Stewarding the Discipline With Cross-Boundary Leadership

ABSTRACT

Proposals to prepare disciplinary stewards and optimize the conditions for collective stewardship can be framed in two ways. The dominant frame emphasizes disciplinary caretaking and lends comparatively less attention to reform and transformation. A second frame is grounded in the social ecology of particular disciplines, their fast-changing university homes, and society’s complex needs, problems, and opportunities, especially those that no longer fit inside the long-standing boundaries of particular disciplines and their specialties. Reformist and transformative stewardship in this second frame prioritizes the development of adaptive, connected disciplines characterized by new boundaries and bridging mechanisms for interdisciplinary research, teaching, and outreach/engagement. This frame also provides the opportunity to explore the difference between an academic discipline and a helping discipline. Questions remain about how leaders will persuade, support, and reward career-oriented, specialized faculty members to engage in all such acts of stewardship for Kinesiology alongside their customary concern for their respective sub-disciplines.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic discipline
• helping profession
• interdisciplinary research
• outreach/engagement
• universities

Notes

1. The system of specialized disciplines in universities corresponds in many ways to the system of professions in society (Abbott, 1988). The pattern is a well-known feature of advanced capitalism. Each profession, like its parent discipline, is structured to address one or more technical problems that are amenable to specialized interventions claimed to be within the jurisdiction of the field’s practitioners. Kinesiology is unique in this respect because several helping professions derive from this discipline.

2. This line of analysis provides an interesting and important research agenda. Studies are needed that attend to the organizational behavior of particular disciplines such as Kinesiology. These studies offer opportunities to discover how leaders weigh strategies associated with prestige-seeking conformity versus alternative strategies in service of diversity-conscious uniqueness.

3. Damrosch’s (1995) exploration of the self-centered orientations of research university faculty members included a quip about their shared experiences as young children. They failed sandbox.