Julie Thompson Klein is an award winning Professor of Humanities in Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan (USA). She holds a Ph.D. in English (Uni. of Oregon) and is past president of the Association for Integrative Studies (AIS) and former editor of the AIS journal, Issues in Integrative Studies. Her numerous books include Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (l990), Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities (1996), Transdisciplinarity: Joint Problem Solving among Science, Technology, and Society (coedited, 2001), and Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity (forthcoming). In addition to considerable consultancies across North America, including the development of tertiary interdisciplinary programmes, Klein has been very active internationally. She represented the United States at an OECD-sponsored international symposium on interdisciplinarity in Sweden and at UNESCO-sponsored symposia on transdisciplinarity in Portugal and in France. She has been a visiting or invited lecturer to Japan, Nepal, New Zealand, Brazil, Mexico, Canada and Russia. She was a member of the planning board for the Swiss National Science Foundation’s international conference in 2000 on transdisciplinary approaches to sustainability, and in 2003 delivered an inaugural address for a UNESCO Summer School in Uruguay on local development and environmental sustainability in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Disciplinary origins and differences
by Julie Thompson Klein

Questions/discussion

A number of years ago, when I was working at the University of Auckland, I told myself, 'I may never be this close to Australia again’, so I spent a month travelling in the country. It was a magic time. The opportunity to come back is splendid indeed.

The Minister, the Hon. David Kemp, has inspired us with a sense of why it is so important to be together. The topic that brings us together is one of global importance. We all have a common need, which is to marshal expertise to understand and to solve problems that in some cases are very grave. In attempting to solve them, we all confront a common impediment. Difference has inhibited integration and problem-solving. However, we have two powerful resources to help us in that task. One is disciplinary expertise, which sometimes hinders us from integration, and the other is a family of integrative approaches.

In this opening address, I want to offer a foundation for a shared definition of what we mean when we use the word 'discipline' and when we use the word 'integration'. It is important to have common terms and common concepts when going about something, not so much for having an abstruse exercise in the technicalities of language but to establish a common vocabulary so that we know what we mean.

Let us begin by asking ourselves what the word 'discipline' means. The answer to the question is fascinating, because this one word has a rich history. We often track the foundations of knowledge in the West back to ancient Greece. However, the word did not exist then and the dominant system of disciplinarity is a very recent product. The disciplines have been around in their modern form for little more than 100 years – a sobering history lesson. Even so, the rudiments of specialisation were apparent in ancient knowledge.

Aristotle, the philosopher, is often associated with the rise of specialisation. Aristotle distinguished theoretical from practical studies and also distinguished systemised studies from non-systemised studies such as, at the time, ethics and political science. He also forged a more empirical basis for knowledge than Plato. Even though the disciplines in the form we know them in today did not exist then, there was concern from the very start about overspecialisation. In ancient Greece and ancient Rome, it was concern about whether or not rhetoric was overemphasised too early in the curriculum.

If we want to track back historically to the origin of the actual word, we need to go to ancient Rome. The Latin root of our modern English word is disciplina, and disciplina meant specifically instruction of disciples. From antiquity to the Late Middle Ages this was a very common association. Discipline did not connote research; it indicated an educational context and referred to teaching and learning in the domain of the liberal arts, specifically.

It was also linked at the time with the Latin term doctrina, which referred to the process of transmitting knowledge in and through the relationship of a master and the master's disciples. The learning process, from the point of view of the master, was associated with doctrina, and doctrines were regarded as final and given. There was no give and take, no disputing what they were.

In the Middle Ages a couple of events happened that are important in this history. The notion of doctrine became more allied with Christian education, so that doctrina took a more sacred route and disciplina took a more secular route. By the time of the Late Middle Ages there were four major meanings that associated with the word disciplina. One of the major associations was the seven liberal arts in the Middle Ages as they were taught at any university – the trivium being the cluster of disciplines that were linked with grammar, logic and rhetoric; and the quadrivium, music, geometry, arithmetic and astronomy. The term also in the Late Middle Ages referred to any subject that was taught at the university and with branches of learning that proceed methodically, with rigour and strictness, particularly logic and the mathematic disciplines, and then with science in general.

There was a strong faith in the unity of knowledge, but the liberal arts were in the service of the great specialties of the first universities. The university is an institution that arose from the cathedral schools in the 12th century. At Paris the major specialisation was theology and the arts, at Bologna it was the law, and at Salerno, medicine.

This historical explanation still doesn't take us into the more modern formation of the disciplines. That in and of itself is quite a striking history, tied initially with the formation of scientific academies. This process was underway from the 16th to the 18th centuries. The formation of scientific academies for research happened outside the universities. Universities were hierarchies of tradition, and the scientific academies were hierarchies by achievement. Several forces also propelled the 'disciplining' of knowledge in our more modern sense. The formation of the modern empirical sciences was a profound event that stimulated a general scientification of knowledge and accompanying values of empirical validation, innovation and progress.

If we look a little further in time, a set of strong external changes took place from 1750 to 1850. It was a period, a century, of accelerated economic, social and political change. The university has never been, despite its ivory tower associations, isolated from the external world. Academic specialisation is a species of specialisation of labour, which is a general process in society. The demand for specialists was propelled by the Industrial Revolution and technological advances. Today we are mindful of how much it costs to do research. Even at that time, in the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries, expensive equipment and sophisticated were already driving the 'disciplining' of knowledge.

One of the profoundest transformations was the change in the structure of higher education in Europe at this time. As you will recall, the word disciplina was initially associated primarily with education. At this time, research began to be brought into the academy. A slow integration of the academies and the universities started in the 18th century. It was visible in the Low Countries of Europe in the medical faculties at universities, and in France was associated with a tremendous amount of upheaval due to the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Wars. Changes in the traditional institutions of education in France produced the École Polytechnique.

The coming together of education and research in the same institution was most strongly apparent in Germany at Göttingen, which was the prototype for the modern research university. Not only did it have a library and traditional educational associations, it had modern features of graduate education: the seminar as a forum, the examination and, most of all, a scientific society within the institution.

So, we are looking at a process that is little more than a century old. The late 19th century was a watershed in the modern formation of disciplines. In the late 19th century and early 20th century we see the formation of 20 to 25 disciplines, each with its own department, its own subject, its own curriculum, and increasingly the institutional structure of 'disciplining' subjects – journals, professional societies and meetings. We take these things for granted now, but they only became entrenched in the system at that point. The disciplinary formation of the sciences was followed by the social sciences and the humanities.

This historical picture might lead us to ask what a discipline looks like. This is when the question of disciplines gets particularly interesting. We can talk about common processes of 'disciplining' knowledge that result from this history, but the results are not always the same. That is an important caveat for us to bear in mind.

If you look on that first page you will see I have listed some of the primary elements of 'disciplining'.

Elements of 'disciplining'

Standard models connote stability, natural order, normality, consistent realities, unity, and images of structure, foundation, and autonomous territorial regimes.

subject matter and content objects isolated for study
body of evidence, canon laws, formalisms
exempla, models, paradigms concepts, theories
methods, procedures, techniques, skills level of theoretical integration
ontologies and epistemologies criteria of validity, legitimated practices
explanatory modes, argument styles accounts of disciplinary history
the questions that are asked the answers that are believed
a distinct world view or discourse a distinct body of knowledge
a behavioural culture self and collective identities
departmental units of teaching, research institutional structures of a profession
patterns of education, training categories of publication and funding
employment and labour markets allocations of resources and privileges
economies of value social, political, and intellectual capital

Within this list we can see two functions of disciplines emanating from the historical process we have just traced. One is functional differentiation. Looking at the top items on the list, we are used to thinking in terms of disciplines having specific subject matters that are different from other disciplines, specific objects and subjects in the curriculum, bodies of evidence, laws, concepts and exempla as well as methods, and even their own separate language systems. But, a discipline is not just a functional differentiation that produces a world view. A discipline is also a system of power, a point that is very relevant to thinking about how we integrate and cross boundaries.

If we look on the latter items on the list, we see some of the ways in which domains of control are established, maintained and sustained. These features make trying to communicate across them a sometimes formidable task. Disciplines control not only accounts of their histories but the kinds of questions we ask and the kinds of answers that will be believed and accepted. The disciplines also control resources; they control identities, patterns of education; they constitute labour and employment markets; and they constitute economies of value determining what kind of work people will do and what kind of work is legitimate or not. They also have enormous social, political and intellectual capital.

So, there is common process of 'disciplining' knowledge. But, an important distinction and qualification must also be made. There are both stable models of disciplines – standard models of disciplines – and other kinds of models of disciplines. And as disciplines have changed and disciplinarity itself has become a subject of a lot of research, we have become much more mindful of how all disciplines are not the same. There may be general processes that 'discipline' knowledge, but not every discipline is the same. Economics for example is not a discipline in the same way that history is, or geography, et cetera.

Standard models connote stability and a normality and a kind of unity in images of a structure and a foundation and even an autonomous territorial regime. However, if you look in the middle of that first page you will see there are also striking variances.

Disciplinary variances

Other models accentuate historical change, dynamism, heterogeneity, complexity, ‘heteronomy’ of institutions, fracturing, and images of network, web, and system.

• Restricted sciences (highly specific subject matter and mathematical precision) vs. unrestricted or configurational sciences (social and life sciences)

• Highly codified (math, natural sciences) vs. less codified (humanities, social science)

• High paradigm (physics, chemistry) vs. low-paradigm (sociology, political sciences)

• Compact (better established physical and biological sciences) vs. would-be disciplines (ethics, philosophy, problem-focused research initiatives)

• Differences linked to historical trajectories, national and local institutional cultures

• Poles of activity: research, teaching, and professional practice; pure or basic vs. applied, hard vs. soft, quantitative vs. qualitative.

We don't necessarily want to spend a lot of time taking about the nuances of terminology, but a terminology has arisen in studies of disciplinarity that helps us understand what some of those differences are, why they exist, and what they tell us about the different ways that different fields go about 'disciplining' their bodies of knowledge.

Other models look at historical change and dynamism, heterogeneity, and the sheer complexity of disciplinarity. The images here are of networks and systems and webs, not foundations and structures. There is also a technical vocabulary that distinguishes restricted disciplines, for example, from unrestricted ones. Think about the logic of distinctions here – restricted, codified, high paradigm, compact disciplines and narrow disciplines, which are usually allied with mathematics and the sciences, as opposed to disciplines that are more unrestricted, less codified, low paradigm, and broader and more open. That is certainly one major set of differences, calling attention to disciplines that are more open to influence.

Disciplines also have different trajectories. Even though we can talk about a common history of disciplinarity as an institution, and even though we can identify common elements of discipline, that all disciplines did not wind up being disciplines in exactly the same way. Biology and chemistry provide a good comparative example. Biology as an empirical science has roots in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it advanced with the growth of medicine and the growth of geographical knowledge. But, it was not until the 19th century that a family of heterogeneous interests were institutionalised into a discipline. Chemistry's evolution into disciplinary status was different. It was an upgrading of a set of practical activities to the status of a discipline.

There are further trajectories as well along differences of national cultures. Sociology does not look exactly the same in Canberra as it does in Detroit or in Helsinki. National traditions and local institutional cultures have a lot to do with this difference. There are also varied poles of activity. We talk about pure and applied disciplines, pure and applied work, quantitative and qualitative. Even here there are differences. While we might position some disciplines more on the qualitative or the quantitative end of a spectrum, these are not airtight categories – another caveat to remember when talking about disciplines or integration.

A pure discipline might have applied elements – optics in materials in physics is a good example – or the reverse, jurisprudence as a specialty in the law. A hard and quantitative field might have soft qualitative elements, for example the study of political economics in the discipline of economics, or the reverse, philology and linguistics in the field of literary studies. Physics is another example and psychology yet another example of how one discipline exhibits the whole spectrum of soft to hard, qualitative to quantitative elements. When we talk about disciplines, then, we have to think about where they are positioned, even within the heterogeneous family of a single discipline. If you tell me you are a biologist, that doesn't necessarily tell me a lot about what you do. For example, there is a great deal of difference between Arctic biology and radiation biology on the spectrum of biology.

This is the most interesting part for me always, since I spend a lot of time studying interdisciplinarity:

Inter---disciplinary relations

• Permeable vs. patrolled boundaries: economics and philosophy vs. political science

• Synoptic and federated disciplines: philosophy, history, anthropology, physics, biology

• Proliferation of subspecialties: ‘geographies’, ‘new’ histories, ‘musics’

• Interdisciplinary genealogy: synthetic tradition, alternative practices, postdisciplinarity

• Daily borrowing of data, tools and methods, concepts and theories; genre blurring

• Problem-focus: contiguous problems, specialty migration, external problems of society

• Theory shifts: plate tectonics, culture, 'man-land', medicine vs. health and wellness

• Interdisciplinary ‘traffic’ with centres, projects, new practices, cross-specialty links.

When we talk about disciplinarity we are increasingly talking about integration and interdisciplinarity. They are in each other's pockets, all the more so today. Interdisciplinary has become a common descriptor of many disciplines particularly at the research frontier and in innovations in the curriculum. We can talk about differences, but we are also seeing more and more intersections and meeting points. In the list of elements of 'disciplining', we were aware that disciplines have different objects, but objects are not exclusive to one domain. We define them as being within a domain but they don't stay put. They don't necessarily live there. An organism, for example, is simultaneously a physical object at the atomic level and a chemical object at the molecular level, a biological object at the macromolecular level, and at other levels physiological, mental, social and cultural concepts.

The 'disciplining' process continues, and disciplinary domains continue to exist. But we are seeing more and more evidence of cross-fertilisation and interaction today. Even with process plays out differently. Some boundaries are more patrolled and some more permeable than others. Economics and philosophy as disciplines, for example, have been more resistant generally speaking to interdisciplinary influences than political science and literary studies. Disciplines also have different scopes. A number of disciplines have been traditionally seen as broader synoptic disciplines – literature, history, anthropology and geography are among those, certainly philosophy as well. Physics and astronomy are not discrete domains either. They become large, federated disciplines, and some of their subdisciplines have such strength and size that they echo disciplinary status.

Subspecialties have proliferated to the point now that we speak of disciplines even in multiples. Edward Soja, the geographer, talks about how we no longer have geography but ‘geographies’. In history, a series of new histories have appeared, and music scholars today speak of ‘musics' rather than a singular notion of 'music'. Many recent disciplinary histories and accounts of how disciplines are changing reveal a generational dynamic as well. A lot of younger scholars are more exposed to interdisciplinary developments and a lot of the people who are most supportive of interdisciplinary changes in education and in the research structure have been trained more recently.

Problem focus is playing a greater role, and not just in response to problem that emanate from society. Recent interviews of scientists, social scientists and humanists reveal the sense among many researchers that in order to work on a problem in any area they are necessarily crossing boundaries. They argue: 'I don't work on a discipline, I work on problems. I go where I need to, to solve the problems.'

In all areas, we are also aware of major interdisciplinary theories that have had a profound impact on the disciplines. Plate tectonics is an excellent example. Within one decade, plate tectonics transformed relationships among the Earth sciences. In humanities, a more anthropological conception of culture has transformed the understanding and study of culture.

Clearly, there is a lot going on in contemporary knowledge. In addition, my university, like many other universities, experiences what I like to call interdisciplinary ‘traffic’ between established departments and disciplines with research centres and new practices. I never reduce history to numbers, but if we consider the difference between the numbers 20–25 and 8530 knowledge fields, we are reminded of how heterogeneous and complex knowledge is today.

At the end of the 19th century 20–25 modern disciplines formed. By the year 1987, some information scientists who were mapping information fields determined that there were 8530 definable knowledge fields at that point. By 1990, 8000 topics in science alone were being sustained by specialised networks. As many as 4000 disciplines have been identified as the result of increasing differentiation and specialisation. Those are sobering numbers indeed.

Those numbers might seem to defy the possibility of talking across disciplines but historically the proliferation of knowledge fields has been one of the factors pushing a more widespread multidisciplinary sense of identity. There is a lot of terminology about interdisciplinarity, and it can get confusing. I am a minimalist when it comes to terminology, and so I want to offer for our discussions these two days some basic terms – just three of them – for thinking about integration.

Multidisciplinary approaches juxtapose disciplinary/professional perspectives, adding breadth and available knowledge, information, and methods. They speak as separate voices, in encyclopedic alignment. The status quo is not interrogated, and disciplinary elements retain their original identity.

Interdisciplinary approaches integrate separate disciplinary data, methods, tools, concepts, and theories in order to create a holistic view or common understanding of a complex issue, question, or problem. ‘Instrumental’, ‘strategic’, ‘pragmatic’ or ‘opportunistic’ forms focused on economic, technological, and scientific problem-solving differ from ‘critical’ and ‘reflexive’ forms that interrogate the existing structure of knowledge and education. Theories of interdisciplinarity premised on unity of knowledge differ from a complex, dynamic web or system of relations. Scope also differs. ‘Narrow interdisciplinarity’ involves disciplines with more or less the same paradigms and methods. In ‘broad interdisciplinarity’, they differ.

Transdisciplinary approaches are comprehensive frameworks that transcend the narrow scope of disciplinary world views through an overarching synthesis, such as general systems, policy sciences, feminism, ecology, and sociobiology. More recently, the term also connotes a new structure of unity informed by the world view of complexity in science, a new mode of knowledge production that draws on expertise from a wider range of organisations, and collaborative partnerships for sustainability that integrate research from different disciplines with the knowledge of stakeholders in society.

Two overriding considerations arise from this terminology: what is the degree of integration, and what is the purpose of integration?

Multidisciplinary approaches add more knowledge to the mix rather than single, separate perspectives. They juxtapose different perspectives, although they speak as separate voices, so their alignment is encyclopaedic. This may be a very important place to start. In fact, that is where our symposium here starts. It differs, however, from interdisciplinary interaction, which involves a conscious integration that may take any number of forms. Interdisciplinary approaches consciously integrate separate data, methods, tools, concepts, perspectives, theories to create a holistic view or a common understanding of a complex issue, question or problem.

Note, though, that the purpose often differs. 'Instrumental’, 'strategic', and 'pragmatic' forms of interdisciplinary differ from 'critical' and 'reflexive' forms. One of the strong forces propelling interdisciplinarity these days, particularly in national research funding, emerged in the 1970s and 1980s when industrialised nations found themselves falling behind in international economic competition in areas of manufacturing, computers, biomedicine, and the medical sciences. These initiatives focus on social, technological and economic problems. They differ from culture-based forms of interdisciplinary investigation and environmental campaigns.

The third term I wanted to put on the table is 'transdisciplinary'. All three terms date from1970. The typology of multi-, inter- and transdisciplinarity evolved from a conference in 1970 that the OECD had in France, the first international conference on the problems of teaching and research in universities. At the time, transdisciplinarity was defined as a kind of comprehensive framework that tries to go beyond combining existing disciplinary approaches in an interdisciplinary fashion to create new frameworks, new overarching syntheses. General systems theory has been one of the most important ones, along with policy sciences, feminism, ecology. More recently, particularly in Europe and Latin America, a new meaning of transdisciplinarity has emerged echoes the Minister's opening remarks: going beyond not only disciplinary boundaries but the boundaries of the academy with society and involving multiple stakeholders. This meaning has been strongly clear in the evolution of environmental work.

Today, we are in the midst of a shift from prior interdisciplinary thinking about the environment to thinking about sustainability, which is a much broader concept that also involves stakeholders in society. Before the 1960s, environment was a dispersed category across disciplines and professions and sectors of society. It was not prominent in university or government work. In the late 1960s and into the ‘70s the concept of 'ecology' gained influence and the rise of environmental awareness promoted social capital for saving the Earth. Despite that momentum, though, the result was a kind of multidisciplinary mix. Older 'sanitary engineering' programs were renamed 'environmental engineering'; and 'environmental' replaced 'conservation' in many courses at universities. A syncretic kind of assembly resulted and these programs were eclectic.

In the 1970s and '80s there was a disengagement of economic and social capital in our societies. Support for the environment continued, but more moderate arguments for balance arose, with analogues in academic structures. In the late 1980s and 1990s a new momentum for sustainability arose. The Fenner Conferences have a place in this history, because 1987, if I recall correctly, was the origin of the Fenner Conferences. In the 1980s and the 1990s, a new momentum arose for inter- and transdisciplinary research in Europe and North-South research partnerships for sustainability that involve stakeholders in society in determining their future. Shifts in technology assessment also appeared in the late 1980s and 1990s, marked by a sense that sustainability requires more than just the old notion of bringing disciplines together for environmental work. Consensus conferences and public forums developed in response to this shift.

The language of describing knowledge have changed in kind. The older keywords of description for knowledge and education were dominated by images of boundary formation and maintenance, expertise and mastery and control. That process still goes on in 'disciplining' knowledge into segmented, fragmented, and even isolated fields that were presumed to develop in a linear fashion with normative social values and homogeneity.

Today, though, descriptions of disciplines, professions, and knowledge in general have changed. The current keywords are boundary crossing and blurring, integration and collaboration and cooperation, and interdependence in an environment characterised by complexity, nonlinearity and heterogeneity, and a trans-sectorality associated with the term ‘transdisciplinarity.’

Ultimately, our common project within and beyond this meeting is to create robust knowledge, knowledge that draws on traditional canons of rigour and reliable knowledge but is also socially robust. I borrow the concept of robust knowledge from Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons' work, Re-thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Robustness is a relational concept borrowed from engineering. To illustrate, if you want to build a building in an earthquake zone, questions about materials and function would follow relative to the location. The challenge for us today is to create robust knowledge that factors not only multiple disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledges but lay knowledges and indigenous knowledges in arriving at sustainable solutions.

If we are going to create robust knowledge, we need to be engaged in a process of negotiating, brokering and leveraging knowledge. In thinking about what this process looks like in action, I defined a number of generic actions we would need for integrative solutions.

Major actions in bridging disciplinary divides:
Negotiating, brokering, and leveraging knowledge

A: Initial phase
1. Define the problem and project or initiative collaboratively.
2. Determine goals, objectives, research questions, and variables jointly.
3. Envision a spectrum that is neither too narrow nor too broad for the task at hand.
4. Identify relevant approaches, tools, and partners together.

B: Organisational and conceptual framework
5. Devise a mutual plan that is both significant and comprehensive yet feasible.
6. Incorporate state-of-the-art knowledges in pertinent disciplines, professions, interdisciplinary fields, and sectors of society.
7. Allow for flexibility in shifting groupings of individuals and approaches.

C: Social learning and communication
8. Use role clarification to find out what partners need and expect from each other.
9. Clarify differences in language, methods, tools, concepts, theories, and worldviews.
10. Provide time for mutual learning.
11. Insure ongoing communication and exchange, both face-to-face and electronically.
12. Craft a hybrid interlanguage.
13. Use conflicts creatively to refine and advance the work.
14. Capture the knowledge produced throughout the work process in tangible forms.
15. Communicate with counterpart teams, projects, and initiatives at regional, national, and international levels to share ideas, approaches, and results.

D: Collaboration and integration
16. Provide for sustained interaction and coordinated tasks in structure and work plan.
17. Engage in ongoing integration, joint activities, and iteration.
18. Use known techniques for integration and collaboration.
19. Strive for interdependence, ‘teamness’, and equal power sharing.
20. Move from a multidisciplinary contracting mode to consulting and partnering modes.
21. Triangulate depth, breadth, and synthesis to achieve an interdependent, collaborative outcomes rather than a multidisciplinary compilation of separate inputs.
22. Reflect explicitly and collectively on interdisciplinary and collaborative components.

E: Evaluation and dissemination
23. Evaluate interdisciplinary and collaborative aspects.
24. Implement new knowledge, models of research and education, and action plans.
25. Bridge academic, non-academic, and public discourses.
26. Forge integrative partnerships with stakeholders outside the university.
27. Articulate findings and recommendations in the public sphere, using all appropriate media from electronic means to informal community-based networks.
28. Disseminate findings, recommendations, and results in pertinent disciplines, professions, and interdisciplinary fields.

If disciplinary divides are going to be bridged, and if robust knowledge is going to be created, we must immerse ourselves in the process of negotiating and brokering and leveraging by engaging in joint definition of our tasks, by mutual learning from each other, by bringing to the table state-of-the-art knowledge not only in the disciplines but in interdisciplinary fields as well. We must engage in social learning and communication in order to make dialogue sustainable. We must also take the transdisciplinary step of involving non-academic and public discourse and disseminating results in the public sphere.

Thank you again for the opportunity to join you, and I look forward to learning from you.

Questions/discussion

Paul Monk: I was fascinated by the figures you put up, of a shift over the period – if I understood you correctly – of 100 years, from 20–25 fields of inquiry to some 8,500. I wondered to what extent taxonomically that 8,500 breaks down into a significantly smaller number. To use a biological parallel, it is like phyla compared with species, or whether we are talking about distinct species. My sense is that you have got a lot of subdisciplines rather than wholly separate disciplines. Maybe you could just enlarge on that slightly.

JTK: That is a great question. It is important to always ask how we count and how we define something. When I look at that map and I reflect on how crowded it has become, to talk about a wholly separate discipline becomes problematic. The larger and the more crowded a particular disciplinary field gets, the more it touches upon other fields. In that 8530 count there are certainly different variations in the formality and the size of those definable fields, though over time some grow to be larger domains and tap off the original disciplinary family.

It is difficult to think about anyone 'mastering' an entire discipline anymore. If you take a look at what the shape of a discipline looks like in any one institution you see that there are very few institutions any more that are able to represent the entirety of the discipline. What gets represented as the discipline becomes a very politically contentious issue in individual institutions.

I have been doing some studies recently of educational reform and how educational programs are beginning to respond to the tremendous changes in research. There has been a shift in thinking under way for a good 10 years now, away from thinking about education representing knowledge as a single core to trying to come up with a small, definable core and then tracking pathways through the rest of the discipline that might lead into a particular intersection.

So no, there not 8530 major disciplines. But there are so many different knowledge fields and so many affiliations that people do not affiliate with all of a discipline, often only developed sub-specialties.

That is a very important issue. Thank you for raising it.

Tony McMichael: You have described the characteristic of permeable versus patrolled boundaries of disciplines. We have got at this conference quite a range of disciplines across the various spectra that you have described. I wondered if you could just say a little more about that characteristic of permeability versus patrolled boundaries, as to whether it reflects something that is academically inherent or whether it is a function of social and political role and perhaps some felt need to exert influence.

JTK: That is another good question. It is like specialisation, in the sense that specialisation of labour is a generic process in society. Permeation and patrolling, boundary formation and boundary patrolling as well as boundary crossing are more general processes in society.

There are many possible answers to your question, but one of the most important issues you have raised is internality and externality. One of the driving forces in greater permeability is responsiveness to external problems of society modified by responses within particular academic traditions. The reason that economics has patrolled its boundaries so closely has to do with the traditional formation of economic knowledge, which is based on very specific, rigorous canons. Some dimensions of economics as a discipline do not share the canon, but the boundaries of economics are much more patrolled than in other fields that have been open to problem-solving in the external arena – addressing not only social, political and economic problems but cultural problems as well.

It is revealing always to ask someone, 'What do you do?' I like to ask not 'What are you?' but 'What do you do?' That question produces a different kind of an answer. It is an extension of the mapping question

Jenny Goldie: You talk about the need for common terminology – in other words, common language – so that we can communicate across disciplines. I have worked as a science communicator and I found one of my biggest problems was a different culture in the communication or journalism area from the science culture. So I am just wondering how we traverse those problems of cultural differences. It goes way beyond terminology and language, surely. Do you find that there are real cultural differences between the various disciplines, or does it stop at language?

JTK: Oh no. Language is never isolated from culture. I am glad you have raised that question, because language is never separate from culture and even creed. For example, the theory of evolution in biology operates as a formidable credal belief among biologists. One of the reasons I wanted to put 'elements of disciplining' on the table, as a way of thinking about 'disciplining', is that language is the indicator of much deeper differences: of world view, of culture, of creed, of identity and of behaviour. People in different disciplines even perform with their bodies in a different way when they do their work. Those differences have to be unpacked. I congratulate the Fenner Conference on starting where it starts, because people often leap into integrative work without understanding those differences. If they fail to invest time at the start in doing that, they will wind up plunged back to an earlier point, or a project may fall apart. So, this is a very crucial concern.

Harvey and Sheila Gold, who have spent time studying interdisciplinary groups and how they operate, talk about the 'wallowing' time that has to happen early on in interdisciplinary projects. They often get criticised for having longer start-up phases, but if that wallowing time is not respected as the investment it is in understanding differences of language, culture, and philosophy, the project may be scuttled down the road. It will be hindered and the quality of the integration along with that.

John Coulter: I have been both a research scientist for over 20 years and also in the federal parliament for eight years, but I am no longer in either of those areas.

I was interested in what you said a moment ago about the rigour with which the economists patrol their disciplinary boundary, because, with a concern for environmental sustainability – and I always qualify 'sustainability', which I noticed the Minister didn't do this morning – I find that in politics and in economics, and by those who comment in the popular media on those subjects, many things which in science are thought to be fairly well established are taken as matters of opinion. One of the problems that we have with economics – coming right down to the subject of this conference – is that most economists don't seem to know anything about thermodynamics, they seem to accept that continuous economic growth is quite possible and they would patrol their boundary in relation to any criticism of the possibility of continuous economic growth very, very rigorously.

I wonder whether, in practical ways, you have any suggestions for how we might bring economists to the table of thermodynamics and an understanding of what the real world teaches us about what is sustainable and what isn't sustainable.

JTK: This is a great challenge that has to be addressed. One of the places where I do see some change is in the prioritising of transdisciplinarity in the EU research programs and in the growing momentum in Latin America for sustainability in local development and governance. But it has to have top-down support. Over time in EU research funding programs, specific initiatives have been targeted. Individuals from disciplines come together around a specific initiative and are expected to pool their resources and expected to go through the step of listening to each other and learning how to bridge those divides.

There is more happening at the level of projects and programs than in broad governmental initiatives, and there has to be both a top-down and a bottom-up process simultaneously. This targeting of specific initiatives is producing some results. The problem, though, becomes targeting economic and technological problems that run counter to the imperatives of sustainability.

One of the reasons I was excited to be able to come here and hear what you have to say was that, having spent time looking at what is happening in Europe and in Latin America, I believe international coalitions and international partnering become crucial. Initiatives that happen in one area of the world are not isolated. So partnering becomes extremely important too. Coming from a country where there are grave implications following from the current policy on the Kyoto Protocols, I am very mindful of the need for international partnering.

John Byron: Particularly in the first part of your speech I sensed the shade of Michel Foucault in the room with us, when you were talking about patrolling the boundaries of disciplines, surveillance, control, and about disciplines being about power. And we should be grateful to Michel Foucault if only for putting the words 'discipline' and 'punish' together in the title of a book.

Much of the talk of the rise of interest in interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity has been about a presumed break from those patterns of control and power, but it seems to me likely that those trends are equally about reconfigurations of control, movement of power from one group to another. How do we ensure that our moves towards interdisciplinary work resist – or perhaps without resisting, capture by those new power structures – new reconfigurations, but can work with them in order to maximise the desirable outcomes of working across disciplinary boundaries without their just being reconfigured into new power structures?

JTK: I will answer your question as the Geist of Michel Foucault floats across the room here. The challenge there is that 'disciplining', boundary formation and boundary control is a generic process which keeps going on. It is not going to go away. Interdisciplinary formations themselves wind up implicated in the creation of boundaries, the construction of their own boundaries, and the patrolling of them.

What has to happen is a better bridging of the rhetoric of the future and the rhetoric of the past. When you take a look at the rhetoric of higher education and the rhetoric of knowledge, you see that it is invested in the symptomatic indicators of keywords. We live in the new keywords – or so it seems. In reality, we live in the middle between the old and the new.

What has to happen is a much more constant, reflexive thinking about how knowledge bodies operate and how new formations are changing the very structure of education and knowledge. Those processes are going to be ongoing. The utopic ideal of interdisciplinarity is a great deceiver because it pretends that the process goes away. It does not go away.