Abstract
ABSTRACT Interdisciplinary research is a popular mode of knowledge production that becomes intensively promoted by research centers all across the globe. Despite the facilitation of interdisciplinary research, however, scholars working in these centers are ‘disciplined.’ Career promotions, funding decisions and scientific publishing are based on peer-review procedures that tend to favor monodisciplinary research. This paper builds on a qualitative study with scholars in interdisciplinary research centers in Germany and asks how scholars cope with these monodisciplinary demands. After deriving a conceptual framework, the study identifies four coping strategies: disciplinary innovation, strategic compliance, niche-seeking, and field creation. Each of these strategies is characterized by a different degree of openness to knowledge bases of other disciplines and a different degree of proactivity towards monodisciplinary demands from the scientific field. The results illuminate how research agendas become disciplined despite interdisciplinary motivation and organizational support of interdisciplinary research.
Highlights
Interdisciplinary research is widely regarded as a catalyst for disruptive innovations that help to solve twenty-first centuries ‘grand challenges’ and a popular and highly promoted mode of knowledge production (Gibbons 1994; Rhoten and Pfirman 2007)
These research centers facilitate interdisciplinary research – for example, by providing intellectual openness within departments (Lattuca 2002), establishing policies like joint appointments or special assessment and recruitment procedures (Porter et al 2006), or installing interdisciplinary units (Sá 2008). Despite these facilitations of interdisciplinary outcomes, the operative core of research centers is still ‘disciplined’ by demands from the scientific field: Staff hiring processes, career promotions, funding decisions, scientific publishing and academic prize-giving are based on peer-review procedures that tend to favor monodisciplinary research (Donina, Seeber, and Paleari 2017; Rhoten and Parker 2004; Mäkinen 2019)
Relying on a content analysis of 32 semi-structured interviews and three group discussions with scholars located in interdisciplinary research centers in Germany, we identify four coping strategies that refer to the different cognitive and behavioral efforts scholars apply in order to manage the perceived demands and conflicts caused by monodisciplinary deep structures
Summary
Interdisciplinary research is widely regarded as a catalyst for disruptive innovations that help to solve twenty-first centuries ‘grand challenges’ and a popular and highly promoted mode of knowledge production (Gibbons 1994; Rhoten and Pfirman 2007). Scholars are traditionally embedded in a discipline, namely a unified and distinct set of methodological, theoretical and epistemological knowledge that is connected to specific area of expertise learned through instruction in courses of study and socialization in the academic profession (Hellström, Brattström, and Jabrane 2018; Silliman 1974; Guntau and Laitoko 1991) These disciplines structure scholars’ interpretations as well as their research decisions and activities (Whitley 1984). The decisive criteria tend to be shaped by specific paradigms, and ontological and epistemological orientations of disciplinary communities (Birnbaum 1977; Lamont 2009; Leahey, Beckman, and Stanko 2017; Yegros-Yegros, Rafols, and D’Este 2015)
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