Integrating Knowledge Through Interdisciplinary Research

Problems of Theory and Practice

Dominic Holland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134490165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this important new text, Holland seeks to explain, by means of social scientific and philosophical inquiry, the difficulties that researchers often experience when attempting to integrate knowledge from different academic disciplines, either individually or as part of a team of subject specialists. It is argued that the difficulty of integrating knowledge from different academic disciplines is the result of, firstly, an inadequate justification of the nature of scientific integration and differentiation and, secondly, the dominance of disciplinary specialization in scientific inquiry.

By focusing on both the theoretical justification for, and the practical feasibility of, integrating knowledge through interdisciplinary research, this book asks what properties of reality make the integration of knowledge from different academic disciplines possible and to what extent it is feasible to integrate knowledge through interdisciplinary research within a traditional, disciplinary context. Accordingly the text is both philosophical and social scientific in content: philosophical in the sense that it presents a theory of causal determination, which will help researchers to understand how reality is both differentiated and interconnected; social scientific in the sense that it presents the results of three case studies of collaborative interdisciplinary research projects.

The book is heavily informed by the philosophy of critical realism. The philosophical argument about the possibility of integration and specialization in science draws explicitly on some of the key concepts of critical realism – particularly those comprising the theory of 'integrative pluralism' – while critical realist assumptions underpin the social scientific argument about the causal influence of the social system of knowledge production. By exploring researchers' conceptions of knowledge and of reality on the one hand and their decisions about what sort of knowledge to produce on the other, Holland shows how the difficulty of scientific integration is both a problem of knowledge and a problem of knowledge production.

This book is essential reading for students and academics interested in the emerging topic of knowledge integration and interdisciplinarity.

1Introduction

The problem of integrating knowledge

When academics think about integrating knowledge from different disciplines they usually think of interdisciplinary research. Scientists and higher-education policymakers have become increasingly interested in this form of research. For example, in May 2006, the British Academy organized a workshop on interdisciplinarity, ‘Working Together Across Disciplines: Challenges for the Natural and Social Sciences’,¹ while, in May 2005, interdisciplinarity was the explicit focus of the third in a series of six ESRC-funded seminars on ‘interactive agenda setting in the social sciences’.² Moreover, the University of Sheffield has recently established the Informatics Collaboratory of the Social Sciences (ICOSS), which is explicitly designed to facilitate ‘high quality interdisciplinary research’,³ while the University of Durham has just established an interdisciplinary Institute of Advanced Study.⁴ Finally, the UK Research Councils have also been stepping up their efforts to encourage the production of interdisciplinary research through the Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme, which involves collaboration between natural and social scientists from over 30 disciplines at research institutions across the UK.⁵

In this book, I focus on a particular type of interdisciplinary research, which Barry et al. define as the ‘integrative or synthesis model of interdisciplinarity’ (2008: 28). I am focusing on this type of interdisciplinary research because, in my observation, this is the type that is most often discussed in the academic literature on interdisciplinarity; in other words, it is the dominant (but not exclusive) meaning of interdisciplinary research. (Indeed, as I discuss later in this chapter, the concepts of integration and synthesis are invoked in justifications of interdisciplinary research.) I am also focusing on this type of interdisciplinary research for the simple reason that, if reality is differentiated and interconnected in the way that I argue it is in Chapter 2, not to attempt to understand how it is differentiated and interconnected at a scientific (as opposed to a philosophical) level, will be a serious derogation from the enterprise of science and will leave policymakers ill-equipped to address the increasingly complicated problems that have emerged within contemporary society – not least the pressing problem of climate change (Bhaskar et al., 2010). As I show later in this chapter, it is the increasing awareness among scientists and policymakers that traditional, disciplinary-based scientific inquiry is seriously deficient that is driving the growth of interest in collaboration across the social and natural sciences.

Moreover, in focusing on integrative interdisciplinary research, this book marks a departure from existing books on interdisciplinarity in the fields of sociology and philosophy of science, which are typically concerned with the different ways in which interdisciplinarity is understood and which deal thereby with the concept of scientific integration (and differentiation) only incidentally. For example, Klein reflects on the nature of the discourse of interdisciplinarity and the ‘internal and external forces’ influencing it (1990: 14) and, in a later work, explores the meaning of different forms of interdisciplinarity across the academic spectrum (1996), while Moran examines debates about the ‘meaning, purpose and practical applications’ of interdisciplinarity from the particular perspective of literary studies (2002: 2). The collection of articles edited by Weingart and Stehr (2000) examines the discourses of both disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, although, as the title suggests, the focus of this collection is the practice of interdisciplinarity and the different forms of organizing it. The practice, or construction, of interdisciplinarity (in both teaching and research) is also the focus of Lattuca's research monograph, Creating Interdisciplinarity (2001), which explores how academics in the United States understand and engage in interdisciplinary work, their perceptions of the impact of the academic context on such work and the different outcomes of their engagement in it. Yet, the concept of scientific integration is incidental to Lattuca's inquiry in the sense that it appears as the concept of ‘synthetic interdisciplinarity’, one of four types of interdisciplinary research and teaching that she derives from her empirical investigation (2001: Chapter 4).

By focusing on understanding the different ways in which individual researchers construct forms of interdisciplinarity, existing books on this subject reflect – in varying degrees – the influence of social constructionism. However, as I argue later in this book, social constructionism and postmodernism cannot sustain a coherent justification for scientific integration and differentiation and so cannot help to explain the problem that motivates this investigation, which is why attempts to produce integrative interdisciplinary research either fail or become incoherent. Producing a form of knowledge ‘that is more than the simple sum of the parts’ (SURPC, 1997: xi) is indeed the goal that most advocates of interdisciplinary research demand; yet, it is a goal that researchers have often struggled to meet, even when working in research centres and institutes explicitly intended to facilitate the production of integrative, interdisciplinary research. In subsequent chapters, I attempt to explain why this is the case. I examine researchers' conceptions of knowledge and of reality on the one hand and their decisions about what sort of knowledge to produce on the other, and I argue that contradictions within researchers' thinking place limits on their ability to synthesize knowledge from different disciplines and that the social system of knowledge production, and the intellectual structures of science constellationally contained within it, places limits on the opportunities for researchers to integrate knowledge from different disciplines in varying degrees. In short, I argue that the problem of integrating knowledge through interdisciplinary research is both a problem of knowledge and a problem of knowledge production.

Accordingly, in the first section of this chapter, I discuss the different meanings of interdisciplinary research that I have identified from a reading of the contemporary academic literature and justify my focus on the integrative form of interdisciplinary research. This leads into the second section, which considers the adequacy of some typical justifications for integrative, interdisciplinary research. In the third section, I attempt to determine whether or not researchers are managing to produce integrative interdisciplinary research and present a critical survey of some recent empirical investigations into the conduct and funding of interdisciplinary research. In the fourth section, I consider the nature of disciplinary research, which has to be the starting point for interdisciplinary research, and examine critically different conceptions of an academic discipline. In the fifth and final section, I draw together the arguments of the previous sections in defining the key questions of the book and show how the arguments of subsequent chapters relate to these.

The nature of interdisciplinary research

It is important to acknowledge that interdisciplinary research has different meanings within the academy. The heterogeneity of interdisciplinarity is evident in the most recent research, which distinguishes between three different ‘modes’ of interdisciplinarity: the ‘integrative or synthesis’ mode, in which the aim is to integrate knowledge from two or more disciplines so as to generate an increase in understanding of the causes of a complicated problem (such as climate change) that would not be possible were the problem to be addressed from multiple yet disconnected disciplinary perspectives; the ‘subordination–service’ mode, in which one or more disciplines are subordinated to the needs of a master discipline – an arrangement that is typical of the interactions between art, science and technology; and finally the ‘agonistic–antagonistic’ mode, in which the aim is to challenge traditional disciplinary thinking and thereby ‘transcend the given epistemological and ontological assumptions of traditional disciplines’ – as in the field of ethnography in the information technology industry (Barry et al., 2008: 28–9). In identifying three different ‘modes’ of interdisciplinarity (and also three different ‘logics’ that motivate it), Barry et al. are adopting a broad-based definition of interdisciplinarity that stands in contrast to the traditional assumption that the essential characteristic of interdisciplinary research is the integration of knowledge from two or more distinct disciplines (ibid: 27–8).

Similarly, Lattuca explores how academics in the United States understand and engage in interdisciplinary work. She identifies four ideal types of interdisciplinary research: ‘informed disciplinarity’, in which the concepts and/or methods of one discipline contribute to answering a question posed in another discipline; ‘synthetic interdisciplinarity’, in which the research question is relevant to two or more different disciplines and thereby acts as a ‘bridge’ between them; ‘transdisciplinarity’, in which the aim is to apply a concept or method across different disciplinary domains so as to unify those domains – as in sociobiology or the application of rational choice theory across the social sciences; and finally ‘conceptual interdisciplinarity’, in which the researcher answers a question that has no ‘compelling disciplinary basis’ and thereby constructs a critique of traditional, disciplinary approaches to a particular problem or issue (Lattuca, 2001: 113–18).

Lattuca derives her typology of interdisciplinarity from an exploration of the different types of research question that her subjects asked in their research. By adopting this approach, she claims to have rejected the traditional way of defining interdisciplinarity according to the degree of integration of different disciplinary perspectives. For example, Rossini and Porter distinguish between ‘type I integration’ – or multidisciplinarity – in which the various disciplinary analyses are linked externally as in a ‘patchwork quilt’ and ‘type II integration’ – or interdisciplinarity – in which the analyses are linked both externally and internally as in a ‘tapestry’ (Rossini and Porter, 1979: 72).⁶ Lattuca's motivation for rejecting integration as the basis of her typology is that in her view focusing on the issue of integration leads to the problem of how to measure the level of integration within a research project so as to determine the extent to which it is interdisciplinary as opposed to multidisciplinary. In her view, we can avoid this problem by examining how researchers understand the meaning of their work. As she explains:

A foolproof method for assessing the level of integration of an interdisciplinary teaching or research project has eluded researchers. Some have tried to measure integration by examining the processes by which interdisciplinary research is accomplished, for example, by noting how often researchers on an interdisciplinary project meet to coordinate their work. Others have attempted to judge the final product of an interdisciplinary project typically relying on the judgments of participants or the researchers themselves. If interdisciplinary projects, however, are born, not made, that is, if they begin as I have argued, with interdisciplinary questions, then such attempts are misguided because we must look to the point of origin to understand interdisciplinarity.

(Lattuca, 2001: 113)

In the third section of this chapter, I argue that attempts to determine how successful an interdisciplinary research project is by measuring the level of scientific integration within it are indeed problematic. I argue that integration is not something that may be quantified. However, that does not mean that we should abandon the issue of integration altogether, because this concept is clearly fundamental to the concerns of many interdisciplinary researchers. Indeed, in my observation, interdisciplinary research as integrating or synthesizing knowledge from different disciplines is the dominant understanding of interdisciplinarity in the academic literature. As I show in the second section below and in the second chapter of this book, integration is a recurring feature of justifications for interdisciplinary research because the integration of knowledge from different fields of inquiry meets an important scientific need, which is to understand the way the world is. I argue that the relevant question to ask about interdisciplinary research projects is not how much integration there is but what is being integrated and how.

Little attention has been given to the question of what an integrated research product is in the literature on interdisciplinarity and many reports on interdisciplinarity leave the nature of integration unexamined. Consider Tait et al.'s fairly typical distinction between multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research:

Multidisciplinary research approaches an issue from the perspectives of a range of disciplines, but each discipline works in a self-contained manner with little cross-fertilisation among disciplines, or synergy in the outcomes.

Interdisciplinary research similarly approaches an issue from a range of disciplinary perspectives but in this case the contributions of the various disciplines are integrated to provide a holistic or systemic outcome.

(Tait et al., 2003a: 12)

For Tait et al., interdisciplinary is distinguished from multidisciplinary research according to the nature of the research product; yet, they say nothing about what a ‘holistic or systemic outcome’ is, even when they go on to make further distinctions between ‘mode 1’ and ‘mode 2’ interdisciplinarity.⁷

Similarly, Bell et al. conclude, from their investigation of interdisciplinarity in two European Union Fifth Framework projects that ‘interdisciplinarity is dynamic, being the integration of “ways of thinking” as part of the development of a “way of working” and thus cannot be produced by following a predetermined recipe’ (Bell et al., 2005: 34). Bell et al. say little about what these ‘ways of thinking’ and ‘way of working’ are. Yet, it may be difficult to integrate ‘ways of thinking’, if these are contradictory; for disciplines are not ‘homogeneous entities with clearly defined borders’ but are ‘heterogeneous’ – that is, characterized by competing scientific paradigms (Molteberg et al., 2000: 321). for example, in the social sciences we find different schools of thought in politics (Marsh and Stoker, 2002a, 2010; Marsh and Savigny, 2004), economics (Harley and Lee, 1997, 1998), law (Toma, 1997) and sociology (Turner, 1990; Crane and Small, 1992) that reflect philosophical differences both within and between disciplines. Now, if researchers are unaware of such differences, they may find it difficult to synthesize competing forms of knowledge. In this respect, Bell et al.'s proposal that researchers should ‘make a conscious effort…to describe to others both the methodological and epistemological foundations of their research and how these are used to interpret their findings’ (Bell et al., 2005: 12) is a step in the right direction. But, it still leaves open the question of how researchers, once they have revealed their philosophical assumptions, can ‘make their disciplinary contribution mutually intelligible’ (ibid.). In other words, how are they to integrate their ‘disciplinary research strands’ (ibid.), if what one researcher accepts as valid knowledge is not the same as what another researcher accepts as valid knowledge?

Even those scholars who do address the issue of integration directly often fail to shed clear light on what exa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Critical Realism: Interventions
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the problem of integrating knowledge
• 2 Critical realism and integrative interdisciplinary research
• 3 Towards a theory of knowledge production
• 4 The intellectual context of knowledge production
• 5 The social context of knowledge production
• 6 Conclusion
• Appendix: research design
• Notes
• References
• Index