scientific advice they receive and the value-laden policy decisions they must make, but they continually find that most decisions involve a complicated mix of scientific, policy, and value problems and that it is not easy - or even possible - to fully disentangle the issues.

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If everyone seems to agree that a mix of research and policymaking can be productive and beneficial, where do the problems come from? A case study can be most useful for addressing this question. In a book-length study entitled Mandated Science (Salter 1988), it was found, for example, that when science was conveyed to nonscientific audiences, their expectations inevitably influenced the design of the research, its conduct, and its interpretation (Salter 1988). The science required by policymakers was one that permitted a high degree of closure in the design of the research and in its conclusions, while most academic research was not capable of producing such closure. However, policymakers were not educated about the limitations of research in this regard; rather, some research, subfields, or disciplines that were capable of producing something akin to closure were highlighted, to the exclusion of others. For example, neither epidemiology nor most social science research would have been likely to produce the kind of conclusiveness required for making policy, and thus both were unlikely to be drawn upon by policymakers when they required a scientific assessment. But toxicological research, which permits fairly precise calculations of probability, economic modelling, and demographic analyses was more compatible with the needs of policymakers because quite specific conclusions could be drawn from the research. These latter fields of study or methodologies are privileged when scientific advice is sought by policymakers, as a consequence. Other fields are ignored. In the study of mandated science, it was also found that the interpretation of results from research was likely to be different, depending on who did the interpreting. Even the same sentence had a very different meaning when it was uttered in a scientific context as opposed to when it was used by policymakers discussing scientific data. We spoke earlier in this book about the problems caused by the existence of different registers when two or more academic disciplines are involved. These problems are at least as serious when academic work is popularized (that is, addressed to nonacademic audiences) or used by policymakers. The register of policymakers is quite different from that of researchers. The public is comprised of many different audiences, each with its own register. The translation problem occurs when researchers try to speak with any of these audiences. Although familiar terminology is used, it has different connotations in each context. Moving information between registers is, as we have noted, never easy, and it often results in distortions. It is these distortions that researchers refer to when they express reluctance to become involved in policy making or to speak directly to the public.

171 Charting New Territories

In Mandated Science, it was suggested that a new register was actually created by the popularization of science or by the use of science for policy making. This new register - "mandated science" was shaped by the constraints imposed upon scientists working in a public arena. It was premised on the view that scientific (including social science) research is a highly rational process, compatible with efficient bureaucratic regimes. It was also premised on a highly idealistic view of the scientific enterprise (and of academic scholarship in general). It was concluded in Mandated Science that there were serious problems flowing from using the register of mandated science. It was found, for example, that the unrealistic expectations of science generated by use of this new register tended to create unrealistic public policies. The new register conveyed an overly rational picture of research and of policy-making, one that was at odds with the experience of members of both communities. Bridging the gulf between academic research and its application to social problems is always much more difficult than those who advocate relevancy in research, or "interdisciplinarity," seem to understand. University administrators, granting councils, and governments now lay great stock in interdisciplinarity, which is seen to be synonymous with practicality and relevance in research. But practicality or relevance cannot be achieved simply by bringing members of the academic and nonacademic communities, or policymakers and researchers, together any more than interdisciplinarity can be achieved simply by bringing scholars from two or more disciplines together. RESOLVING THE PROBLEMS

In the last chapter it was possible to speak about methods of resolving the problems. Time, patience, recognition of the different registers involved, willingness to tolerate unorthodox and possibly new approaches - all these were means of coming to terms with the language, translation, reception, and even the transition problems posed by interdisciplinarity. In this chapter, resolution of the problems caused by interdisciplinarity seems considerably harder to achieve. When interdisciplinarity is cast as a metatheoretical critique of the research enterprise or of the organization of knowledge, the result is more likely to be paradoxes than problems amenable to resolution. When interdisciplinarity means incorporating other voices in the design and conduct of research, the conventions of research are so significantly challenged that it is difficult to know

172 Charting New Territories

how to proceed. Finally, when the translation problems are encountered in the realm of mandated science between researchers and those who want to use research for purposes quite different from the usual academic ones, the translation problems so threaten the research enterprise that most researchers refuse to become involved. Compounding this last problem is the fact that mandated science - policyrelevant research - is so much in demand and its problems so infrequently recognized. That the problems posed by the more fundamental challenges offered in the name of interdisciplinarity seem irresolvable by any pragmatic standard does not mean that interdisciplinarity should be cast aside. On the contrary, it should be recognized that interdisciplinarity is not only a pragmatic issue affecting research, one easily dealt with by reforms to the intellectual landscape and within the existing disciplines and new fields of study. It is also an attempt to chart new territory. Not everyone inside or outside the universities is interested in or willing to abandon existing and often comfortable conventions of research. Nor are many prepared to abandon the storehouse of research to which they have contributed, mainly, though not exclusively, through the disciplinary structure of the universities. We suspect that few of the interdisciplinary critics, whose challenges we have discussed in this chapter, would demand that they do so. What is asked for by interdisciplinarity, as discussed in this chapter, is a willingness to engage in self-reflection, to engage with fundamental questions even while pursuing more mundane ones. The contention shared by all who subscribe to the variants of interdisciplinarity discussed in this chapter is that the vitality of intellectual life is derived from this willingness to confront what is otherwise taken for granted about research. In the introduction to this book, we made reference to the two meanings of discipline, the second being concerned with power and control. Interdisciplinarity, seen from the perspective of the challenges discussed in this chapter, means being concerned with issues of power and control as they affect people within particular disciplines and as they affect conceptions of research and intellectual work. To dismiss these challenges because they are often not amenable to resolution is to become victim to the discipline - to the control exercised within and upon the research community. It is to sustain orthodoxy at the expense of expanding the horizons of intellectual work.

9 Conclusion

We have chosen to retain the concept of disciplinarity, even as we recognize the divisions within disciplines and the commonalities among them. The separation of knowledge into distinct branches has a pragmatic purpose. Disciplines are characterized by different registers, and their registers create and sustain communities of scholars. In turn, these communities of scholars develop standards to adjudicate research, standards that are necessary, even if they occasionally have the effect of disenfranchising unorthodox approaches, because not all research is equally well-conducted or of similar import. It is very difficult to envision a situation in which all research, regardless of how it is conducted, would be granted equal status as knowledge. Even those scholars most strongly committed to interdisciplinary and nondisciplinary approaches make distinctions between what they consider to be significant research and less worthy research. We have also introduced a variety of positions that argue against the concept and practice of disciplinarity and the perspective on knowledge it represents. These arguments are to be taken very seriously. Disciplinarity implies consensus about topics, paradigms, or methods. But actual disciplines are characterized by conflict, not consensus, and by very differently oriented subfields. Researchers commonly work across disciplines with scholars from other fields, and in doing so find greater commonality with others than they do within their own disciplines, since all too often, institutional support and academic politics, not true intellectual distinctions, are the forces that sustain disciplinarity. Moreover, many of the topics pursued by

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researchers cannot be addressed adequately from within a single branch of knowledge or through the segmented approach engendered by disciplinarity; they require an interdisciplinary approach. And finally, the standards used to adjudicate research are themselves sometimes questionable on intellectual grounds. Too often they reflect an unacknowledged alliance between intellectual and political considerations, an alliance no less significant because those engaged in it fail to recognize the situation. Our intention, then, is to retain the concept of disciplinarity with a full appreciation of the practical limitations and political implications of its use. We wish to maintain a realistic view of the often arbitrary nature of disciplinary distinctions and the social and political dimensions of the "disciplining" of knowledge. The concept of disciplinarity has been retained for more than pragmatic reasons. An understanding of disciplines sets the context for an appreciation of interdisciplinarity. Indeed, we have defined interdisciplinarity as the sum of all the challenges offered by researchers to their own disciplines or to the structure of disciplines in general. The challenges take many forms. Some have little in common with others. They arise, for example, when researchers in different fields find that it is more advantageous to work together than with members of their own discipline, when researchers seek to create new fields of study, and when researchers want to reorient the program of research within their own disciplines. Other challenges are more closely associated with the phenomenon of disciplinarity, its underlying epistemological assumptions, and its political dimensions, rather than specific disciplines. The organization of knowledge into separate branches, the applicability of research in nonacademic contexts, and the issue of how nonacademic (and particularly socially disadvantaged) communities are to be included in the research process (as opposed to being the subjects of research) all give rise to interdisciplinary research. Given the span of challenges offered to disciplines and disciplinarity and given their dissimilarity, there is and can be no single variant of interdisciplinarity. The forms and preoccupations of interdisciplinary research are as varied as the questions and challenges that give rise to them. Nor is there a single pattern of development for interdisciplinary research. The difficulties with definitions that we have observed in the literature have their origins in the phenomena that are defined, not in any shortcomings in the analyses. The various contributors to the debate about interdisciplinarity are each seeking to establish a critical stance with respect to an established discipline or with respect to disciplinarity. At the same time, they are arguing

175 Conclusion

with each other about the intellectual foundations and the political commitments associated with the critiques they propose. Despite the complexity of interdisciplinarity, much can be concluded about its implications for the research process within the universities and as supported by the granting councils. This last chapter examines these implications. CORE DISCIPLINES?

In the context of academic debates, the concept of core disciplines is often used to refer to particular fields of study, university departments, or topic areas understood to have preceded or to be more important than other fields of study. In discussions about interdisciplinarity, the phrase "core disciplines" is often used to suggest that interdisciplinary fields of study must be grounded intellectually within these core disciplines and that interdisciplinary fields of study must take a second priority in academic or research planning. For example, the argument is often advanced that criminology is an offshoot of sociology or psychology, which are, in this example, understood to be core disciplines. It is implied that criminology developed later, that it took its key analytical and conceptual foundations from sociology or psychology, and that it built upon and extended research from these core disciplines. In situations where financial and academic resources are constrained, it is argued further that criminology should be reconnected to the core disciplines from which it came, as a subset of their concerns. It is felt that criminology should not have disciplinary status and that it should not command the same university and granting-council resources as the core disciplines. In very pragmatic terms, this argument has resulted in criminology and similar fields of study being staffed by cross-appointments from the so-called core disciplines. In some instances, criminology and similar fields of study have been considered suitable only for undergraduate programs; disciplinary specialization follows in graduate work. In other cases, the opposite policy is applied. Interdisciplinary programs are considered to reflect specializations appropriate only to graduate education. Undergraduates should, it is argued, deal with the basics first - the so-called core disciplines - before specializing. It is maintained that criminology is a second-order study and is thus less deserving of priority in university planning and funding. Unexamined premises govern such a perception of criminology and similar fields of study. For example, it is assumed that there is a clear historical progression not only within the process of knowledge creation but also within particular fields of study. Seen from this

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perspective, criminology is less developed than other fields of study, less theoretically rich, conceptually grounded, empirically diverse and robust because it developed after sociology and psychology. Here, disciplinary development is seen to reflect an orderly and evolutionary process. Criminology is at an early stage of its evolution, it is suggested. This first premise betrays an appalling lack of information about the actual development of disciplines and about the actual status of theoretical and empirical work within them. It displays a similar ignorance about criminology, which is an intellectually vibrant and flourishing field of study. Regardless of which disciplines one considers to be "core," there is little evidence of the seemingly careful evolutionary process that underlies this conception of disciplinarity. And even if one were to accept that disciplines develop in an evolutionary manner, questions about the role of institutional and political support (as opposed to intellectual foundations) in the emergence and entrenchment of particular disciplines remain. An examination of the histories that have been written about disciplines reveals a story of dissonance and conflict between any new field of study and its so-called originating disciplines. New fields of study, it appears, are forged in the process of testing the limits of knowledge within established disciplines. This testing occurs, inevitably, as conflict and confrontation. It does not occur smoothly and seamlessly, as the evolutionary theory of disciplinarity would have us believe. If the history of disciplines fails to support the evolutionary assumption embedded in the notion of core disciplines, perhaps there is another basis for retaining the phrase "core disciplines." A second premise supporting the notion of core disciplines is that consensus exists about the central questions to be addressed in research and about the most appropriate manner for addressing them. If such a consensus does exist, then core disciplines are those that everyone agrees will provide the foundations for further, more specialized study. The process of knowledge creation, understood in light of this second premise, is seen to be cumulative and hierarchical - a process through which the results of any one field of study are integrated rationally and developmentally with others to create a coherent whole. This second premise is appealing. It solves many problems for university and granting-council administrators, since it allows them to view their work as simply fitting the pieces of knowledge together coherently. It is also a politically appealing premise. Governments want university researchers to be engaged in a rational process of knowledge creation that amounts to something, even in the short

177 Conclusion

term. They have little tolerance for the role played by change and conflict in the development of knowledge and certainly little tolerance for the chaos and bitterness of academic wars. Individual researchers might also find this second premise appealing. They might find it gratifying to believe that research and knowledge evolve together, to form a larger and more coherent whole. Moreover, this second premise is not entirely without foundation. Research does build upon research; researchers do take account of and extend studies that have been conducted and published previously. Fields of study that generate intellectual tools - whether they are mathematical models or analytical concepts - can make a foundational contribution to the work of others. This second premise is, of course, more likely to reflect reality in the natural and technical sciences than it does in the humanities and social sciences. There are, however, two serious problems with this second premise. First, it does not take into account the role of conflict in the creation of new conceptual and analytical work. Taking historians as an example, there is now some consensus of opinion about developments in the nineteenth century in Canada, and this consensus has emerged as a result of the cumulative body of research undertaken in the last few decades. Although it is possible to argue that a consensus among historians is emerging from their cumulative work on the nineteenth century, it must also be granted that feminists and labour historians have forced these same historians back to the drawing boards to question the very consensus of opinion upon which their work is based. History is continually being rewritten for good reasons as well as for poor ones. The challenges offered to the prevailing consensus from within a discipline may well turn out to be the source of its most important new insights. The second premise also rests on an assertion of consensus between and among disciplinary communities about knowledge hierarchies when little empirical evidence actually exists to support such an assertion. Any witness to debates within universities will attest to the high level of discord between disciplines and to the lack of consensus about any hierarchy among them. Consensus about hierarchy is often a rhetorical strategy employed by those most likely to benefit from the agreed-upon hierarchy. Many researchers (for example, Mulkay 1985; Tibbetts 1986) argue that the notion of hierarchy implied by the phrase "core discipline" is flawed for reasons other than the lack of consensus about the hierarchy. They argue that there is and can be no stable basis for understanding and no possibility for progress in the creation of knowledge. Some of the most interesting insights into the concept of progress in knowledge creation come from the natural

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and physical sciences (Latour 1980; Pinch 1981; Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay 1981; Knorr-Cetina 1983). Theorists argue that the science of the laboratory is not like the ideal picture of rational science portrayed in the introductory science textbook, nor is it much like the social scientists' image of science. In the natural and technical sciences, no less than in the humanities and social sciences, understanding is likely to be bound up in paradigm debates, in chance occurrences and insights, in conflict and contested issues, and in negotiations. Knowledge creation, they observe, is neither particularly rational and orderly, nor particularly progressive. The notion of core disciplines implies a hierarchy of knowledge justified either historically or epistemologically. But serious questions arise around both of these justifications. Even if we do not accept the radical critique of science described very briefly above, we must accept that the notion of core discipline is itself a contested concept. The image of disciplinary history evoked by the concept is very much at odds with the reality of even the most established disciplinary histories. There is considerable evidence that conflict is at least as important as consensus in the process of knowledge creation. There is no evidence of a consensus among disciplines about a hierarchy of knowledge. Interdisciplinarity is often assessed in relation to the notion of core disciplines. Decisions about interdisciplinary research, its place within the university, its relation to teaching programs and its status within the granting-councils are often made on the basis of the assertion that there are core disciplines. It is felt that interdisciplinary research should develop and be adjudicated in relation to them. If this assertion is questioned, as we believe it must be, then the consequences for interdisciplinarity may well be significant. At the very least, interdisciplinary fields of study need not be seen and assessed in light of their relation to these other "core disciplines." Clearly, there is little reason for viewing interdisciplinary fields of study as marginal within the research enterprise. CENTRE AND

PERIPHERY

It is very common to view interdisciplinary work as marginal to the research enterprise. Often, this view is premised, once again, on the notion of core disciplines, a notion we have just thrown into question. Often, this view is simply self-serving: its proponents benefit from the resulting assessment that their own work is not marginal but "core." But there are two other reasons why interdisciplinary work is seen to have a marginal status: interdisciplinarity is viewed chiefly

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as an extension of the main body of research, and it falls outside the main preoccupations of the majority of researchers. Is interdisciplinary work really a small part of the research enterprise? From a strictly administrative perspective, a strong argument can be made that it is. In almost every university, interdisciplinary studies are a minority or marginal interest. In the granting councils, interdisciplinary work is often defined by exclusion. As Wekerle described, it includes work that cannot easily be made to fit within the mandates of existing disciplinary communities. If one surveys the journals, however, a different picture emerges: disciplinary journals constitute a small portion of the total corpus. Similarly, an examination of the conferences and learned meetings over the last few years suggests that disciplinary interests take second priority. Interdisciplinarity attracts the most attention. Even in the applications adjudicated by SSHRC, it is difficult to see interdisciplinarity as a marginal or secondary interest. To be sure, the greater proportion of applications fall within the purview of the disciplinary committees. But our observations of the actual applications suggest that this phenomenon is due more to the exigencies of administrative procedures than to the innate character of the research applications. Had no categories for the granting programs and no titles for the proposed research projects been provided, it would have been very difficult to determine the "disciplinary" or "interdisciplinary" character of the applications. Furthermore, strategic granting programs constitute a significant proportion of work now being adjudicated by the funding councils. This research is intended to be interdisciplinary. The volume of the strategic work to be adjudicated, however, has been limited. The limits are arbitrary, because the funding councils have designated only a few fields as strategic and funded only a small proportion of the potential strategic programs that might be envisioned. Without the labels and with unlimited freedom to create new strategic programs, one might well assess the greater proportion of research to be interdisciplinary, not disciplinary, in orientation. Finally, as Wekerle points out and as we have stressed, the categorization of research as interdisciplinary or disciplinary by the councils does not necessarily reflect the orientation of the research. It is the researchers who choose whether to apply to one program or another, and their decision may well be influenced by factors having relatively little to do with the intellectual content of the research. We doubt that a proper double blind study would produce a categorization of research compatible with the current research adjudication process. Much of the research either displays characteristics that we have associated with interdisciplinarity or is of unclear disciplinary origin.

180 Conclusion

If there are strong empirical reasons for questioning the status of interdisciplinary research as marginal, there are equally compelling normative ones. We have argued that interdisciplinarity represents the sum of challenges to the orientation of the disciplines and to the phenomenon of disciplinarity. Seen from this perspective, there are profound and disturbing consequences in viewing interdisciplinarity as marginal. Disciplines that exclude all challenges to and debates about the content or methodologies of their work are disciplines that stagnate, as our contributors vigorously argue. They are disciplines that reject the unorthodox out of hand and achieve their coherence at the price of an ever-narrowing range of interests and research. This is not to say that all interdisciplinary challenges are equally worthy of being taken up. Nor is it to suggest that all disciplines should be loosely bounded and oriented primarily to theory, and thus highly responsive to interdisciplinarity. There will always be a need to assess the merit of any challenge, and there will always be disciplines more responsive to interdisciplinarity than others. Our contention is not that all disciplines should accept all the challenges that arise but that they should not reject such challenges out of hand. It is important that they make provision for some self-reflection within the main corpus of their work. Interdisciplinarity may not always seem particularly central to disciplinary scholars. But something serious is amiss when strict orthodoxy takes hold and challenges are precluded. The intellectual enterprise is stymied within any discipline when questions are disallowed, or when they are pushed so far to the periphery that they are addressed only by outsiders. Our assessment is, in fact, that such strict orthodoxy exists only in a few disciplines. Moreover, our intention is not to create a new report card for rating different disciplines. It is to take issue with the notion that interdisciplinarity, as we have understood it, is or should be considered to be marginal to the research enterprise. Interdisciplinarity represents the forces for rejuvenation and regeneration, the pressures for change, the capacity for responsiveness within any discipline. It is, in the language of broadcasters, the necessary "churn" within the system. As such, interdisciplinarity cannot be considered to be marginal even to the most tightly bounded and research-oriented disciplines. Interdisciplinarity is central to the process of knowledge creation and to the research enterprise. It is central to the mission of the universities regardless of whether or not they institute formal interdisciplinary programs. It is central to the granting councils quite apart from their strategic programs.

181 Conclusion THE I M P L I C A T I O N S OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH

To argue that interdisciplinarity is central to the mission of the universities and granting councils is not to propose their wholesale reorganization. Nor is it to take issue with the status of so-called interdisciplinary fields of study within particular universities. What is involved is an attitude of mind. A university might still staff interdisciplinary fields of study with cross-appointments and nonetheless appreciate fully the implications of interdisciplinarity for all of its many activities. Some measures are required, however, to deal with the centrality of interdisciplinarity to the universities and granting councils. First and foremost, opportunities need to be created for regular and sustained contact between and among disciplinary communities. This contact will lead to an appreciation of the registers involved in the different disciplines and to the possibility of adequate communication between them. It will reduce some of the artificial and purely institutional barriers to cooperative research and ensure that the problems arising from such work can be addressed properly. It will ensure that interdisciplinarity and team research are not confused and that the problems of the different kinds of interdisciplinarity are each addressed on their own terms. Second, attention needs to be paid to the institutional barriers to interdisciplinarity. Such barriers take many forms. They arise in disciplines that are, by their nature, not easily responsive to interdisciplinary challenges. They arise as a result of the way research is organized in departments and as a result of the organization of granting programs into disciplinary committees. They arise because "old boy networks" (some involving women) exist and draw upon institutional support to protect their domains from change and regeneration. They arise because governments have seen fit to distinguish between different kinds of research through the establishment of different granting councils and "strategic" areas of research. Here again, massive reorganization is not necessary to resolve these problems. Everyone will profit if the task is undertaken to explore how any discipline or department has made itself responsive to the dynamics of change within the field and to those who propose new approaches or topics for research. Much can also be done at the level of the granting councils. For the most part, the granting councils have been far too slow to act and much too passive in the process of working together. They should

182 Conclusion

not leave it to governments to create the funds and initiatives for their joint endeavours. There will always be situations in which disciplinary communities (and even interdisciplinary ones) protect their prerogatives at the expense of challenge and change. Increasing the incentives and rewards for responsiveness - the strategic granting programs are a good example - can have a salutary effect. Venues need to be created where new initiatives can be generated, assessed, and if found to be of merit, supported strongly, notwithstanding their reception within the conventional disciplines. Third and finally, interdisciplinarity is time-consuming. It takes time to deal with challenges to disciplinary work and to gestate new fields of study capable of sustaining adequate assessment. Researchers who work across the disciplines or with colleagues from other disciplines need time and resources to become familiar with the registers involved. Committees drawing their members from different disciplines need to develop the skills for effective communication. If the universities and granting councils are serious about making interdisciplinarity central to their mission, as we argue they should be, then allowance will have to be made for the time and the resources necessary to achieve this goal. The application and popularization of science may well be a desirable goal of interdisciplinary work. In this instance, communication with nondisciplinary communities supersedes communication within any discipline. But this form of interdisciplinarity is not easily achieved without robbing academic research of its intellectual integrity. Some serious and scholarly attention to the problems of communicating research to nonacademic audiences is needed. A simple question about the dissemination of research attached to the end of a grant application is not sufficient to deal with the issues related to the applicability and popularization of scholarly work. Similarly the "other voices" research cannot easily be accommodated within or appended to the conventional research process. The challenges this position poses are serious and demanding. Attention and resources need to be directed to developing research methodologies that are, at once, adequate in scholarly terms and responsive to the demand being made by the researched community. In this way, other voices research may produce knowledge that is truly transformative. There will always be some interdisciplinary research so innovative and broad in its scope that it cannot be dealt with by even the most responsive of disciplines. This variant of interdisciplinary work can be the most important of all. It can have a seminal effect, reorienting research and the universities in fundamental ways. That said, some caution should be exercised. Too often, interdisciplinarity is associated

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with research lacking substance and with intellectual fads. Too often, in its attempt to encompass many fields, interdisciplinary work deals adequately with none. In creating venues for interdisciplinary research, care must be taken that the research itself is not protected from assessment. Interdisciplinary research must not be insulated from those it most seeks to influence.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 Studies of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity abound, and they are emerging from all corners of the academic world. Some take academic research as their object; others focus on pedagogical issues. Some focus on interdisciplinarity within a distinct field, such as literary criticism or physics, others on the more general constitution of disciplines and interdisciplines across university cultures. Each one, however, betrays a distinct academic orientation and clear epistemological assumptions. Such studies of knowledge production are, necessarily, "radically heterogeneous." As Ellen Messer-Davidow, David Shumway, and David Sylvan argue, "we cannot study disciplinarity without using disciplinary terms, but we can use many disciplines to study it" (see their edited volume, Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity [1993, 3]). 2 Having said this, we must draw attention to the most comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of interdisciplinarity we have encountered, Juli Thompson Klein's Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory and Practice (1990). In this volume Klein examines the evolution of the concept of interdisciplinarity, the activities associated with it, its relationship to disciplinarity, the rhetoric associated with discussions about interdisciplinarity, and interdisciplinarity's incarnation as problem-solving activity outside the university walls. In her study Klein demonstrates an impressive ability to understand concepts and theoretical trends across the most distant academic borders, from microbiology to literary studies. In fact, it is difficult, if not impossible, to locate Klein's own disciplinary

186 Notes to pages 11-18 history by reading her analysis of interdisciplinarity. The fact that this is so, however, does reveal her epistemological position. She is truly a social scientist. Concerned with gathering evidence and maintaining an objective voice, she eschews the more radical criticisms of disciplinarity in favour of a more functional and, indeed, more instrumental version of interdisciplinarity. 3 The construction and maintenance of these intellectual divisions has been called "boundary work." It is important to clarify that differentiations between the disciplines are not the result of immutable laws that underlie the structure of knowledge. Nor are they solely a function of institutional imperatives. It is useful to understand boundary work as an ongoing process involving both conceptual justifications for certain divisions of knowledge and more pragmatic, institutionally based strategies for their maintenance. See especially Gieryn (1983); see also Fuller (i993)CHAPTER ONE

1 For clarification, we offer the following definitions, which are taken from the report of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) entitled Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities (1972). These definitions have served as the basis for much contemporary debate about interdisciplinarity. There is little consensus on the adequacy of the definitions, however, and debate continues to plague discussions of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. "Multidisciplinarity" is defined as a juxtaposition of various disciplines, sometimes with no apparent connection between them. "Pluridisciplinarity" is defined as a juxtaposition of disciplines assumed to be more or less related: for example, mathematics and physics. "Transdisciplinarity" is a process of establishing a common system of axioms for a set of disciplines. Finally, "interdisciplinarity" is defined as the interaction between two or more disciplines. This interaction may range from the simple communication of ideas to the mutual integration of organizing concepts, methodologies, procedures, epistemology, terminology, data, and the organization of research and education in a fairly large field. 2 The influence of Michel Foucault in current discussions of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and the organization of knowledge has been great. His explorations of the nexus of discourse, power, "truth," and the configuring of knowledge has allowed thinkers to expand their understanding of discipinarity in new and critical directions. We would like to explore briefly here some of the ways in which Foucault's ideas have been inflected in current discussions of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity.

187 Note to page 18 Critics such as Ellen Messer-Davidow, David Shumway, and David Sylvan insist that disciplinarity concerns the marshalling together of disparate elements - methods, scholars, students, journals, objects - into apparently coherent types of knowledge relations with each other. Knowledge, then, is seen as a social construction of material practices that are defined and delimited by social and institutional concerns. The authority of disciplines, then, must also be seen as socially constituted: "knowledge does not grow naturally but is selectively produced in order to realize socially defined goals" (Messer-Davidow, Shumway, and Sylvan 1993, 7). Andrew Pickering (1992) elaborates upon Foucault's view of history as discontinuous in his essay "Anti-Discipline or Narratives of Illusion." Pickering insists that disciplinary knowledge is not unidirectional and progressive in nature. The narrative lines of argument that characterize historical writing (including disciplinary histories) trade upon "takenfor-granted understandings of nature, rationality, society" (103). For Pickering, disciplines emerge, produce, and change through a variety of discursive practices - conceptual, institutional, economic, and social. Disciplines become organizing schemes that involve making and enforcing distinctions between "knowers, knowledges and truths." Disciplinary meanings, then, are "connected not by an immanent logic or progressive historical unfolding but genealogically, that is, by series of historical contingencies related by constancy of use" (Lenoir 1993, 74). Many critics highlight the ways in which disciplinarity serves to constrain and delimit voices and options in the making of knowledge. The enforcement of divisions and differences in the constitution of knowledge is most often used as a way to ascribe power or value to one group over another. Marginalized voices struggling to be heard and to carve out a space for themselves on the terrain of knowledge production and "truth-making," are doubly challenged by the delimiting function of disciplined knowledge. They are starting from a position of no value (value is understood here as access to discourse and to modes of self-representation). These groups must not only strive to validate themselves but struggle to constitute their voices in ways that simultaneously seek out confirmation within prevailing systems of disciplinary values and contest or undermine those same systems (see, especially, Minnich 1990; Messer-Davidow 1991; Fuss 1991). Insofar as we perceive disciplines as sets of limitations and as historically contingent sets of dispersed elements, we must necessarily challenge the view of disciplines as unified, coherent, stable units of knowledge. Critics highlight the ways in which this illusion of unity is often deployed as a discursive strategy whereby one school of thought can assert its authority over another by characterizing its own views as

i88 Note to page 24 "truth," its own methods as "more rigourous," and its own paradigms as "more comprehensive." Mieke Bal notes how this convention of unity "is a powerful ideological weapon because of the pressures it exerts on the reader to choose one interpretation over another, rather than to read through the conflict of interpretations (1990; see also Amariglo, Resnick, and Wolff 1993). Disciplines also work to constitute their practitioners. Critics insist that disciplines serve a socializing function by constituting not only forms of knowledge production but kinds of behaviour that extend beyond the laboratory or the classroom into all facets of life. Individuals are disciplined into their "expert" or "professional" status and thereby work to further entrench disciplinary authority. But, more profoundly, practitioners and subjects of study alike are disciplined in (or interpolated into or subjected to) certain modes of being and behaving: "discipline is ... above all concern about bodies - human bodies. Disciplines are institutionalized formations for organizing schemes of perception, appreciation, and action, and for inculcating them as tools of cognition and communication" (Lenoir 1993, 72). So, disciplines infiltrate, not just the institutional structures of society, but the very basic modes of individual perception with which we then act on the world. Ed Cohen suggests that disciplines colonize their subjects, as so much conceptual territory, in order to reinforce their authority: "the production of knowledge (re)produces its subjects ... disciplines operate precisely by interpolating their subjects as sites of identification and thereby articulate the coherence of their epistemological domains" (Cohen 1993, 400). These various inflections and uses of Foucault's ideas (often in concert with other poststructuralist or postmodern formulations) obviously support a profoundly critical approach to disciplinarity. Foucault's ideas work to throw accepted notions about the progressive or "naturally" representative functions of disciplines into question. In true poststructuralist fashion, these ideas work to deconstruct and de-legitimate prevailing concepts about knowledge formation. This delineation of disciplines as being either tightly or loosely bounded is echoed by Julie Thompson Klein in her discussion of disciplines as showing relative degrees of permeability or impermeability. Impermeable disciplines are associated with tightly knit communities of scholars occupied with applied, "hard" research. Disciplines with higher levels permeability are associated with loosely knit divergent communities of scholars whose concerns are more fragmented, open-ended, and theoretical. Other critics use the metaphor of boundaries or borders. In these discussions disciplines are characterized as impenetrable, or easily penetrated, welldefended or weakly guarded, violable or inviolable (see Klein 1993, 185211; see also Becher 1989, 1990; Gieryn 1983).

189 Notes to pages 29-61 CHAPTER

TWO

i Interestingly these divisions, found in our reading of the literature, have been highlighted, in different ways, by Julie Thompson Klein and Mark Kann. Klein highlights three different kinds of explanation offered for the phenomenon of interdisciplinarity. The first explanation sees interdisciplinarity as "normal," a natural characteristic of knowledge growth. Here interdisciplinary activity is seen to be part of a greater problemsolving activity involving tool borrowing and the migration of scholars across disciplines, as problems demand. The second explanation sees interdisciplinarity as "exceptional," and condemns disciplinary boundaries as arbitrary impediments to interdisciplinary inquiry. Within this explanation disciplines are considered annoying obstacles but are not otherwise challenged. As a result, within this explanation interdisciplinary activities are "either normalized or marginalized" (Klein 19933, 207). The third explanation is an "oppositional" one. Here disciplinary organizations are challenged to their core. The disciplining of knowledge is contested and arguments are made, instead, for crossdisciplinary structures and political intervention (Klein 19933). Mark Kann highlights three types of demands that are characteristic of interdisciplinarity activities and that are related to distinct political orientations. Conservative elites engaged in interdisciplinary work are most often led by economic concerns. They demand that interdisciplinarity be utilized to solve social and economic problems, and they have no quarrel with the integrity of the current disciplinary structure of knowledge. Radical groups demand that interdisciplinarity respond to the needs and problems of marginalized groups seeking greater equality in society and that interdisciplinary work embody overt challenges to the disciplinary structure of knowledge. Liberal academics demand that interdisciplinarity accommodate exceptional forms of knowledge production at the same time as it maintains its base in the disciplinary structure (Kann 1979). CHAPTER

THREE

1 I would like to thank Frances Early and Jutta Dayle for their very helpful comments. 2 In the beginning, this journal was called the Canadian Newsletter of Research on Women. Eventually the name was changed to Resources for Feminist Research. 3 I learned about this because a colleague told me about it. I forget which library it was. 4 The solution to this problem, incidentally, is not to force everyone to work in groups, since you can only convince colleagues to work with

190 Notes to pages 62-89 you on an issue once you have formulated it well enough to present the problem to them, at which point the most important work has already been done, and the rest is a relatively simple application. 5 In a large-scale study of Canadian women's/feminist studies professors, less than 5 percent listed women's studies as either their primary, secondary, or tertiary discipline (Eichler 1990, 19) yet over 96 percent of the women stated that their work was informed by a feminist perspective (48). CHAPTER FOUR

1 See Barthes (1984, 100); Barthes claims that only in the latter case should one speak of interdisciplinarity. 2 Some sociologists of science have actually described disciplinary boundary crossings as a crucial step for innovative research. 3 No special arrangement has been established for PhD students. Ideally, MA students are selected from those applicants with the ability and motivation to undertake and complete doctoral-level studies. They can specialize in one of the three disciplinary fields within the regular Pho program of one of the arts departments, while still participating in SSOM seminars and conferences and receiving consultation or thesis supervision by SSOM faculty. 4 It might actually turn out to be the best solution for candidates for an MD-pho degree. 5 The reciprocal is also true: the medical faculty has always shown support for Social Studies of Medicine. 6 Quotations are from the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary program, from texts delivered by ex-directors at the Twentieth Anniversary events. Data are from surveys conducted for OCGS appraisals. 7 For example, there is little or no collaboration, or even apparent mutual awareness, between the two approaches to interdisciplinary research called by Klein "strategic interdisciplinarity" - research driven by the policy agenda or social problems - and "critical interdisciplinarity" intellectually driven approaches to interdisciplinarity, often informed by literary or cultural theory (1993^ cf. the distinction Salter and Hearn make between problem solving and critical interdisciplinarity). Yet I would argue that the underlying structure of the critique informing much strategic interdisciplinarity in the environmental field is very similar to the postmodernist arguments underlying most critical interdisciplinarity. 8 Since many members of interdisciplinary research teams may themselves come from an interdisciplinary background, the issue has to do with more than communication among disciplinary perspectives. It is

191 Notes to pages 89-112 quite common for scholars from different interdisciplinary fields to have communication problems of the kind discussed here. 9 This is more and more a problem as one moves along the spectrum outlined above from work that simply combines disciplinary research (which can in large part be evaluated in disciplinary terms) to work that is critical of the very notion of disciplinarity. 10 In other words, I am less worried than Salter and Hearn that interdisciplinary research gives rise to a problem regarding the "integrity" of the research (see chapter 2). In my view the problem is more a lack of credibility with disciplinary researchers than an inability to evaluate the research on its own terms. Of course, a lack of credibility in disciplinary communities can pose its own problems. However, I am not sure these are best described as problems of "integrity." CHAPTER FIVE

1 The July 31 1992 issue of the journal Science has several articles defending the objective nature of science. They suggest that scientists who have a point of view in their research may be in a conflict of interest. See, for example, Marshall (1992). 2 See, for example, the pioneering work by John Fletcher, Morals and Medicine (1954). Fletcher contends, "I do not believe that either the codes of medical ethics or the physicians who have undertaken to comment on them ... will suffice to withstand the omnivorous appetite of scientific research or of a therapeutic technology that has a momentum and a life of its own." 3 The new version, published after this essay was written, is in CIOMS (1993)4 As of 1994, the MRC, NSERC, and SSHRC are working towards national integretated guidelines for the ethics of research with all subjects (see Miller 1996). This initiative will likely enhance the multi- and interdisciplinary requirements in ethical review. 5 "Research-ethics board" is the Canadian terminology. In other countries similar boards may have other names, for example, institutional review board in the United States or ethics committee in the United Kingdom. 6 Interdisciplinarity in research ethics may require additional broadening from the current active participation of, primarily, philosophers, healthscience professionals, jurists, and occasional community members. The reader is referred to the proceedings of a conference published under the title Social Science Perspectives on Medical Ethics (Weisz 1990), particularly to the papers of Joseph Kaufert and John O'Neill, Margaret Lock, and Renee Fox.

192 Notes to pages 112-45 7 At the conference (see note 6), we discussed the advantages and limitations of individual disciplinary contributions to bioethics. Joseph Kaufert and John O'Neill, for example, proposed on the basis of their experience with sociocultural analysis of real interaction sequences in the negotiation of consent between clinicians and native clients that anthropologists' and sociologists' analyses of trust relationsips may be more significant than a legal or ethical analysis of the exchange. 8 Examples include the Danish Council of Ethics, the French National Consultative Committee on Ethics in the Biological and Medical Sciences, the Norwegian Committee for Medical Research Ethics, the Netherlands Interim Consultative Council on the Ethical Aspects of Research and the Portuguese National Council for Biological Sciences. CHAPTER

SEVEN

i The battle over naming is rooted in structuralist accounts of the nature of language. Michel Foucault suggests that language is a purely arbitrary process of signifying, a "pure invention" that fills up the "absolute vacancy of being" (White 1979, 87). Foucault states that the separation of words from things - thus the confusion of logical types - produces a gap, or false relation. It is in this gap that plays of power occur. Differing interests attempt to fill thus gap - to fix the meaning of words and concepts in such a way as to support their version of "reality" or "truth" (Foucault 1972).

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Contributors

CAROLINE ANDREW teaches political science at the University of Ottawa, where she is currently chair of the Department of Political Science. Her areas of research are urban development and women and politics. She has been active in women's studies and in Canadian studies at the University of Ottawa. ELLEN BALKA is on leave from her job as Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She is currently teaching communications at Simon Fraser University and conducting research on two approaches to designing technology (participatory design and ergonomics) and on how each approach addresses skill, expertise, gender, and user involvement in the design process. She holds degrees in geography and environmental studies, women's studies, and the applied sciences. ALBERTO CAMBROSIO is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University. His area of expertise lies at the crossroads of medical sociology and the sociology of science and technology and his work focuses on the material cultures and practices of biomedicine. He is the author (with Peter Keating) of Exquisite Specificity: The Monoclonal Antibody Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). MARGRIT EICHLER is Professor of Sociology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto. She has published

2io Contributors widely in the area of feminist sociology. Her two most consistent themes are family policy and non-sexist methodologies. Her latest books are entitled Change of Plans: Towards a Non-sexist Sustainable City (Garamond, 1995), and Family Shifts: Families, Policies, and Gender Equality, Oxford University Press, forthcoming. STEPHEN E. FIENBERG is Maurice Falk Professor of Statistics and Social Science, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He has served as Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon and as Vice President for Academic Affairs at York University in Toronto. He has published extensively on statistical methods for the analysis of categorical data and on aspects of sample surveys and randomized experiments. His research interests include the use of statistics in public policy and the law, surveys and experiments, and the role of statistical methods in census-taking, as well as cognitive aspects of survey methodology. ALISON HEARN is a freelance researcher and writer. Her research interests include issues of gender and cultural/political practices, contemporary art-making and intervention, and the historical emergence and disciplining of cultural studies. She currently teaches in the Cultural Studies Program at Trent University. ELAINE ISABELLE has worked extensively with the Canadian scholarly community for many years, both as a researcher and an administrator, notably with educational and library organisations. Since 1980 she has worked with the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), including serving as the director of the competition for the new federal program for Networks of Centres of Excellence. Elaine Isabelle has been the Director General, Program Branch, of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council since 1990. KAREN MESSING was educated at Harvard and McGill Universities. She is Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Quebec (Montreal) and a member of the Centre for the Study of Biological Interactions between Health and the Environment (CINBIOSE). She has published many scientific papers on women's occupational health and is the author of Occupational Health Concerns of Canadian Women, published by Human Resources Canada. She is currently writing a book on occupational health and ergonomics. JUDITH MILLER was founding director of the National Council on Bioethics in Human Research from 1989 to 1994. Formerly, at the

211 Contributors Medical Research Council, she served as secretary to the working group that prepared the first draft of the Guidelines on Research Involving Human Subjects, 1987. She is now a consultant in ethics and health policy. Please note that her remarks are personal, based on her experience, and may not reflect the views of the NCBHR. JOHN ROBINSON obtained his BA in Geography at the University of Toronto before going on to do a masters in Environmental Studies at York University. He then returned to the University of Toronto to complete his PhD. From 1981 to 1992, Dr Robinson worked at the Department of Environment and Resource Studies at the University of Waterloo. Since 1992, Dr Robinson has been Director of the Sustainable Development Research Institute at the University of British Columbia. The current focus of SDRI activities are research on climate change; reconciliation of ecological, economic, and social imperatives; sustainable futures for the Lower Eraser Basin; and development of modelling and gaming tools for exploring alternative futures. LIORA SALTER writes about science, law, and public policy as well as public controversies. She is a Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, and author of, among other books, Mandated Science, Public Inquiries in Canada and a new manuscript entitled Controversy: The ByPlay of Language and Politics in the Making and Unmaking of Controversy. JUDITH M. TANUR is Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she has taught for 30 years. She received a BS in psychology and an MA in mathematical statistics from Columbia and a rho in sociology from Stony Brook. Besides cognitive aspects of survey methodology, her research interests include parallels between experiments and sample surveys, customer and employee satisfaction surveys, and proxy reporting. BARRY TRUAX is Professor in both the School of Communication and the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, where he teaches courses in acoustic communication and electroacoustic music. He has worked with the World SoundScape Project, editing its Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, and has published the book Acoustic Communication, dealing with all aspects of sound and technology. As a composer, Truax is best known for his work with the PODX computer music system, which he has used for solo works on tape and works that combine tape with live performers or computer graphics. A selection of these pieces may be heard on the compact

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Contributors

discs Digital Soundscapes, Pacific Rim, and Song of Songs, all on the Cambridge Street Records label. JILL VICKERS is author of numerous books and articles in the fields of feminist political science, epistemology and interdisciplinary methodology, feminist theory, and movements for change. Recent books include Politics as if Women Mattered (with Rankin and Appelle) and Taking Sex into Account: The Policy Consequences of Sexist Research. Forthcoming is Re-inventing Political Science: A Feminist Account. She has served as Director of the Institute of Canadian Studies at Carleton University and as President of the CAUT and the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women. GERDA R. WEKERLE is Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies and Graduate Program in Women's Studies, York University. A sociologist by training, she has published in the fields of environment and behaviour, feminist geography, women's studies, urban planning and design, and social policy. Her recent work includes a co-authored book, Safe Cities: Guidelines for Planning, Design and Management (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1995), and two co-edited books, Local Places in the Age of the Global City (Black Rose Books, 1996) and Remaking the Welfare State: Canadian Women's Experience (University of Toronto Press, 1997). She is currently working on a comparative study of municipal feminist initiatives in six cities and on a book on gardens and culture.