Abstract
Interdisciplinarity sets out to analyze and explain some of the major changes that have swept through academia in the last 20 years, namely the call for interdisciplinarity from funding agencies, governments, and university managers. More specifically, the book asks how it looks when scholars from the “hard” and “soft” sciences enter into scientific collaboration and what the consequences are, especially for the social sciences. In the last twenty years or so, “interdisciplinary” has been a magic word among science policymakers and academics. It has been a magic tool for battling well-established cognitive and institutional structures and promoting new modes of research and teaching. We have been flooded with statements and normative accounts for (and few against) interdisciplinarity. However, few of these have provided us with analytically guided empirical analyses of how interdisciplinarity works. Andrew Barry and Georgina Born’s edited volume offers both analytical concepts and empirical analysis and is thus a good starting point for a discussion on how to analyze this social phenomenon and its consequences for academic knowledge production. The book contains eleven chapters including the introduction, and many of the chapters are written by significant scholars, mainly from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related areas and seeming to derive from the large research project on interdisciplinarity that Barry and Marilyn Strathern have reported on previously.
In their introduction, Barry and Born outline the thesis and analytical framework of the book. This is probably the most interesting contribution, since it offers a simple vocabulary with which to analyze and discuss disciplines and interdisciplinarity. The introduction stands in relation to long Mode-2 discussions about the changing organization of knowledge production. Barry and Born argue that the call for interdisciplinarity is not in itself a new thing. What is changing is the magnitude of interdisciplinarity discourses and the ways interdisciplinarity is justified. Thus, they argue that interdisciplinarity today is related to the increasing demand for the accountability of science or the integration of science in society and predominantly into the economy and market through innovations. Interdisciplinarity and the accountability of science are thus closely related to science’s contribution to economic growth, and this has implications for possible justification within academia.
A number of the book’s chapters show that this conception of accountability is important when negotiating the relationship between disciplines, especially between the natural and social sciences. But what is interdisciplinarity, and how does it play out? Barry and Born offer a set of analytical concepts, inspired by STS, to capture different logics of interdisciplinarity. They suggest that interdisciplinarity can operate in three different logics: accountability, innovation, and ontology. They argue that interdisciplinarity comes in three different modes: integration-synthesis, subordination-service, and agonistic-antagonistic. Furthermore, Barry and Born conceptualize disciplines as assemblages in the style of STS. This discussion of the nature of disciplines and the difference between disciplines and interdisciplinary fields seems somewhat underdeveloped. As Thomas Osborne points out, disciplines are often presupposed and under-theorized, an observation that applies to the book under review.
Equipped with this set of concepts, the ten following chapters succeed to some degree in applying the theoretical framework from the introduction and informing it with empirical accounts, especially in the chapters written by the editors or by others associated with them. I will highlight some of the chapters that succeed in providing a novel analysis of the politics and power struggles around interdisciplinarity and that show how the demand for accountability in an economic sense changes the relationship between disciplines.
These points are nicely analyzed by Strathern and Elena Rockhill in their chapter about the Cambridge Genetics Knowledge Park. Strathern and Rockhill tell a story about how social science perspectives and positions are slowly abandoned in an interdisciplinary project centered on health science issues. In their detailed account, they show how research organization, management, and discourses about usefulness and accountability were used to sideline the “academic” social science perspective in favor of the “applied and useful” health sciences. In this way, they show how classical epistemological differences, contemporary research policy, and local research management entangled in a way that disadvantaged the social scientist on the project.
Likewise, the two later chapters co-authored by Barry provide us with an interesting analysis of background and conflict in interdisciplinary research and education. The chapter co-authored with Gisa Weszkalnys considers three different research institutions all concerned with environmental problems. Weszkalnys and Barry show how ambitions to create new interdisciplinary research institutions accountable to the public played out very differently in different settings. Not only did different national traditions provide different organizational possibilities, but these differences were incorporated differently into the organization and knowledge production of the institution. Academic publication becomes a hard measure for public accountability for all three institutions, but other kinds of outreach or contributions to the public debate do not.
In the book’s last chapter, Born and Barry focus on how new publics can be created in the intersection between science and art. In a comparative study between a U.K. and a U.S. case, they show how the cooperation between artist and scientist mostly has been thought of as art helping science to communicate its knowledge to the lay public. But they also show that these relations can be thought of in other ways and that art can play a vital role in developing sciences by raising questions, engaging publics, and producing different kinds of knowledge. This relation is, as Born and Barry show, not straightforward, and art/science initiatives and institutions are often met with resistance from well-established scientific and technical disciplines.
Other chapters do not seem to follow the analytical tracks laid out by Born and Barry, but some of them are still recommended for understanding interdisciplinarity. The chapters by Osborne and Sheila Jasanoff are especially worth reading. Osborne offers one of the book’s more theoretical analyses, and he approaches a discussion that is curiously lacking in the literature on interdisciplinarity— namely, theoretical considerations about disciplines—in a highly interesting way. Disciplines are, Osborne argues, taken for granted in research policy calls for interdisciplinarity. This has large implications not only for research and research funding, but also for education, since it would imply that classical disciplinary education remains prioritized. Jasanoff’s chapter is a reflexive account of the genesis of STS. It shows how “disciplines” emerge and are institutionalized through struggles both internally and with established academic and societal interests.
Interdisciplinarity shows that the call for accountability and science in society does not affect all scientific disciplines equally. The main message, even though it is not spelled out that clearly, seems to be that this call changes conditions dramatically for the “soft” and critical social sciences, since accountability and usefulness are predominantly translated to industrial, economic, and instrumental codes.