Forms and Modes of Apprehending Interdisciplinarity

Explicit Forms of Interdisciplinary Indication

This can be understood as a particular form of scientific research. The various works on this subject show that they are an answer to scientific challenges (produce original forms of knowledge) and to social challenges (taking complex subjects into consideration). However, they also pose quite a number of practical problems; in particular, acknowledging the scientific validity of these approaches. This is the reason why scientists often feel the need to explicitly mention the interdisciplinary framework in which they work and to justify or comment on it. This clarifying is very meaningful in itself; it testifies to a positioning in the reference scientific world and is sometimes accompanied by a discussion on this type of work. Consequently, we first endeavoured to gather together a sub-corpus in which interdisciplinarity and its corollaries were explicitly mentioned.

Our first project was to create a fictitious “being” ⁴ including every possible way of qualifying interdisciplinarity, thus collecting all the texts explicitly including this notion.

As mentioned in the introduction, there are different ways of apprehending interdisciplinarity in its wider sense. As early as 1967, R. Bastide suggested the following research terminology: interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and multidisciplinary. The first one is brought about by an individual or a team “at the very point where various sciences meet”. The second one could be a study between researchers working in the same field, but coming from different cultures, or a study done by a researcher on a subject other than his own discipline. The third one may gather specialists from various disciplines or several researchers from the same field, but “each knowing a specific aspect of the problem […] Multidisciplinary research can be both interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, but every interdisciplinary or cross-cultural research is not necessarily multidisciplinary.”

Piaget (1972) establishes a three-level hierarchical distinction based on the degree of integration of interactions between disciplines. 1) The multidisciplinary level is characterized by the borrowing or importing of information from one science to another, without entailing changes in the original discipline. 2) At the interdisciplinary level, there is reciprocity in the exchanges, either between disciplines or between “the heterogeneous sectors of a single science” and “the total result is mutual benefit”. 3) At the cross-disciplinary level, the relationships between disciplines are said to be “within a global system devoid of clear-cut boundaries between disciplines”.

As for Palmade (1977), he identified eight forms of disciplinary relations. 1a) Multidisciplinary to differentiate a juxtaposition of disciplines: heterogeneous in one case and neighbouring in another. 1b) Multidisciplinary “when they are implemented around the study of a single issue”. 2) Auxiliary interdisciplinarity. 3) Intersecting and interdependent interdisciplinarity when there is “intersection between two disciplines and relatively localized interactions”. 4) Interlocking interdisciplinarity “when the objects of a discipline consist of the structure of the relationships between the objects of another discipline”. 5) Local cross-disciplinarity or cross-rationality. 6) Extended cross-disciplinarity. 7) General cross-disciplinarity, the position of mathematics and logics on any other science. 8) Co-disciplinarity “when a set of disciplines form a unit testifying of the specificity of each discipline”. Even though Palmade maintained the main terms, he often redefined them differently, even adding secondary themes to them and creating the notion of co-disciplinarity.

We can see here that a number of terms are used to denote various forms of interdisciplinarity. We chose to keep them all and dismiss nothing a priori, but to list them first and then pose the question of how actors call on them in their writings. Thus, to conform to the software requirements, we started detecting every possible generic term to qualify interdisciplinarity, along with their many phrasings: interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, cross-disciplinarity, trans-disciplinarity, plural-disciplinarity, and juxtaposed-disciplinarity. We were able to do this by establishing a list based on our theoretical readings, but also on an analysis of the corpus. ⁵

We then attempted to detect the various expressions integrating the corresponding adjectives, using a formula ⁶ to find the entities followed by a category of formulas in which had been entered every possible qualification linked to the forms of interdisciplinarity (cross-disciplinary, multidisciplinary…):

Following this grouping operation, we were able to create a sub-corpus of 67 texts explicitly alluding to interdisciplinarity; these writings were to form part of the basis of our subsequent work.

However, one may wonder whether the explicit indication of interdisciplinarity is compatible with a disciplinary indication. To test this view, we qualified the texts whenever possible. Our knowledge in the field of sports sciences ⁷ sometimes enabled us to allocate a reference discipline to the various articles, but this was not always possible. According to the reference discipline, we filtered the uses of the fictitious being INTERDISCIPLINARITY@ and this revealed that some writings do not mobilize any explicit form of interdisciplinary indicator:

Among the writings which can be given a disciplinary qualification, it appears that those calling on explicit interdisciplinarity are generally part of “sciences of communication and information”, “educations sciences”, epistemology and psychoanalysis ⁸ – in other words, “institutional disciplines” built up on objects and claiming to be essentially interdisciplinary, thus generally proclaiming their interdisciplinarity. Nothing surprising or revealing there, but this evidence allowed us to validate the relevance of our fictitious being.

Indicating several disciplines

Nevertheless a number of texts may indicate an interdisciplinary approach without necessarily mentioning it explicitly. This creates two problems.

The first one regards identifying what we are looking for when trying to detect inter-disciplinary texts. To remedy the aporia of looking for texts from an a priori definition of interdisciplinarity whereas our study aims at highlighting its various forms, we chose to start from a minimal and unrestricting position: detecting texts which call on at least two different disciplines, whatever form they might take.

The second one is related to the way of detecting these disciplines in the texts. This raises the issue of how to define the boundaries of a discipline. This point is still being debated in the sociological literature. As mentioned above, authors may or may not consider this scale of analysis as relevant to report on scientific collective works. We certainly cannot decide on the matter a priori, but it is precisely through the study of shared disciplinary lexical cores that we can report on the configuration of the scientific works’ social forms (Grossetti, 2004) in the field of sports sciences. As a hypothesis, we can imagine that some areas in sports sciences show clear lexical homogeneity, thus testifying to a disciplinary “stability”, whereas others present more hybrid social forms from a lexical point of view. In short, through our lexical – and consequently epistemic – approach, we intend to report on the nature of social forms in sports sciences: weighty instituted disciplines or more reticulated and contingent organizational modes.

In this study, we opted for defining a specific lexicon for each scientific field. Prospero allowed us to define categories ⁹ which brought together a set of terms connected to metonymic images.

Thus defining a disciplinary lexicon raises epistemological as well as pragmatic questions. How should it be built up? How does one ensure its specificity? How to do you deal with polysemous and shared concepts?

Our proposition is based on the use of manuals specific to some scientific fields in order to work with their index. We then had interviews with specialists in the field to confirm this selection and constituted wide-ranging lists as well as restricted ones to eliminate every ambivalent entity.

Here is the list of entities for the Psychology category:

The interesting point about a restricted list is that it avoids the trap of wide-ranging concepts. According to actors concerned, the word “transfer”, for example, appears in various research fields like the psychology of learning, management (transfer of competence…), or texts around a general theme (transfer of football players, etc.). Part of the ambiguities was dealt with through the creation of phrases: this operation made it possible to isolate a characteristic segment with a different meaning. By typing the phrase “field of vision”, we can both detect an entity which is meaningful for researchers working on perception and avoid including occurrences of the word “field” in a category related to Bourdieu’s sociology.

This arduous task was carried out on a number of the main scientific fields of the corpus: physiology, psychology, neurosciences, biomechanics, history, sociology, didactics and economy.

However, analyzing the actors’ words also means listing the resources they mobilize and it was most important for us to see whether or not these resources belonged to various lexical fields, from a disciplinary perspective, which would testify of a scientific mix. ¹⁰

When we crossed disciplines in pairs, we came up with a number of texts including, for example:

This new corpus gave us an opportunity to enrich the earlier one. It could be the subject of specific investigations.

These forms of lexicon sharing may disclose more or less “institutionalized” social forms specific to scientific work (laboratories, learned societies), reticulated and contingent forms (teams connected by a research contract, all kinds of networks), but also disciplinary or hybrid forms (through the degree of sharing disciplinary lexical cores).

Interdisciplinarity as a Subject for Study and Discussion

Among the 67 texts which explicitly mention interdisciplinarity, we can set aside those where it appears as a subject of study; the aim is to produce a sort of meta-knowledge about scientific knowledge itself. In this scenario, we can find studies questioning STAPS as an academic discipline: the way it is organized, the way it functions and the scientific methods at work in a field which is inherently multidisciplinary. We can notice epistemological analyses revealing the forms of interdisciplinarity expressed through sports sciences and their challenges. “What about it? Is there one specific object of study or many or none? Are there traditions of research and paradigms specific to STAPS? Is STAPS a science, a multidisciplinary knowledge, a set of heterogeneous rationalities or a plural science?” wonders Jarnet (2003). Other texts, more sociologically oriented, endeavour to study the more concrete aspects of scientific works, either through conflicts between actors or through cohabitation of knowledge with the users. Interdisciplinarity is then an object of study leading to a questioning of the relationship between the field of sports sciences and their main institutional support: STAPS.

The second category of texts aims at highlighting the importance of interdisciplinary work. In some cases, it is presented like a real watchword: interdisciplinarity is claimed as a privileged mode of scientific work. This category of texts was detected thanks to the use of deontic indicators. These imply a constraint, an obligation, normativity ¹¹ . For example, we can find formulas such as:

The texts making use of these formulas take on a heavy challenge, in particular because they are facing disciplinary boundaries. For the researcher, the point is to defend a territory which he or she feels may be threatened and to confirm the importance of his or her scientific approach. In this case, interdisciplinarity is a case of scientific valorisation.

Finally, if researchers claim the need for an interdisciplinary approach, it is also due to social requirements and the necessity to face more and more complex issues that often reach far beyond their disciplinary boundaries. For example, according to some authors, the need to understand school mechanisms – especially those related to learning – and to report on the problems associated with them, inevitably leads a call on interdisciplinary analysis or they might not be able to account for the complexity of the phenomena they have observed.

Whereas some texts remain at a general level as regards the interdisciplinary work to be produced, others explicitly refer to interdisciplinarity to qualify a scientific study expounded in an article they are presenting. It should be noticed that interdisciplinary scientific work is justified by some research subjects especially suited to this form of analysis.

Finally, some fields of study appear inherently interdisciplinary. These “disciplines” are founded on the basis of integrating several scientific patterns. This seems to be the case of sports management, didactics, biomechanics and more recent approaches like cognitive anthropology and dynamic systems.

This first level of analysis reveals two major aspects of interdisciplinarity. On one hand, its questioning suggests how difficult it may be to define it concretely or at least to associate it to the reality of interdisciplinary activity. On the other hand, it is very often mentioned in relationship with its use as a means of organizing social forms of scientific activity. Therefore, like Vinck (2000), we can wonder at the frequent use of the word “interdisciplinarity” for organizational ends, while the processes underlying this notion remain unclear. Even though our investigation would deserve further deepening, it seems to us that this paradox potentially reveals one of the images which allow some of the actors using interdisciplinarity as an organizational watchword to create asymmetric relationships with other protagonists of sports sciences.

Ambivalence of Hybrid Disciplines - The Case of Didactics

Didactics appears as a particularly interesting example of hybrid disciplines; that is to say, a discipline offering plural disciplinary lexicons. In other words, and in the meaning given to this notion by Ben-David’s science studies (1991), as well as by Akrich, Callon and Latour (2006), it allows the mix of several lexical roots – a mix leading to a new epistemic form and thus revealing shared concepts, methods or subjects. This epistemic process is inherently related to the context of the social challenges involved in sports sciences. Indeed, as confirmed by the interviews and earlier works on the subject (Terral, 2003), since the 1980s didactics has been trying to establish itself as a full scientific discipline. In the field of Education Physique (EP), the integration of an EP section into the INRP ¹² in 1981 marked the beginning of a set of research projects that authors tried to structure in order to acquire scientific visibility.

If we consider the disciplinary corpus of 55 texts on didactics – explicitly within the scope of a research of a didactic type ¹³ - we can notice that they have many subjects in common with social sciences (representation, interaction, culture, fields, standards, professional identity, network, conflict, domination), but also with psychology (perception, motivation, concept of self, self-esteem, personality, information processing, motor skills, cognition/cognitive process, verbalization, anticipation, anxiety, leadership and learning). One of the identities frequently used in the didactic corpus and pointing at the psychological lexicon is the notion of learning. This word highlights the subject of didactics, which is classically defined as a “study of the teaching-learning processes”. However, it also refers to the field of psychology and is related to other concepts: processes, knowledge, behaviour, development… As a common subject, we can find several statements where it is quite difficult to perceive whether this term should be read in its classic didactical meaning, or as a psychological concept.

In what way does didactics differ from a more psychological work? To answer this question, we need to refer to our survey with actors. People qualifying themselves as specialists in didactics show some hesitations. A young PhD student who was asked in what scientific field she was working answered:

A confirmed researcher in didactics explained his attempts at “working in psycho-sociology and sometimes coming close to qualitative sociology”, thus testifying of a bordering position in his disciplinary field. Researchers claiming their affiliation to psychology make a distinction from didactics according to two criteria. The first regards the ultimate aim of didactic research which, according to them, is mainly to formulate explicit prescriptions to take action. The second stresses the fact that the methods used by researchers in didactics are attached to their environmental area and could not bear the rigour of experimental protocols.

As the Prospero software mainly aims at testing intuitions and inviting experiences on texts, we followed the latter lead.

The Experimental Method as a Shared Working Mode

Our survey underlines the fact that specialists in didactics often insist on the need to distance themselves from rigid experimental methods that would be out of context from actual teaching conditions and praise the possibilities of environmental situations. However, like many other disciplines, many of the 55 texts from the didactic corpus mobilize a lexicon which strictly fits the experimental request. Indeed, despite the multidisciplinarity of the review, our Experimental Sciences category ¹⁴ is exhibited in some 493 texts out of 542 belonging to this category, while the STAPS magazine includes many articles on history or social sciences, for example, thus showing a wider variety of scientific methods. The words “experience, test, correlation, threshold, experimenting…” recur quite often:

Not surprisingly, articles on physiology and biomechanics consistently contribute to this category. If we turn to psychology, a field with more qualitative movements (clinical psychology or psychoanalysis) and more or less experimental branches like social psychology, we can count 123 texts out of the 223 entered in this category; that is, 55 percent.

To illustrate and further develop this analysis, let us take a text signed by two lecturers who, when interviewed, respectively claimed to be a sociologist and a psychologist (in the field of clinical and/or social psychology). The article, titled « The Weight of Social Context on Representations of a Curriculum: The Specificities of Physical Education in Primary Schools”, is structured on the model of an article in experimental sciences: Introduction – Theoretical framing and problematic – Method – Results – Discussion – Conclusion. If we focus on the “Method” part, we can see that it is made up of variables, sample, data collection and data processing.

This article, written in 1998, seems to illustrate a process we identified in our earlier works on the study of controversies in sports sciences (Terral, 2003). A large number of actors in non-experimental sciences (disciplinary sciences like history, sociology, clinical psychology…or interdisciplinary sciences like didactics and dynamic decision theory) complained about the hegemony of experimental science (see among others Biache, 1989; Le Pogam, 1998; Midol, 1998). A socio-computer analysis allows us to go beyond the simple study of discourses on science and testify to directly measurable influences from scientific texts.

Boundary Objects

Star and Griesemer (1989), and later Fujimura (1992), developed the concept of “boundary objects” to refer to objects favouring interactions between scientists and their partners. They have both social and cognitive qualities in as much as they reconcile contrasted local social interests, but also make it possible to resolve tensions between local intellectual and cultural viewpoints, on one hand, and the need for general results on the other. In this context, boundary objects are meant as objects bring together various scientific fields. This image of interdisciplinarity in our corpus encouraged us to study the presence of many disciplinary lexicons in a single article. We thus detected several texts showing disciplinary crossings referring to a number of defined objects. We started detecting these objects through crossing lexicons related to various categories such as physiology, biomechanics, psychology, etc. (see the two screenshot below). In each of the “bi-disciplinary” sub-corpus thus obtained, we tried to find out how the main representatives of the categories were mobilized.

In the first screenshot, propulsion is the most represented entity of the Biomechanics category. For the Physiology category, it is a matter of energy cost. This entity appears in two texts within the sub-corpus. Reading them enables us to specify the way interdisciplinarity was implemented around this concept of energy cost:

The article, titled “The Place of Mechanical Energy in Determining the Energy Cost of Locomotion”, offers an approach where the contributions of the mechanical parameters of movement are analysed according to a biological variable – the energy cost ¹⁵ – while walking and running. A similar analysis operated on the various combinations of disciplines shows quite a number of these interdisciplinary “boundary-objects”: energy cost, but also closely related notions like “output” or “tiredness” (in the corpus where biomechanics is crossed with physiology), “stress” (in the corpus where psychology is crossed with physiology), “motor coordination” (psychology and biomechanics) or else “mental imaging” (psychology and neurosciences). Sometimes it is a matter of analysing a phenomenon through different levels of description. In other articles, the point is to study the influence by factors related to a disciplinary field upon other factors related to another field (as in our example on energy cost). In yet other cases, it is a matter of objectifying a description level relatively difficult to observe with variables and factors mobilized from another discipline. For example, this is the case of studies of stress in which physiological indicators testify for unobservable psychological processes.

This type of research positions the researcher in an area of interdisciplinary work which is not always easy to situate from a scientific point of view. We interviewed a researcher working on this type of studies and he said:

This interview is a clear illustration of the tension existing between interdisciplinarity as a watchword and interdisciplinarity in action. Indeed, even though it is encouraged by various science “managers” – who can be found in laboratories or learned societies, in politics, etc. – it remains difficult to situate it on the academic scene, in particular as regards the evaluation of scientific works. This is partly due to “disciplinary powers” in some areas of the scientific work.