The intellectual and social organization of academic fields and the shaping of digital resources

Abstract

This paper looks at disciplinary differences in the production, relevance, and use of three predominant genres of informal scholarly communication on the internet: academic mailing lists; scholarly homepages, and scholar-produced decentralized digital resources. The aim is to contribute to the development of a theoretical framework for understanding and explaining disciplinary differences in the shaping of networked resources. We apply Whitley’s theory of the intellectual and social organization of academic fields to explain variation in forms and types of digital resources across fields. The paper extends Whitley’s theory by applying his key domain analytic concepts ‘task uncertainty’ and ‘mutual dependence’ to explain scholarly communication practices in the digital realm. The empirical data spans seven intellectual fields across the natural sciences, health sciences, humanities, and social sciences. The analysis shows that, while there are similarities in the scholarly production of information genres on the internet, Whitley’s theory helps in identifying and understanding the diversity and heterogeneity of electronic communication fora across fields.