Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Scott Frickel, Mathieu Albert, Barbara Prainsack

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780813585895
• eBook ISBN: 9780813585901
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Interdisciplinarity has become a buzzword in academia, as research universities funnel their financial resources toward collaborations between faculty in different disciplines. In theory, interdisciplinary collaboration breaks down artificial divisions between different departments, allowing more innovative and sophisticated research to flourish. But does it actually work this way in practice?     Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration puts the common beliefs about such research to the test, using empirical data gathered by scholars from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. The book’s contributors critically interrogate the assumptions underlying the fervor for interdisciplinarity. Their attentive scholarship reveals how, for all its potential benefits, interdisciplinary collaboration is neither immune to academia’s status hierarchies, nor a simple antidote to the alleged shortcomings of disciplinary study.  Chapter 10 is available Open Access here (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK395883)

Part I

Interdisciplinary Cultures and Careers

1

New Directions, New Challenges

Trials and Tribulations of Interdisciplinary Research

David McBee and Erin Leahey

Interdisciplinary research (IDR), “a mode of research by teams or individuals that integrates information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts, and/or theories from two or more disciplines or bodies of specialized knowledge” (National Academy of Sciences 2005, 188), is viewed as beneficial to science and society (Rhoten and Parker 2004). This optimism has catalyzed efforts at various levels (national, state, organizational) to fund IDR projects and promote IDR centers. Indeed, Porter and Rafols (2009) document a small but steady rise in interdisciplinary scholarship, especially since the mid-1980s. Interdisciplinarity is a timely and nationally important topic.

Despite this growth and optimism, systematic investigations of the impact of interdisciplinarity on individual careers are rare (Jacobs and Frickel 2009). Without strong empirical grounding, the widespread attention to—and praise for—interdisciplinarity may be premature. Few studies “seek to understand empirically the links between institutional initiatives, individual attributes, and professional implications” (Rhoten and Parker 2004, 2046). Recent exceptions include Albert and Paradis’s (2014) study of social scientists and humanists employed in medical schools, Frost and Jean’s (2003) evaluation of an initiative at Emory University, Lattuca’s (2001) qualitative study of interdisciplinary faculty, and Leahey et al.’s (2015) quantitative analysis of IDR’s costs and benefits. These studies suggest that while engaging in IDR can be rewarding, it can also be challenging. We suspect that IDR is difficult and time-consuming to produce; this, combined with reviewers’ difficulties evaluating IDR (Lamont et al. 2006), may thus dampen productivity. Interdisciplinary scholars may lack the support needed to work through these challenges, leading to feelings of dismay or regret.

In this chapter we empirically explore and elaborate upon the professional risks and challenges of interdisciplinary scholarship and training. We do this by interviewing tenured interdisciplinary scholars in the humanities (e.g., English, history, philosophy), where IDR faces fewer barriers, compared to the social and hard sciences (Lattuca 2001). Our sample of interdisciplinary scholars comprises recipients of a prestigious fellowship that is awarded to recently tenured scholars who wish to extend their research into a second disciplinary area. Sampling these successful scholars likely provides a conservative estimate of the challenges that IDR presents: if these scholars face them, certainly others do, and probably to a greater extent.

Our analysis extends and complements the extant scholarship in at least two ways. First, we focus on the humanities. Most studies of IDR and its effects focus on the natural and physical sciences, where collaboration is common and IDR arises from specialists working together in teams (Fiore 2008). In the humanities, sole authorship is still the norm, so IDR is typically accomplished alone (Wuchty et al. 2007). While we do not dismiss the difficulty of working with colleagues from different epistemological backgrounds, it may still be easier than trying to learn all of that knowledge oneself. For these reasons, we study scholars in the humanities. Second, we focus on the costs of IDR to counterbalance the extant scholarship, which highlights the benefits of IDR (Frost and Jean 2003). In this way, we heed Jacobs and Frickel’s (2009) call for empirical studies of IDR’s potential negative repercussions.

What’s So Hard about IDR?

Skepticism about IDR’s impact (Jacobs and Frickel 2009) and scholarship in organization ecology (Hsu et al. 2009) suggest that domain-spanning activities, like IDR, are penalized. We focus on possible challenges experienced during the production and evaluation of IDR, including an unsupportive environment and/or colleagues.

Production Hurdles

Interdisciplinary scholars likely face hurdles during the production stage, when ideas are incubated, data collected and analyzed, and papers written. Research literature on challenges in the production phase of domain-spanning activity focuses on coordinating and integrating contributions from team members with disparate knowledge (Uzzi et al. 2013). Coordination challenges may be less prevalent in the humanities, where sole-authored work remains normative (Wuchty et al. 2007), but other production challenges remain—like communicating across disciplinary borders and attaining mastery in two or more fields. We elaborate on each in the sections to follow.

Communicating and fully engaging with members of other disciplines can be challenging—and perhaps especially challenging—when one works alone, and sole-authored work is still typical in the humanities. Different intellectual domains have distinct approaches that are difficult to learn and, without sufficient immersion, can make working in another domain challenging (Strober 2011). Indeed, research that is original, significant, or sound in one discipline may appear indolent, conventional, or dispassionate in another (Guetzkow et al. 2004). Framing one’s research to align it with another discipline’s concerns, assumptions, and standards is difficult, especially without a collaborator from that discipline.

Cognitive resources are finite, so mastery may also be more difficult to attain when time, energy, and effort are distributed across more than one domain (Negro and Leung 2013). Lamont and colleagues (2006) find that it is challenging for interdisciplinary scholars to master two or more bodies of literature, to accommodate the research mores and concepts of multiple fields, and to produce output that is standard in form and content. Translating unfamiliar ideas into a familiar intellectual domain takes time, but thinking as a member of a different epistemic culture requires learning tacit knowledge through experience and socialization (Strober 2011; Collins 2010). While funding for IDR has increased in recent years (Jacobs and Frickel 2009), preparing an interdisciplinary grant proposal demands additional effort so the research can speak (and appeal) to distinct audiences (Strober 2011). At minimum, branching out to incorporate insights from other fields takes additional time: one is sacrificing the efficiency gains that come with specializing (Leahey 2006). Interdisciplinary scholars likely have to work harder than mono-disciplinary scholars to demonstrate to two or more disciplinary audiences that their research is high quality and worthwhile.

Evaluation Hurdles

Even after surmounting production challenges, interdisciplinary scholars likely face evaluation challenges. During peer review, experts from different fields often disagree on the merits of a paper and evaluate them differently (Lamont 2009; Boix Mansilla 2006). Indeed, Birnbaum (1981) finds that research that does not fit neatly within the substantive bounds of “normal science” instills irritation, confusion, and misunderstanding among reviewers and editors. Former American Sociological Review editor Rita Simon (Simon and Fyfe 1994, 34) notes that “works of imagination, innovation, and iconoclasm may fail to receive positive appraisals from reviewers who are good at catching errors and omissions but might miss a gem, or at least the unusual, the provocative, the outside the mainstream submission.” Thus the review process may be fraught with tension and a lack of consensus and may be slower—all of which contribute to lower rates of productivity.

Research suggests that reviewers and editors tend to overlook, devalue, or outright reject domain-spanning offerings. Such offerings are often received poorly because interdisciplinary scholars may not effectively target the relevant disciplinary audiences. Their offerings become difficult to place within existing schemas and difficult to understand, reducing their appeal (Lamont 2012). In the context of academe, this may result in lower recognition, visibility, and impact for interdisciplinary scholars unless they understand how their work fits into other disciplinary evaluation schemas. Thus, they may be caught trying to please multiple audiences and satisfying none (Lattuca 2001; Hsu et al. 2009).

Scholars are evaluated not only in the review process, but also by their home institution; here again, interdisciplinary scholars might face challenges. Interdisciplinary scholars may take longer to be promoted, partly because of the lower productivity we expect to find, but also because it is hard for committee members to evaluate work outside their own discipline. Within one’s department—and especially beyond it—promotion committee members may fail to understand the contributions of interdisciplinary scholars. Thus, interdisciplinary scholars may experience hurdles both outside and inside their university walls.

Insufficient Support

Despite the prospect of extra hurdles in both the production and evaluation of IDR, interdisciplinary scholars likely fail to receive the formal support they need to overcome them. We suspect that a lack formal support—including financial resources as well as the backing needed to establish legitimacy—is attributable to both disciplinary competition and organizational decoupling. Because disciplines (and their local manifestation, departments) are embedded in larger institutional fields, they struggle for resources like physical space, students, and prestige within the larger academic field (Abbott 2001). Department colleagues and administrative personnel may believe that interdisciplinary endeavors drain resources from long-established departments, undermine their vested interests, or disrupt existing relations between disciplines (Lamont 2012; Lattuca 2001).

A lack of formal support for IDR may derive, indirectly, from organizational decoupling. Policies designed to promote IDR may be implemented in a superficial or symbolic way in order to buffer existing disciplines from change (Meyer and Rowan 1991; DiMaggio and Powell 1991). Moreover, administrators may not understand how policies promote—or fail to promote—desired ends (Bromley and Powell 2012). Albert and Paradis (2014) discuss such a case. The Canadian government sought to increase the public usefulness of its academic health research by promoting interdisciplinary collaboration. It provided funds to hire humanists and social scientists into medical schools. It was assumed that they would contribute new approaches and perspectives, but this did not happen. To meet publication requirements, the humanists and social scientists ultimately conformed to the standards of the medical school by producing short articles that sidestepped social theory. Ultimately, without sufficient formal support, the hiring effort did not achieve its goals. As this example shows, interdisciplinary researchers are often caught in a lag between stated support for IDR and effectual administrative support (Lattuca 2001; Strober 2011).

Interdisciplinary researchers are also likely to receive less informal support compared to their disciplinary peers. In addition to being difficult to evaluate, IDR may reflect poorly on interdisciplinary researchers, especially if they question their discipline’s epistemic foundations (Lamont and Molnar 2002). Disciplinary peers may respond to IDR they do not care for by turning their symbolic evaluations into social boundaries. Thus interdisciplinary researchers may be excluded from their discipline’s or department’s invisible colleges (Crane 1972) that serve as informal professional support networks.

Unshared Cognitive-Emotional-Interactional Platforms

Because of production hurdles, evaluation hurdles, and a lack of support, we suspect that interdisciplinary researchers do not experience the full benefits of a shared cognitive-emotional-interactional (SCEI) platform (Boix Mansilla et al. 2016). That is, their relationships to scholars in their second discipline may not foster deliberation, trust, or a scholarly identity that allows for mutual learning and meaningful exchange. They may not experience solidarity with disciplinary peers that could carry them through professional frustrations. Without an SCEI platform, interdisciplinary researchers may be isolated from disciplinary peers (Lattuca 2001; Strober 2011). They may also experience role strain, an incongruence between their expectations and those of their employer, peers, or academic culture (Boardman and Bozeman 2007).

Data and Methods

To investigate these ideas about the challenges of engaging in IDR, we study recipients of Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s New Directions Fellowships. Part of the foundation’s mission involves promoting the contributions of the humanities to the well-being of society, and the New Directions Fellowships program is one way this is accomplished. Its objective is to “assist faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who . . . wish to acquire systematic training outside their own disciplines” (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 2014). Each year since its inception in 2002, about twenty faculty members from the humanities or humanistic social sciences have been awarded yearlong fellowships that allowed them to work on interesting cross-disciplinary problems. Recipients had received tenure in their home discipline and were eager to move beyond their disciplinary bounds.

We sampled recipients of the New Directions Fellowships because we aimed to identify successful interdisciplinary scholars: those who engage a second discipline or specialized body of knowledge, beyond their primary discipline (National Academy of Sciences 2005). Recipients were all employed in elite research universities or liberal arts colleges, had received tenure in their home field, and were nominated by their deans as promising scholars moving in interdisciplinary directions. Of the 115 fellows to date, we selected all (thirty-four) recipients from three disciplines (English/literature, history, and philosophy) who received fellowships before 2010. These three traditional disciplines were well represented among the fellows. We excluded fellows from less well-represented disciplines, like East Asian studies, to allow the possibility of disciplinary comparisons. We omitted more recent fellows (from 2011 to 2013) to ensure sufficient post-fellowship experience with IDR.

Eighteen (more than half) of these fellows agreed to be interviewed by telephone. The interviews took place between December 2012 and February 2013 and were conducted via Skype, a communication software package that offers calling capabilities, and were recorded using MP3 Skype Recorder. Of those who did not agree to be interviewed, six reported a lack of time, three expressed their disinterest in participating, two were on sabbatical, and five failed to respond to our letters and emails. Those who agreed to be interviewed do not differ systematically from those who did not in terms of their gender, discipline, institutional type, or institutional size (see Table 1.1).

The interview schedule focused on faculty members’ experiences, reflections, and intellectual identities. Specifically, we asked about the interdisciplinary nature of their work; how they presented IDR to relevant to communities inside and outside their home disciplines; how IDR affected th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: The Messiness of Real-World Solutions
• Introduction: Investigating Interdisciplinarities
• Part I: Interdisciplinary Cultures And Careers
• Part II: Disciplines And Interdisciplinarity
• Part III: Changing Context Of Interdisciplinary Research
• Notes on Contributors
• Index