Interdisciplinarity in the Context of University Politics

Abstract

1. Foundations for Interdisciplinarity The traditional disciplinary system has been questioned among educational policy makers and researchers over the past decade. Concepts and practices described as subdisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary have been strongly encouraged by policy makers, and they have even acquired intrinsic value as a means of enhancing innovative research. In this article, I discuss the ongoing reorganization of disciplines in the economic context of research in European universities. My starting point is that the new ordering of disciplines is not only a question of innovativeness but also a mechanism of political regulation of universities and the relations between universities and society. For this reason, I approach the question of interdisciplinarity in educational research as a question of university politics. The growing demands for subdisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity seem to originate from at least two different, if not even contradictory, perspectives. The first perspective is connected to the actual transformation of society, including the field of education. The disciplinary categories that have constituted the modern university were organized during the process of modernization and attached to industrialism, technological development, new challenges of understanding and controlling the human mind and behaviour, and the issues of social coherence and the building up of nation states. During the past four decades, the processes causing the transition of society from modernity to late or postmodernity have simultaneously dispersed, fragmented and reorganized the social categories and issues to which education, among other disciplines, was attached. Thereby, the traditional organization of disciplines seems to have become at least partly incapable of addressing the challenges of education, schooling and learning in multicultural and socially polarizing Western countries. The second perspective demanding interdisciplinarity is connected to neo-liberal educational policy. Its cultural vocabulary has introduced a set of new regulation technologies into the practices of universities: measurable productivity, cost-effectiveness, quality assurance, quality control, competition, accountability, human resources management, and so on. The neo-liberal policy has dismantled traditional organizational structures and introduced detailed and expanding forms of governance. The new technologies of governance have reoriented actual research practices (see, for example, Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Koski, 2009; Blackmore, 2010). The shift to neo-liberalism has also been analysed as a shift of the rationale from cultural-intellectual values to the principles of marketization, with ambitions of tying education and economic growth together more closely and directly (see, for example, Whitty, 2002). These two processes have not only fostered demands for political interdisciplinarity but have also produced genuine hope for new approaches and solutions to actual educational problems and challenges. Thus, interdisciplinarity cannot be approached as a simple question of advantages and