Logics of interdisciplinarity

Abstract

This paper interrogates influential contemporary accounts of interdisciplinarity, in which it is portrayed as offering new ways of rendering science accountable to society and/or of forging closer relations between scientific research and innovation. The basis of the paper is an eighteen-month empirical study of three interdisciplinary fields that cross the boundaries between the natural sciences or engineering, on the one hand, and the social sciences or arts, on the other. The fields are: 1) environmental and climate change research, 2) ethnography in the IT industry and 3) art-science. In the first part of the paper, in contrast to existing accounts, we question the idea that interdisciplinarity should be understood in terms of the synthesis of two or more disciplines. We stress the forms of agonism and antagonism that often characterize relations between disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, and distinguish between three modes of interdisciplinarity. In the second part we outline three distinctive logics or rationales that guide interdisciplinary research. In addition to the logics of accountability and innovation, we identify the logic of ontology, that is, an orientation apparent in diverse interdisciplinary practices in each of our three fields towards effecting ontological transformation in the objects and relations of research. While the three logics are interdependent, they are not reducible to each other and are differently entangled in each of the fields. We point to the potential for invention in such interdisciplinary practices and, against the equation of disciplinary research with autonomy, to the possibility of forms of interdisciplinary autonomy.

Keywords:

• interdisciplinarity
• interdisciplinary research
• accountability
• innovation
• ontology
• ethnography
• environment
• art-science

Notes

1. There are few empirical studies of contemporary interdisciplinary research. Recent examples include Bruce et al. (2004), Mansilla (2006, n.d.), Tait and Lyall (2001), Rhoten (2004) and Tompkins (2005).

2. Our research was funded by the ESRC under the Science in Society Programme: ‘Interdisciplinarity and Society: A Critical Comparative Study’, RES-151-25-0042-A, investigators Andrew Barry, Georgina Born and Marilyn Strathern.

3. The ten case studies were: 1) environmental and climate change research: the Tyndall Centre, University of East Anglia; the Earth Institute, Columbia University; the Öko-Institut, Darmstadt and Freiburg; 2) ethnography in the IT industry: three IT corporations; the Institute for Software Research at the University of California, Irvine; and 3) art-science: the Arts, Computation and Engineering (ACE) Master's programme, UC Irvine, and Digital Arts Research network (DARnet) of the University of California; the Symbiotica lab, University of Western Australia; and project-based funding programmes supported by the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England. In this paper we do not address differences between interdisciplinary research in the US, Germany and the UK. A third element of the overall ESRC project, carried out by Marilyn Strathern and Elena Khlinovskaya Rockhill, was an ethnographic study of another interdisciplinary field: collaboration between research on ethical, legal and social implications and genetics research. Although this study complements our own work, we do not address it directly here.

4. By contrast, one could note the importance of interdisciplinary research in the development of military science and technology in the 1940s and 1950s (Pickering, 1995; Edgerton, 2006).

5. Our research partakes in the broader ‘ontological turn’ within the social sciences (see, for example, Mol 2002, Barry 2005 and Henare, Holbraad, & Wastell, 2007); and in other projects we have ourselves engaged in interdisciplinary research with natural scientists, engineers and artists. In writing of the logic of ontology, then, this paper is in part a reflection on the rationale for our own work; and, in studying those engaged in fostering ontological transformations in their research and practice, we acknowledge the inevitably recursive nature both of our project and of our analyses. In spite of these qualifications, we suggest that the detour through empirical observation and enquiry represented by this study lends acuity, complexity and objectivity to our account of these phenomena.

6. See, inter alia, Petts et al. (in press), Lawrence and Després (2004, p. 400) and the discussion on <www.interdisciplines.org>.

7. This irreducibility has important implications for the evaluation of this kind of interdisciplinarity which we outline in Born and Barry (2007).

8. It may be worth clarifying briefly the relations between the three modes of interdisciplinarity outlined in this section and the descriptive definitions given earlier. In short, there is no one-to-one mapping. While the integrative-synthesis mode can characterize interdisciplinarity (but not multidisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity), the hierarchical division of labour of the subordination-service mode can characterize both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. The agonistic-antagonistic mode, finally, can characterize both interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research (but not multidisciplinary).

9. Interview with a former corporate ethnographer, now in a university setting, February 2006.

10. Interview with a long-standing corporate ethnographer, now in an academic setting, February 2006.

11. See Jasanoff and Wynne (1998), Demeritt (2001) and Miller (2004) on the co-construction of the global environment as an object of knowledge and government. On the lack of a relation between climate change science and policy during the 1950s and 1960s, see Hart and Victor (1993).

12. The genealogies are commonly traced from origins in Muybridge and Duchamp, founding father of conceptualism, via mid-century figures and groups such as Cage, Tinguely, Kluver and Experiments in Art and Technology, Art and Language, Nam June Paik, Jack Burnham, Jim Pomeroy, Hans Haacke and Artist Placement Group, to contemporary figures including Laurie Anderson, Perry Hoberman, Natalie Jeremijenko, Geert Lovink, Eduardo Kac and groups such as Adbusters, RTMark, Critical Art Ensemble, Survival Research Labs, Red Group at Xerox PARC and Symbiotica.

13. Interview with a British art-science administrator, May 2005.

14. Interview with a leading exponent of art-science, August 2006.

15. For a discussion of the methodological underpinnings of this approach, see Born (forthcoming).

16. Our thanks to Gail Davies, Paul Dourish, Sheila Jasanoff, Lucy Kimbell, Bill Maurer, Susan Owens, Lucy Suchman, Brian Wynne, several of our informants and the anonymous referees of Economy and Society for extensive and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. We extend our gratitude also to all those individuals that we interviewed and observed during the course of our research, to the participants in the ‘Interdisciplinarity and Society’ conference in Oxford, February 2007, at which we presented our initial findings, and above all to Marilyn Strathern and Elena Khlinovskaya Rockhill for ongoing conversations and productive collaboration.