Musing about Interdisciplinary Research: Is Interdisciplinary Research Amusing or Bemusing?

Amusing Aspects of Interdisciplinary Research

First, let us look at the amusing experiences we have had. Working on interdisciplinary research is fun because most projects stem from intrinsically valued experiences. Crossing academic borders means you can ask broad questions that are more likely to be personally relevant and interesting to you (Jones & Bartunek, 2021). No one wants to research something they do not care about. Interdisciplinary research enables us to ask questions that genuinely excite us, which makes our work personally meaningful and practically useful because it can help us apply our training to new areas.

Perhaps most importantly, interdisciplinary research can be tremendously rewarding if your research team is a motley crew of friends who genuinely care about a common topic. A lot of people want to answer the big questions. One thing holding us back from generating these novel insights is that we work with people who have the same training as us: they build on related theories, read the same publications, and use similar methodologies. That is why we should invite that one marketing professor onto our team when our disciplines collide. Creativity naturally requires diverse experiences and expertise (Leroy, Buengeler, Veestraeten, Shemla, & Hoever, 2021). So, work with a team with varied skill sets that you genuinely care about on a topic that interests you. Then, regardless of any extrinsic rewards (or lack thereof), at least you will have invested some time working with your friends, broadening your horizons, and helping you convey old material in news ways in the classroom.

Bemusing Aspects of Interdisciplinary Research

Now, for the bemusing part of our experiences while trying to publish interdisciplinary research. Just like with the amusing aspects of interdisciplinary research, there is an intrinsic component embedded in its bemusing aspects. It was not efficient for us to become well-versed in multiple disciplines. Why would people want to become experts in everything when it is difficult to find the time just to stay current in our own research areas? It is hard to convince junior faculty to risk promotion and tenure by diving into the content within and norms for publishing across different disciplines and tenured faculty avoid interdisciplinary research because they are firmly rooted in their own habits and face ever-increasing service loads from their universities.

This brings us to the extrinsic component of the bemusing aspects of interdisciplinary research. First and foremost, it is rarely rewarded (O’Meara, 2011). This issue has long been recognized and lamented with regard to grant funding (Bromham et al., 2016) and faculty performance appraisals (Brown, Deletic, & Wong, 2015). How are management faculty supposed to evaluate somebody’s journal article during promotion and tenure decisions if they have never even heard of the journal? This issue is especially challenging to address in departments that have specific journal lists that people are encouraged to target so they publish in top tier journals. Plus, the value and importance of interdisciplinary research can vary widely across departments, universities, and parts of the world. In summary, publications in outlets outside of primary disciplines tend to not carry the same weight in reward systems or get deans and department chairs excited.

However, the general disdain for crossing academic borders is no more apparent than during the journal review process. The first set of reviews you get for your interdisciplinary research likely will be pretty eye-opening. We acknowledge that it is difficult for reviewers to evaluate interdisciplinary research because the publishing expectations and norms can vary so widely across disciplines. Regardless, it is our experience that reviewers who do not understand certain aspects of interdisciplinary work tend to lose interest in papers, dislike how theory is developed in unfamiliar disciplines, devalue the insights that other disciplines can generate, and/or unrealistically impose their own expectations on studies. After all, it has been known for decades that people are susceptible to a number of decision-making biases that influence them to rely on simple rules of thumb based on information that is easy to recall (Taylor & Fiske, 1978; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).

For example, reviewers have asked us to add variables to our studies that do not exist and could not be validly created. We have also been condemned several times for our methodological approach despite it meeting the goals of reviewers’ requests. Additionally, we have been criticized by reviewers for using theories that were foundational to our approach. However, people who are not familiar with the literature from other fields likely overlook the connections we make in our papers because they are distracted by violated expectations for theory building and/or analytical approaches. We find it bemusing that people in the management field are so primed to challenge the theoretical framework and contribution in interdisciplinary studies they review without possessing much knowledge of the other fields, regard for the norms in other fields, or an understanding of the realities of conducting interdisciplinary work.

Recommendations

So far, we have identified some amusing and bemusing aspects of interdisciplinary research. Now, we have some recommendations for review teams. First and foremost, reviewers should try to be aware of their strengths and weaknesses while reviewing interdisciplinary research. If you are not familiar with the norms in a different discipline, then ask for clarification about why something is appropriate rather than gatekeep how you like to do things or how things are done in the management field. We have had a lot of reviewers dedicate the majority of their reviews to fussing about not using their favorite theory, citations, and/or statistical software package (to produce identical results). Authors can address these recommendations if reviewers do not leverage them to reject a paper they do not care about. Further, authors can clarify portions of their studies that are hard to follow for people from other disciplines. This is a major opportunity for growth in the management field. It is important to provide constructive feedback for substantively improving the current paper and the study it describes. Isn’t that what we are supposed to do as reviewers?

Last, we offer the following guidance to editors and associate editors. We recommend that review teams create a system for tracking submitters from outside the primary disciplines the journal covers, especially for people who successfully coauthor a paper that gets published. Sometimes people are part of a coauthor team from outside their field due to their expertise in a specific area, such as a specific theory or method. For example, we have published articles in strategy, marketing, information systems, and sports science journals. A relatively small percentage of submissions likely cross interdisciplinary lines, so authors who describe the interdisciplinary nature of their study in the cover letter could enable well-prepared editors to choose reviewers who are familiar with the expectations and norms across some or all of the fields included within a given study. Some journals already get submissions that span across multiple fields (e.g., Group & Organization Management; Rapp, Davis, & Gibson, 2021), but other journals will have to be purposefully prepared if they wish to evaluate interdisciplinary research effectively.

As researchers engage in more interdisciplinary research, the quality of reviews likely will improve because the people reviewing interdisciplinary studies will have experience conducting them. This first-hand insight will help reviewers understand the realities of conducting interdisciplinary research. Ultimately, we hope that review teams will progressively improve at balancing the publishing expectations imposed across disciplines with the strengths, limitations, and challenges facing the interdisciplinary studies they review.

Summary

In summary, we acknowledge it is difficult to conduct and evaluate interdisciplinary research. However, think about all the things we overlook when we stick to only what we know (thanks for the reminder, Alan Watts!). In this Musing, we hope that we were able to refresh your understanding of the realities of conducting interdisciplinary research and challenge you to carefully evaluate your assumptions and opinions about conducting interdisciplinary research specifically within the management field (Cruz, 2021; Zagenczyk, 2021). In our experience, interdisciplinary research is amusing if you are intrinsically motivated to do it, but it is bemusing if you expect it to be tied to extrinsic rewards. Now that we have highlighted the amusing and bemusing aspects of interdisciplinary research, we hope you are motivated to pursue your own and carefully evaluate others’ interdisciplinary research.