Conflicting Currents

Consider the wording of a recent spate of announcements from major universities. In 2008, the University of Michigan announced searches for 25 interdisciplinary junior faculty, in the new fields of data mining, energy storage, global change, global HIV/AIDS, microbial ecology, and social science and energy, as part of an initiative to hire 100 new faculty, targeting “scholars whose work crosses boundaries and opens new pathways. . . to explore [collaboratively] significant questions or address complex problems” (University of Michigan News Service 2008, emphasis added). At the same time, the University of Minnesota searched for 21 new faculty, plus graduate students and post docs, “across a broad range of disciplines” in Interdisciplinary Informatics (Chronicle of Higher Education [CHE] 2008a). Northeastern University sought 50 scholars “who aspire to create new areas of scholarship and new disciplines by combining their knowledge and mastery of different fields with others’. . . combining fundamental and translational research to solve social problems” (CHE 2007).

These statements reveal the discourse of interdisciplinarity and presumptions of its power and importance. They also convey a pervasive sense of newness and hint at tensions between applied research and fundamental problems of knowledge or theory, as well as between existing disciplines and emerging ones.

With such faculty positions in mind, the Claremont Graduate University recruits the “BEST, BRIGHTEST, and most innovative, precocious, contagious, visionary TRANSDISCIPLINARY students” (CHE 2008b; also the online program information). Meanwhile, Northwestern University aims at “institutionalizing interdisciplinary study” by building interdisciplinary clusters in doctoral programs, especially in humanities and social sciences. The organization of learning, and of work, depends upon and advances collaboration, it is often claimed without evidence.Footnote ¹

Ironically, a 2013 study from the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, based on data from “all people who earned Ph.D.s in 2010,” suggests “those in the cohorts who did interdisciplinary dissertations” earned “on average $1,700 less than those who completed dissertations in a single field. . . . The current value system in academia clearly imposes a cost on boundary spanning.” The report did not specify how “interdisciplinary” was defined, or if this was a significant difference in salaries within or across fields of employment. (“Study finds that Ph.D.s who write interdisciplinary dissertations earn less,” Inside Higher Education [IHE] 2013: 68–69.) At most universities, developing new procedures to evaluate the work of interdisciplinary scholars represents a real challenge.Footnote ²

Such complications remind us that disciplinary and interdisciplinary works are inextricably linked, regardless of the assumptions of many proponents and opponents of interdisciplinarity (Graff Reference Graff2015; Jacobs Reference Jacobs2013). That each usually depends on the other is not often recognized or appreciated. Without further comment, the Chronicle repeats a claim sometimes heard about the institutional uses and abuses of interdisciplinarity: “Universities, especially those such as Arizona State, which have few individual disciplines at the top of the research food chain, see the interdisciplinary route as a way to diversify and distinguish themselves” (CHE, June 14, 2002). Interdisciplinarity is commonly used—or, rather, abused—in this way.Footnote ³

Foundations

Regardless of the potential for contradiction, a strong initiative or movement needs a pedigree and a genealogy amidst or as a balance to claims of novelty. “Interdisciplinary research may be hot, but it is hardly new,” the Chronicle of Higher Education (ibid.) observed. “From the 1940s through the 1960s, scientists engaged in novel collaborations” (ibid.). They made the atomic bomb, isolated the structure of DNA, and discovered the shifting of tectonic plates. “That tradition continued into the 1990s with the effort to map the human genome, which linked geneticists and information-technology experts. Today, scientists are interested increasingly in problems so broad and complex that they are unlikely to be solved by researchers trained in one discipline, working alone” (ibid.). This impressive genealogy claims little more than a half century, thus supporting the presumptions that change is recent and concentrated especially in the sciences. It presumes great success. “Problems so broad and complex” is the new mantra. “Integration” and “convergence” are the rallying cries. But is there a tradition? Can it bear these claims? What is the history of interdisciplinarity? Are “problems” now broader and more complex? What has changed?

In this vein, philosopher of science Steve Fuller (Reference Fuller2003) identifies a “rather ‘heroic’ interpretation” of the value of interdisciplinary, one with strong assumptions. “Unlike most contemporary defenses of interdisciplinary research, mine does not presuppose that interdisciplinary supplements, complements, or replaces discipline-based research. Rather, I see the matter the other way round, namely, that disciplines are artificial ‘holding patterns’ of inquiry whose metaphysical significance should not be overestimated.” Fuller emphasizes that “inquiry needs a social space where it can roam freely. That space, the natural home of interdisciplinarity, is the university. Unfortunately, that institution is often deconstructed, if not completely under erasure, in contemporary discussions of interdisciplinarity.” Referring to himself as “an ideologue of interdisciplinarity,” Fuller sees disciplinarity as “a necessary evil of knowledge production. . . and a function of institutionalization.” Fuller finds his heroes, and golden age, with a few exceptions, prior to the “canonization of the Scientific Revolution.”

The recent and contemporary university differs. “Universities restructure themselves to face an increasingly competitive market for both training and research services.” Under the shadow of “the mindless repetition of old lectures and the artificial extension of exhausted research programs,. . . the ability to undertake interdisciplinary research is seen as a mark of ‘flexibility’ and ‘adaptiveness,’ highly valued qualities in today's ‘knowledge economy’ (if less profound than the ‘critical reflexivity’ promoted by ‘interdisciplinarians of an earlier era’” (ibid.).Footnote ⁴

Thus, US federal National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for multi- and interdisciplinary scientific and medical research centers has been rising. (As I write in 2015, it seems to be declining.) In this form, aimed at problems both broad and complex, interdisciplinarity is expensive. (Yet dreams of the payoffs from commercialization, patents, licensing, etc. dazzle with dollars [Bok Reference Bok2013].) Nonetheless, the level of federal funding is deemed insufficient by researchers and their institutional sponsors: “Interdisciplinary research programs account for only a small fraction of federal agencies’ total research spending, most of which continues to go to individual scientists” (Fuller Reference Fuller2003). Hinting at conflicts usually left unstated, at least publicly, scientists’ anecdotal reports suggest that both NIH and NSF reviewers tend to give lower scores to interdisciplinary proposals when judged against those focused within a discipline. Bias persists. Interdisciplinarity is political, and so too is disciplinarity (Camic et al. Reference Camic and Lamont2011; Graff Reference Graff2015; Lamont Reference Lamont2009; Strober Reference Strober2010).

In September 2007, the US National Institutes of Health Roadmap for Medical Research announced funding for “nine interdisciplinary research consortia as a means of integrating aspects of different disciplines to address health challenges that have been resistant to traditional research approaches” (NIH News, Sept. 6, 2007). Major problems demand major new solutions, combining elements, crossing boundaries, constructing teams, raising money, and promising payoffs, the announcement continued, with nods to the promise of interdisciplinarity and, perhaps, to the romance of world-altering research.Footnote ⁵

Exaggerated promises and unrealistic expectations abound in the rhetoric, ideology, and political economy of interdisciplinarity. They may be necessary. The promise for the payoff from increased support for interdisciplinarity, which sociologist Jerry Jacobs calls “interdisciplinary hype,” also fuels criticism. The diversity of definitions, organization, scope, and scale across interdisciplinarity needs to be recognized. So do variations in the nature of collaboration. Despite the rhetoric of much interdisciplinarity, there is no one form of interdisciplinarity, and this recognition mandates distinct approaches to developing and understanding interdisciplinarity in different fields.

The “tradition” of “novel collaborations” leans toward promises of unusually grand research findings and impacts, well beyond fair expectations of most interdisciplinary or disciplinary research. The “wars” on poverty and cancer, genes, and now the brain (so to speak) are prime examples. (My point is not to deprecate the importance of much of the research, but to acknowledge the outsized ambition of its stated goals.) In any event, the “knowledge economy” simultaneously driving and derived from these thrusts demands new professionals and workers, and thus interdisciplinary education (e.g., Rose Reference Rose2013).

This iconic approach's foundation in basic as well as applied science (or foundational and translational research) is presumed but seldom acknowledged by those who promote interdisciplinary research. Regardless of an awareness of interdisciplinarity's diversity, “big science” both explicitly and implicitly provides a normative model that shapes expectations and evaluations for interdisciplinarity in nonscientific as well as scientific research (Galison Reference Galison, Galison and Hevly1992). Large-scale, team-driven, experimental science is not the only model for interdisciplinarity, but its hegemony in thinking about the scale and organization of research is powerful. Judgments of importance follow from that thinking as well as expectations for costs. Integrated or holistic undergraduate general education curricula, integrated media across the arts, or digital humanities pale in comparison. So does the work of individual interdisciplinary scholars and small groups. As a result, efforts to claim the trappings of “big science” multiply mimetically. “Labs” and claims to high tech and biological or cognitive theories proliferate across fields.Footnote ⁶

Interdisciplinarity is often closely associated with applied research. To some observers this coupling is an advantage, but to others applied work occupies a lower place in the hierarchies of research prestige. Nonetheless, interdisciplinary research underlies a great deal of basic and theoretical work. The great breakthroughs attest to this fact. The studies of Julie Klein in particular have stressed diversity across interdisciplinary work. But that observation has done little to reshape perceptions and expectations of the fundamental connection between science, especially “big science,” and interdisciplinarity.Footnote ⁷

Describing what I call the standard version of interdisciplinarity, the NIH provides a succinct, conflict-free, and romanticized account of a “great transformation,” neatly unconstrained by time, place, and historical context. It has a distinctly formulaic quality. New ways depend on changes in “academic research culture” and proudly (as well as ironically) claim their status as “unconventional” and distinctive. “The funding of these consortia represents a fundamental change in both the culture within which biomedical and behavioral research is conducted. . . . These programs are designed to encourage and enable change in academic research culture to make interdisciplinary research easier to conduct for scientists who wish to collaborate in unconventional ways” (NIH News, Sept. 6, 2007).

As opposed to multidisciplinary research, which involves teams of scientists approaching a problem from their own discipline, this view contends that interdisciplinary research integrates elements across a wide range of disciplines, often including basic research, clinical research, behavioral biology, and social sciences so that all of the scientists approach the problem in a new way. The members of interdisciplinary teams learn from each other to produce new approaches to a problem that would not be possible through any of the single disciplines. Typically, this process begins with team members first learning the language of each other's disciplines, as well as the assumptions, limits, and valid uses of those disciplines’ theoretical and experimental approaches.

The idealistic orientation and the presumptions on which this model is rooted developed over time. Typically we associate recent decades with an emergence and at least partial acceptance of interdisciplinarity, despite the longer genealogy of the great breakthroughs. A more useful appreciation of interdisciplinarity's development needs a historical perspective, looking back to at least the nineteenth-century origins of modern academic disciplines in developing research universities.Footnote ⁸ It also demands a critique of idealism and case studies of actual interaction (Graff Reference Graff2015).

How well does this model fit views of a great transformation? Does it accommodate the unusual wartime circumstances that propelled the Manhattan Project that led to the atomic bomb? Credit the roles of leading scientists or military and civilian organizers? Appreciate the relative informality of Watson and Crick's collaboration in identifying the structuring of DNA's double helix? Acknowledge the widespread coordination of the many laboratories in many institutions that contributed to mapping the human genome? Accept the critical roles of external circumstances, nonscientific influences, institutional elements, leadership, and specific circumstances, as they interacted with intellectual breakthroughs and the marshalling of resources? Certain factors emerge as especially significant, including the location, relationships, and organization of the interdisciplinary effort and its historical context, including disciplinary and institutional factors. Preconditions, particularly research preparing the way to the critical moment and socio-political-economic context, are also prerequisite.

In contrast, strong presumptions underlay perceptions that a new, unprecedented level of interdisciplinarity has emerged recently. In 1986, the New York Times proclaimed “Scholarly Disciplines: Breaking Out” of their boundaries. The focus on the humanities rather than social sciences and especially the sciences was relatively rare. But the dating ignores the extent of earlier interdisciplinary work (Campbell Reference Campbell1986). Equally belatedly, Nature reported in 2000, with respect to biomedical research, “Laying a firm foundation for interdisciplinary research endeavors, U.S. universities and institutes are becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of a multidisciplinary approach to research” (Gershon Reference Gershon2000: 107–8). Multi- and interdisciplinarity are used interchangeably, raising basic questions about their differences.

Political contests over scholarship are also crucial to these questions. “The political landscape of academia, combined with the fight for grant money, has always fostered competition far more than collaboration. But the threat of global warming may just change all that,” forecast the New York Times (Dec. 25, 2007), risking rational fallacy. “‘The academic tradition is to let one discipline dominate new programs,’ said Nabil Nasr [Rochester Institute of Technology's] director. ‘But the problem of sustainability cuts across economics, social elements, engineering, everything. It simply cannot be solved by one discipline, or by coupling two disciplines’” (ibid.). As a result, “That realization is spreading throughout academia. So more universities are setting up stand-alone centers that offer neutral ground” (ibid.). Global warming, energy, and the environment, more generally; health; these are also grounds for corporate spending and influence. But in the world of “stand alone,” “neutral ground,” and “coupling,” where is interdisciplinarity?

The Antinomies, Anxieties, and Ambivalences of Interdisciplinarity

Closer examination leads to other questions. Failing to pose these questions explicitly limits our work, even if we ultimately disagree about the range of responses. What is meant by “interdisciplinarity”? Major differences exist, and will continue to exist. NIH's focus on interdisciplinary research centers and teams describes one path. There are others. What are the goals and how well are they met? How are they sponsored and funded, organized, and conducted? Where are they located across university campuses and organizational charts? What are the relationships between interdisciplines and disciplines? Do they vary across disciplines, disciplinary clusters, and interdisciplines? Where and when do conflicts and competition take place? What is the relationship among the myths, discourse, and history of interdisciplinarity? Not only are there different kinds of interdisciplinarity in theory and in practice, but there are strong currents of criticism and doubt about the values, claims, and uses of interdisciplinarity.

Dictionary definitions are vague. But for differently placed observers, looseness is either among interdisciplinarity's weaknesses or its strengths. The common emphasis on counting numbers of disciplines is problematic. The meanings of “interdisciplinarity” do not receive the critical, comparative, and historical attention that they require. Too often definition by list making overwhelms questions of relationships to and among disciplines.

Little better is the proliferation of often-unclear terms for differentiating and evaluating interdisciplinary-ness. I call this the interdisciplinary name game. It is inseparable from questions of definition and commentators’ positions, including their academic (and other) politics. The quantity of words and phrases called up and the layers and levels implied or imagined—classifications, typologies, and so forth—is a daunting semantic storm, as most guides or position papers attest. More than a few of the many hierarchical schemata are provocative and polemical. They range from multi- to inter- and transdisciplinarity; from adisciplinary and antidisciplinary to meta- and supradisciplinary; from indiscriminate and pseudointerdisciplinarity to composite, supplementary, and unifying interdisciplinarity.

“The I-Word,” historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom (Reference Wasserstrom2006) dubs it. He quips that the “I-Word” compares with the “P-Word,” postmodernism.Footnote ⁹ Although he may miss their limits semantically and conceptually, Wasserstrom's pairing suggests the power of contrasting and conflicting positions or images. Unlike the “P-word,” he thinks, “So powerful are the I-words that it is difficult to oppose anything (including top-down reallocations of resources) done in their names.” Lennard J. Davis (Reference Davis2007) agrees: “When everyone in academe agrees on something, you've got to be worried. . . when you say the word ‘interdisciplinary,’ all the breeds. . . lie down, roll over, and wag their tails?”Footnote ¹⁰ But so many don't. Failure to acknowledge that fact raises yet more questions. Assumptions of interdisciplinarity's hegemony constitute another myth (Campbell Reference Campbell1986).

Differences in definitions, meanings, locations within universities or research institutes, relationships with other disciplines, and organization of interdisciplinarity within the institution can be minimized or exaggerated. But they can be consequential as well as comical. Karen M. Markin (Reference Markin2005) observes, “So Happy Together. If you're a scientist who is not used to collaborating with nonscientists, you'd better get used to it.”Footnote ¹¹

Not surprisingly then, strongly positive and negative responses clash. Confusion, even dismay and disavowal are rife. They become fodder for those opposed to the contender for the new canon. The terms of discourse matter. Neither clarity nor ease of communication marks the lexicon of interdisciplinarity.

At times, the discourse of interdisciplinarity suggests an incantation, almost mystical, which seems to parallel some of the principles within the 1994 Charter of Transdisciplinarity.

• Article 3: Transdisciplinarity. . . offers us a new vision of nature and reality. Transdisciplinarity does not strive for mastery of several disciplines but aims to open all disciplines to that which they share and to that which lies beyond them.

• Article 4: The keystone of transdisciplinarity is the semantic and practical unification of the meanings that traverse and lay beyond different disciplines. It presupposes an open-minded rationality by re-examining the concepts of “definition” and “objectivity.” An excess of formalism, rigidity of definitions and a claim to total objectivity, entailing the exclusion of the subject, can only have a life-negating effect.

• Article 6: In comparison with interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity is multireferential and multidimensional. While taking account of the various approaches to time and history, transdisciplinarity does not exclude a transhistorical horizon.Footnote ¹²

At other times, there is a tone that rings—sometimes defensively when not derisively—of “I'm more interdisciplinary than you are” or “my interdiscipline has more disciplines than yours.” At its best, the humor of interdisciplinarity is worthy of a cartoon in the New Yorker; at its worst, an editorial for the National Review (e.g., Matthiasson Reference Matthiasson1968).

Consider the range and powers accorded to interdisciplinarity. By contrast, the widely recognized 1972 UNESCO classification describes interdisciplinary as the “interactions” between disciplines. Never specifying what “interactions” (or integration) might entail substantively, the interactions “may range from simple communication of ideas to the mutual integration of organising concepts, methodology, procedures, epistemology, terminology, data, and organisation of research and education in a fairly large field.” If the uses and meanings have few boundaries, the operational dimension has a specific formulary: “An interdisciplinary group consists of persons trained in different fields of knowledge (disciplines) with different concepts, methods, and data and terms, organised into a common effort on a common problem with continuous intercommunication among the participants from the different disciplines” (CERI 1972). One size fits all, at least when it comes to organization and operation.

Conceptually, boundaries encompass, on the one side, acts of preservation, protection, or reinforcement that are rhetorically or metaphorically connected with disciplines. On the other side, there is breaking, breaching, bridging, or surmounting them, with the qualities of active, forceful, changing, or redirecting. As with most metaphors, some simplification is unavoidable. That is part of the interdisciplinary process (Fisher Reference Fisher1988; Gieryn Reference Gieryn Thomas1983).

The discourse of interdisciplinarity is founded on the repetition, and occasional abuse, of a relatively small number of words. Beyond boundaries and borders lie borrowing, breaking, bridging, crossing, disciplinarity, hybridity, integrative, integration, interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary, ecology of knowledge, multidisciplinary, problem solving, specialization, supradisciplinary, synthetic, transdisciplinary, unity, and unification. This is an active but often abstract discourse. This series of words is not a particularly inviting vocabulary, or often a clarifying one. The key terms seem only to cohere around moves away from the disciplinary.

Repetition, among other elements of the discourse of interdisciplinarity, lends a quality akin to chanting an oath or a prayer of interdisciplinarity and a badge of membership. “Crossing, crossing, crossing. . . integrating, integrating, integrating. . . converging, converging, converging.” In the discourse of interdisciplinarity, its promises and criticisms of them compete, but not always equally. This makes for a ragged journey in the direction of the high altar of unification.

Reviewing and Revising; Proclaiming and Disclaiming Interdisciplinarity

“Being Interdisciplinary Is So Very Hard to Do,” Stanley Fish (Reference Fish1989) famously opined. Thinking critically and speaking clearly about interdisciplinarity is no less difficult. For some observers, judgments follow from familiarity with the quantity and quality of writing on the subject and the ubiquity of the discourse. For others, awareness of the issues leads to more favorable views. Some critics object that interdisciplinary work is simply too hard—even impossible—to do well: “mastering” and “integrating” two or more disciplines, and beyond. Some exhibit a fear of interdisciplinarity.Footnote ¹³

Others warn that it is too easy: long on pretense, short on rigor, and therefore of poor or questionable quality. As “interdisciplinary,” it could evade discipline-based review and vetting. It invites superficiality and worse. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern notes the presence of “interdisciplinary anxieties. . . which arise at the moment when's one's enterprise extends into those of other people” (Strathern Reference Strathern, Camic, Gross and Lamont2011: 265ff).

Julie Stone Peters points to “interdisciplinary longing”: “One of the slights of hand of interdisciplinarity is that it deludes us into the belief that we've escaped our disciplinary boundaries. But that delusion also allows us freedom from interdisciplinary longing” (Peters Reference Peters2005: 451).

With respect to her own field of law and literature, Peters notes that “interdisciplinarity here tended to exaggerate disciplinarity, caricaturing disciplinary difference through each discipline's longing for something it imagined the other to possess.” In the process, it “exaggerated the very disciplinary boundaries it sought to dissolve” (ibid.: 452–53).

Some observers say that interdisciplinarity is an ideology, a belief, or a way of life. Martin Trow (Reference Trow1984/1985) referred to interdisciplinary studies as a “counterculture.” To some that is high praise; for others, it is damning. Interdisciplinarians are seen as charlatans and masters of smoke and mirrors. Interdisciplinarity has neither been universally accepted nor conquered the opposition. It also stimulates fears that unchecked, interdisciplinarity will seriously damage the legitimate quest for knowledge, academia's foundation in the disciplines, and recognized traditions of checks, balances, and faculty authority (as opposed to administrative control) (Jacobs Reference Jacobs2013). It is curious that contemporary academic discourse so often refers to the absence of criticism.Footnote ¹⁴

Strong claims and consequent conflicts about interdisciplinarity are frequent. In a mix of recurring and emerging issues, intellectual and professional matters associated with the organization and production of knowledge prompt periodic debates over the promises and perils of interdisciplinarity. The spectrum is wide. It embodies both light and darkness, tangibles and intangibles. Sociologist Guy Michaud asserts, vaguely and pretentiously, “interdisciplinarity. . . is. . . perhaps first and foremost—a practice. . . interdisciplinarity cannot be learnt or taught, for it is a way of life. It is basically a mental outlook which combines curiosity with open-mindedness and a spirit of adventure and discovery” (CERI 1972: 285).

Interdisciplinarity's recognition and increased presence stimulates questions that actually challenge it. Epistemologist Georges Gusdorf (Reference Gusdorf1977) declares, “Everyone invokes interdisciplinarity; no one dares say a word against it. Its success is all the more remarkable in that even those who advocate this new image of knowledge would find it hard to define. The appeal to interdisciplinarity is seen as a kind of epistemological panacea, designed to cure all the ills the scientific consciousness of our age is heir to” (Gusdorf Reference Gusdorf1977: 580).

Some critical voices do get a hearing. Psychologist and philosopher of science Marc De Mey (Reference De Mey1982: 140) observes, “Interdisciplinarity is an ambivalent term in science. . . . For practical problems it is considered valid and unavoidable but for theoretical purposes in science, interdisciplinarity is handled with great caution and even with suspicion.” Identifying a common dichotomy associated with interdisciplinarity, De Mey sees the obstacle to science: “While they pay lip service to the principle, most scientists look upon their own discipline as either too incomplete or too immature to be coupled with another one. The prevailing attitude seems to be: first disciplinarity before engaging in interdisciplinarity” (ibid.). Yet others see an affinity, or even a unity, among the sciences (what I call a disciplinary cluster in science, or social science, humanities, arts, engineering, management, etc.) and interdisciplinarity. Or interdisciplinarity as the cure for disciplinary incompleteness. The presumption of linear sequencing is one among the long-standing assumptions that have the potential to unravel under questioning (ibid.).Footnote ¹⁵

Sociologist Neil Smelser writes more expansively: “The very concept of interdisciplinarity connotes a number of paradoxes and ambivalences. On the one hand, it is almost universally believed to be a virtue and has considerable appeal as such. . . . It usually evokes a feeling of communicative warmth and power in the utterer. . . it frequently attracts dollars from foundations and government agencies. Dogan and Pahre remarked that ‘everyone seems to believe in interdisciplinarity.’” But not Smelser: “My own sense is that this positive aura—which has a staying power even though the positive consequences of interdisciplinary activity remain unknown—retains its appeal on account of its connection with quasireligious and quasicommunal imagery” (Smelser Reference Smelser, Camic and Joas2004: 52).

Smelser's challenge to this “paradox,” or contradiction, takes an empirical turn: “positive consequences. . . remain unknown.” “Interdisciplinarity is powerful because it promises to be an antidote to the disenchantment with specialization and fragmentation of knowledge, and because it evokes an unspoken but persistent romance with the idea of the unity of knowledge, perhaps a ‘nostalgia for the scientific and literary humanism of the eighteenth century.’ Interdisciplinary thus bears some of the marks of a utopian ideology and social movement” (ibid.).

Capitalizing on the diffuseness of so many discussions of interdisciplinarity, Smelser overly narrows his focus to the search for unity, which others see as transdisciplinarity, leaving aside holistic general education, sophisticated research, and various forms of integration and synthesis. Smelser's target rings more of the landscape of interdisciplinarity circa 1930–50s, than the early twenty-first century. His critique of ideology or belief, and a social movement based on it, is superficial and ahistorical. Many disagree with transforming interdisciplinarity into romance and nostalgia. Eighteenth-century humanism and romanticism did not promise unity, nor is there evidence of such nostalgia among recent scholars (ibid.).

“Interdisciplinarity seems to be something of an unexamined myth,” Smelser (ibid.: 52–53) concludes. In my view, the myths of interdisciplinarity—often in forms that oppose or contradict each other—are both cause and consequence of many of the difficulties in defining, talking clearly and critically, and studying successfully in an interdisciplinary mode. This is not the same as saying that interdisciplinarity is “an unexamined myth.” There are too many versions. Unfortunately, Smelser does not probe the meanings and uses of myth, which holds a special place with respect to interdisciplinarity.

Moving from myth to contradiction, Smelser's final charge centers on interdisciplinary ambivalence. “We smile” on interdisciplinarity “in principle and frown on it in practice. Our reward system discourages it.”

Interdisciplinary research is a career issue for scholars and their institutions. But does that lead to “interdisciplinary ambivalence” or unexamined myths?

How do we assess the nature and quality of this not uncommon argument that fills departmental hallways if not always administrative offices? Is it empirically sound? Is interdisciplinary a “luxury” associated with seniority? What does this imply for teaching, research, and the organization and pursuit of knowledge? Why then does the appeal of interdisciplinarity, as we have seen in several dimensions, appear to rise over time? Is ambivalence and/or quasicommunal imagery sufficient to explain that? Considered culturally and psychologically as well as politically and historically, interdisciplinarity is a complex, even contradictory process. Both a fuller historical perspective and familiarity with recent developments promote clearer understanding. I explore this both in this article and in my new book Undisciplining Knowledge: Interdisciplinarity in the Twentieth Century (2015).

Sociologists Mattei Dogan and Robert Pahre (Reference Dogan and Pahre1990) preceded Smelser in myth making as criticism. Their 1990 attack is even more sweeping. For them, the age of interdisciplinarity was made impossible by the spread of specialization, a view contrary to the presumptions of many others. “Hybridization” of subfields replaces interdisciplinarity as their goal (ibid.: 65).Footnote ¹⁷ “Just as some seem to believe that the social sciences can be neatly categorized, many others persist in pursuing the holy grail of ‘interdisciplinarity’—a word which should be banished from the language as virtually devoid of real meaning today. The fragmentation of each discipline makes this impossible, for it leaves gaps between the specialties in addition to those left by the division of the social sciences into formal disciplines” (ibid. 115). The contribution of “pure specialization” and “utopian interdisciplinarity,” another dichotomy, lay in the past. Now, “innovative social scientists are increasingly turning away from the first two strategies: specialization is self-destructive, exposing its own weaknesses as it advances, while true interdisciplinarity is impossible today because of the extent of specialization” (ibid.: 116).

Yet the paradox remains. “Everyone seems to approve of interdisciplinary research. We do not. . . . We believe ‘interdisciplinarity’ is usually a poor research strategy, because it implies fairly thorough knowledge of two or more entire disciplines. No one can master two disciplines today and still retain the depth needed for scientific advance; we can never have another Leonardo da Vinci” (ibid.: 117). In their turn toward history as evidence for or against interdisciplinarity, Dogan and Pahre eclipse Smelser by several centuries, and outdo him in inappropriate images.

Dogan and Pahre present an old myth and misunderstanding of interdisciplinarity as if it is new: the supposed need to “master” two or more “entire” disciplines. As a review of the interrelated definitions, myths, dichotomies, and contradictions of interdisciplinary shows, not only has this notion been used as a test, but also it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of interdisciplinarity (or even disciplinarity)—no one “masters” an “entire” discipline. The scholarly practice of interdisciplinarity depends on the ability to use knowledge, theories, questions, methods, understandings, and the like from more than one disciplinary area or field in an effort to fashion a new and different approach to a question or problems, large or small, theoretical or applied.

Myths of Interdisciplinarity/Interdisciplinarity as Myth

In making sense of the Manichean struggle of myths that favor or oppose interdisciplinarity, we recognize that strongly held anti-interdisciplinarity is at least in part a response to grand myths of interdisciplinarity's powers. Presumptions of one true form of interdisciplinarity—“truly interdisciplinary”— also contribute. Exaggerated versions of the pro-interdisciplinary position, especially in the form of the proselytizing evangelical chapel of transdisciplinarity, are provocative. The First World Congress of Transdisciplinarity (Portugal, 1994) adopted a charter with 15 articles, which comprise the fundamental principles of the community of transdisciplinary researchers, and constitute a personal moral commitment, with no legal or institutional constraints.

Squaring the circle and claiming a high middle (if slightly evasive) ground, Marianna De Marco Torgovnick opts for pragmatism: “Interdisciplinarity has no promises to keep and none to break. It is not a mantra or a magic potion. Work that cuts across areas of study is as good or as bad as the individual books and articles that do it. Certainly, working across disciplines is not the only or even always the best way to do scholarly work” (Torgovnick Reference Torgovnick1996: 282). But it is a significant way that has a past and a future, she asserts. Recent books on interdisciplinarity, for example, by economist Myra Strober, Interdisciplinary Conversations, and sociologist Jerry Jacobs, In Defense of Disciplines, testify to the power of dichotomies, myths, contradictions, and limits in our understanding and efforts to develop interdisciplinarity. Among both critics and supporters of interdisciplinarity there is often a fine line between cogency and silliness (Herbst Reference Herbst2008; Nissani Reference Nissani1995, Reference Nissani1997).

Interdisciplinarity and the responses it provokes have complex historical, cultural, discursive, and political relationships. The dichotomies and contradictions on which it is built underlie both myths and definitions of interdisciplinarity across time and inter/disciplines. Presumptions of the need for and promise of interdisciplinarity for both theoretical and practical matters are common. Inside and outside the academy, presumptions proliferate. Influenced in part by current external factors, they are tied to plans for productivity and prosperity, individual and national security, technology, and intellectual development. Yet the standard version of interdisciplinarity blurs the extent of confusion and conflict that the subject stimulates. Failure to distinguish among differing forms of interdisciplinary and their contexts compounds the problem. The intensity of differences over the value of interdisciplinarity (and its definition and organization) is striking. The problem is exacerbated by hype and overstatement, both pro and con.

Myths. . .

Particularly revealing are the close relationships among interdisciplinarity's associations with dichotomies and contradictions. Introducing their useful collection of essays, Outside the Lines: Issues in Interdisciplinary Research (1996), Liora Salter and Alison Hearn explicitly adopt the discourse of myths. They begin by identifying the myths of interdisciplinarity that they seek to counter, citing Gusdorf among others. Lining up what they see as most misleading to a balanced understanding, they seek to replace a dominantly negative perspective with a positive one, a narrow conception with a broader, variable one. Dichotomies rule as they move to replace one set of declarations mainly with their opposites. In the process, they reconstruct interdisciplinarity in more constructive terms, albeit with less passion and force. They give interdisciplinarity a history, significance, variety, and variability. Writing about the same subject as Dogan and Pahre, their vision differs by 180 degrees. They end by endorsing a dichotomous view of interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity that promotes interdisciplinarity. Despite their advance, their view is limited.

Salter and Hearn (Reference Salter and Hearn1996) deny nine myths of interdisciplinarity:

1. 1. Interdisciplinarity is “not a unified or discrete phenomenon” (ibid.: 5–7);

2. 2. Interdisciplinary fields of study become new disciplines;

3. 3. Interdisciplinary is a recent phenomenon and interest will soon fade (as has been the case with other intellectual preoccupations);

4. 4. Interdisciplinarity—whatever its importance—is a marginal interest within research, the granting councils, and the universities;

5. 5. Interdisciplinarity is best considered to be marginal, in spite of the fact that many people are engaged in it, simply because it takes place in relation to the “core disciplines”;

6. 6. Disciplines are mature when they display consensus about the topics and methods for research;

7. 7. Interdisciplinary research is critical research; it is grounded in different social and political commitments from disciplinary research;

8. 8. Interdisciplinary research always involves team research; and

9. 9. Interdisciplinary areas can be productively grouped together for the purposes of research or institutional support.

They distinguish two contrasting “camps” of interdisciplinarity. One sees interdisciplinarity as applied or problem centered. “Its approach is one of methodological borrowing. Tools of research and analysis are borrowed and applied across disciplines, but no direct synthesis of knowledge is required or produced.” “Purely functional,” it does not seek to challenge disciplinary boundaries or the epistemological assumptions of disciplinarity.

The second camp “is said to provide a synoptic justification for interdisciplinary research and study.” It focuses on interdisciplinarity as a conceptual activity with an emphasis on producing new syntheses of knowledge. “Interdisciplinarity is a theoretical, primarily epistemological enterprise involving internal coherence, the development of new conceptual categories, methodological unification, and long-term research and exploration” (ibid.: 8–9). While this corrective of interdisciplinarity as myth has value, I ask if defining two camps is sufficient to cover the range of variation? I do not believe that it is.

Are there no common grounds or reciprocal or dialectical relationships between these camps? They are among the missing elements. Salter and Hearn's construction elides the multiple possibilities and the concrete foundations in theory and practice for the kinds of interrelationships on which fundamental paths to interdisciplinarity and their organization are based, and are located within institutions and professional organizations. They also neglect the driving forces of empirical approaches to specific questions and problems, and the conceptual roles of both theory and method. Together the active pursuit of these recognitions encourages approaches to questions and problems that are not amenable (for some researchers at least) to normative disciplinary practices. Salter and Hearn also continue to conflate specialized, advanced research with general integrative education.

Through the lens of myths, Salter and Hearn attempt to reopen basic questions about interdisciplinarity using arguments against myths. In general, they repeat: Interdisciplinarity is not new; is not limited in conceptualization or operation (including numbers of researchers working together); and is not political, superficial, marginal, threatening to disciplines, or impossible. To Salter and Hearn's two camps, Julie Thompson Klein (Reference Klein1996, Reference Klein2010) adds “multiple forms and definitions,” an advance over a unitary conception and beyond the limited dualism of two camps. The multiples may be many but they need to be described in general terms. The dialectics of myths either in support or opposition unnecessarily impose limits and a sense of contradictions in understanding and conceptualizing interdisciplinarity. At different times, in different contexts, interdisciplinarity takes recognizably different terms, forms, and locations, and faces distinctively different chances of success or failure.

Notions of both pre- and postdisciplinarity, for example, do cultural—and institutional—work in the politics of knowledge, including constructing precedents for the future. For example, if we see no disciplines or implicit interdisciplinarity before the rise of disciplines, opposing developments have been held to follow: unbridled chaos or a golden age of openness. Notions of contemporary postdisciplinarity are construed similarly contradictorily, as a fall or loss, or as an advance (Fish Reference Fish1989; Menand Reference Menand2010). These connections serve specific purposes. The terms with which we see the past and the future not only shape how we see the present but also influence public and political opinion.

Consider claims made for the classical era in Greece, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment in relationship to disciplines and interdisciplines. Plato cannot be claimed as the first interdisciplinary thinker if there were no disciplines. Nor can Aristotle. This assertion is anachronistic, indeed ahistorical. Although equating major intellectual movements before the nineteenth century with interdisciplinarity can be a powerful force rhetorically and a rhetorical reach for precedent and genealogy, it distorts more than it clarifies (Fuller Reference Fuller2003). No golden age of predisciplinarity preceded disciplines. No modern dark ages followed them (Grafton and Jardine Reference Grafton and Jardine1986; Lloyd Reference Lloyd2009; Valenza Reference Valenza2009).

Ironically, when I began my research I hoped to find a predisciplinary paradise for interdisciplinarity. There is none. Absence of disciplines no more signifies a unity of knowledge than an era of overarching interdisciplinarity. The history of organized knowledge is neither a narrative of rising nor falling. Interdisciplinarity is not a new development, nor is it a rediscovery or salvage operation. That is a myth to challenge and revise.

Interdisciplinarity in Historical, Comparative, and Critical Contexts, Redux and Redefined

Although use of the term interdisciplinarity has been traced back to the 1920s and 1930s, interdisciplinary efforts preceded that time. Andrew Abbott (Reference Abbott2001: 131–32) writes, “The first entry for the word ‘interdisciplinarity’ in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1937, in the Journal of Educational Sociology. But the Social Science Research Council and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation were already focused on the problem of eliminating barriers between the social sciences by the mid-1920s.” From that beginning, use of the word spread to dictionaries and other social science associations. Abbott explains that “the emphasis on interdisciplinarity emerged contemporaneously with, not after, the disciplines. There was no long process of ossification, the one bred the other almost immediately.” Roberta Frank observes that “By mid-century ‘interdisciplinarity’ was common coin in the social sciences” (ibid.). She makes a case for early use by the Social Science Research Council (Frank Reference Frank, Stanley and Hoad1988: 95). Other areas of scholarship followed, the sciences and later the humanities. Interdisciplinary efforts preceded the use of the word.Footnote ¹⁸

Having explored discourse, myths, dichotomies, and contradictions, we return to definitions of interdisciplinarity. Familiarity with the uneven, sometimes treacherous ground(ing) of disciplinarity and the contradictory terrain of interdisciplinarity—the contribution of history— prepares us. The terms of confusion help us move toward a new agenda for studying and advancing interdisciplinarity.

In the recent and by far the weightiest endeavor, the 2010 Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, with 37 chapters, 580 pages, and several pounds, editor Robert Frodeman's minimalism contrasts with the book's bulk. For him, interdisciplinarity is philosophy. Not “a shibboleth or a sign of one's advanced thinking. Neither is it an incantation that will magically solve our problems. Interdisciplinary is simply a means. . . . interdisciplinarity constitutes an implicit philosophy of knowledge—not an ‘epistemology,’ but rather a general reflection on whether and to what degree knowledge can help us achieve the perennial goal of living the good life. It is the newest expression of a very old question” (Frodeman et al. Reference Frodeman, Klein and Mitcham2010: xxxii–xxxiii). That is one way of dealing with the paradox and contradictions. But for practice and for theory, it is too short a stick.

Frodeman reiterates the “real world” emphases in stimulating interdisciplinary initiatives. The problem, as he sees it, is that “disciplinary knowledge has tacitly functioned as an abdication. By focusing on standards of excellence internal to a discipline academics have been able to avoid larger responsibilities of how knowledge contributes to the creation of a good and just society.”Footnote ¹⁹

Powerful prose, but is this true? What does it mean to “tacitly function as an abdication” (ibid.: xxxii)? While I am sympathetic to a general conception that connects interdisciplinarity to useful approaches to contemporary problems, so much depends on what is meant by interdisciplinarity. Not only does Frodeman oppose interdisciplinarity to disciplinary, he uncritically celebrates “dedisciplinarity” and what he calls “an undisciplined life.” Clearly, “interdisciplinarity” by itself is no guarantee of success or solution. Among the complications of views like Frodeman's is, on the one hand, their opposition of science to the humanities, and presumption of its superiority. On the other hand, Frodeman's (Reference Frodeman2014) own work and examples stem from the domain of an applied, usually environmental science (with a rhetorical play on “sustainability”). The premise of his assertions is ideological, not epistemological. While that does not make it wrong, it does not make an honest expression. Does science never “abdicate”? Does interdisciplinarity equate with relevance? Sometimes, but not by definition or axiom.

Difference is important, although it can be exaggerated both within and across disciplinary clusters. There is interdisciplinarity in science and science as interdisciplinary, the standard version as I term it. Sociologists of science Peter Weingart and Nico Stehr explain, “Scientific disciplines are, in a sense, the eyes through which modern society sees and forms its images about the world, frames its experience, and learns, thus shaping its own future or reconstituting the past. Disciplines are the intellectual structures. . . disciplines are. . . also social structures.” In this view, “scientific disciplines constitute the modern social order of knowledge, and the order of knowledge is in this sense a political order as well” (Weingart and Stehr Reference Weingart and Stehr2000: xi, emphasis in the original).Footnote ²⁰

Weingart (Reference Valenza2000) continues, expressing his understanding of the contradiction: “We can now unravel the apparent paradox of an ongoing and perhaps even intensified discourse on interdisciplinarity in the face of ever more specialization and fragmentation.”

The formula is rewritten, even reversed. “Interdisciplinarity is not the promise of ultimate unity, but of innovation and surprise by way of recombining of different parts of knowledge, no matter which” (ibid.: 41).

“No matter which”? “Taken the place”? These cry out for explanation and discussion. On the one hand, there is the question of science or nonscience, that is the rub. Has scientism completely triumphed? Yet “no matter which” part of knowledge suggests no such boundary. On the other hand, if not opposed, interdisciplinarity and specialization combine into an interdisciplinary domain of specialized research and knowledge that is common and important, a dichotomous concept of interdisciplinarity and “one recurring idea.”

Transcending dichotomies leaves the danger of reductionism. Consistent attention to contexts, conceptualization, and comparison may counter or reduce that risk. My understanding of interdisciplinarity begins with the view that interdisciplinarity is part of the historical process of the making and ongoing reshaping of modern disciplines since the late nineteenth century. It is inseparable from them, neither an opposition nor an end point. Historically, the organization, production, and dissemination of knowledge around universities, disciplinary departments, and research institutes, especially in the United States and Europe, give rise to interdisciplinary efforts and movements. Those endeavors cross fields, disciplines, and disciplinary clusters over time, in different ways, and with differing outcomes.

In this construction, interdisciplinarity is defined and constructed by questions and problems of theory or practice, knowledge or conditions of living, and the means developed to answer them in new and different ways. Interdisciplines are fashioned from elements of different disciplines to form distinct approaches and understandings. Interdisciplines are historical constructs. I emphasize questions and problems, not the number or roles of disciplines “mastered,” “integrated,” or “transcended,” or the fact that normative disciplinary boundaries—or, better, normative practices—are bypassed. I seek to avoid dichotomies that interfere with our understanding, but I recognize key conflicts and contradictions. In the making of interdisciplinarity, disciplinary elements are interactive, not additive. Similarly, interdisciplinarity derives from the selection of appropriate and relevant ideas, approaches, theories, concepts, methods, comparisons, and related elements from different fields or disciplines. Those choices surround central questions and problems. In no way do they depend on knowledge of entire disciplines or notions of global unity. There is no single path to interdisciplinarity, model, standard for successful development. The process and results vary across disciplines and clusters. Like disciplines, interdisciplines are diverse in paths, locations, relationships to disciplines, organization, and institutionalization (Graff Reference Graff2015).

Interdisciplinarity, Culture, and Politics

In revealing ways, the cause of interdisciplinarity is simultaneously advanced and retarded by the cultural associations of interdisciplinarity. After all, if a novel or rediscovered approach to a major problem in theory or practice draws on more than one basic discipline, it must be beyond the understanding of any one person, or so it is too often said. Not surprisingly, both university and governmental promotion of interdisciplinarity for problem solving simultaneously draw on and further the inseparable attraction and suspicion of interdisciplinarity. The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion interact. This also reminds us that an emphasis on interdisciplinarity is often linked to contemporary concerns, threats, and pressures of the “real world.” We forget, at our peril, that interdisciplines, like disciplines, are historical constructs. Both external and internal factors actively and critically shape them.

Today, “convergence science” across life sciences, physical science, and engineering, and beyond, is exemplary (Katsouleas Reference Katsouleas2011).Footnote ²¹ Concerted responses to important matters of the moment, health or environmental, for example—absolutely central to interdisciplinary designs, cooperation, and collaboration—win praise and serve as models for others, or, to different eyes, represent the inferiority of applied compared to “pure” research or a demeaning search for relevance. Forging interdisciplinary groups to save the world may seem trite and hyperbolic. But it is sincere and often beneficial. Add to this the commercial potential in fields like molecular biology, nanotechnology, or communication, and the complications expand. No wonder so many universities promote their “grand challenges,” with at least the rhetoric of interdisciplinarity—and sometimes more—at their core.

Oppositional dichotomies also contribute to a sense of distance and disconnection between disciplines and interdisciplines, blurring their connections. How simply and easily we assume differences between disciplines (and clusters like humanities, social sciences, and sciences) and interdisciplines rather than relationships. Typically, the discourse and the expectations of interdisciplinarity weigh more heavily on the addition of disciplines than their relationships. Heckhausen (Reference Heckhausen1972: 63) is exceptional in making this point in his definition of interdisciplinarity: “Interaction may range from simple communication of ideas to the mutual integration of organising concepts, methodology, procedures, epistemology, terminology, data, and organisation of research and education in a fairly large field.” Still, the sense of difference is stronger than that of dynamic relationships. Interdisciplinarity marks an “end” to disciplines—reflected in some hierarchies and many discursive constructions—rather than a view of relationships and interdisciplines as part of the disciplinary process. This is where conceptualization and epistemology meet. It is also where claims about the significance of the contemporary relevance of interdisciplinary studies, in contrast to “pure” research, conflict (Abbott Reference Abbott2001; Brint Reference Brint and Brint2002, Reference Brint2005; Brint et al. Reference Brint, Riddle, Turk-Bicakci and Levy2005; Calhoun Reference Calhoun2006).

Uses and Abuses

Given interdisciplinarity's associations with supposedly new and unconventional studies and its interest in revision and improvement, both proponents and opponents presume an alliance between interdisciplinarity and liberal or left politics. This is often but not always true. Revealing further contradictions, in recent years new conflicts have emerged. Contrasting disciplinary doctoral programs with interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary programs, sociologist Stanley Aronowitz (Reference Aronowitz2000) articulates connections and counter trends that many will accept as axiomatic. “As academic jobs have dried up in nearly all domains, since the late 1980s the pressure on faculty to forfeit or otherwise jettison experiments in transdisciplinary or interdisciplinary masters’ and Ph.D. programs has become intense. . . the student hoping to use graduate school. . . to explore intellectual options freely—finds departments becoming more protective of their turf and their disciplinary boundaries and hardening into academic fortresses.” Thus, “Graduate education today is once again the site of the learner's socialization and acculturation to conventional professional roles, even as the nature of higher education veers away from conventions, if not always for the better” (ibid.: 145–46).

That view is rejected by other critical voices on the left. In a recent exposé of the uses of interdisciplinarity in the transformation of universities and their complicity in the expansion of the marketplace, cultural studies professor Bill Readings (Reference Readings1996: 39) writes, “One form of such market expansion is the development of interdisciplinary programs, which often appear as the point around which radicals and conservatives can make common cause in University reform. This is partly because interdisciplinarity has no inherent political orientation. . .,” a point of contention.

For many observers, dangers inhere in administration-driven reforms. “It is also because the increased flexibility [interdisciplinary programs] offer is often attractive to administrators as a way of overcoming entrenched practices of demarcation, ancient privileges, and fiefdoms in the structure of universities” (ibid.). But there are risks. “The benefits of interdisciplinary openness are numerous,” Readings continues. “At present interdisciplinary programs tend to supplement existing disciplines, the time is not far off when they will be installed in order to replace clusters of disciplines. Indeed, this is a reason to be cautious in approaching the institutional claim to interdisciplinarity staked by Cultural Studies when it replaces the old order of disciplines in the humanities with a more general field that combines history, art history, literature, media studies, sociology, and so on” (ibid.; see also Brint Reference Brint and Brint2002; Hunt Reference Hunt and Kerman1997; Newfield Reference Newfield2009). In other words, the growth in interdisciplinary studies programs and the expansion of research centers claiming to be multi- or interdisciplinary poses a dilemma for practitioners, promoters, and students, including threats to the curriculum and jobs for faculty and graduating PhDs. We confront these contradictions in universities today.

Recent research identifies rising levels of interest on many levels—local, national, and sometimes international: financial support from federal agencies, foundations; institutional initiatives and seed money; hiring initiatives; and undergraduate and graduate program development. Jacobs and Frickel (Reference Jacobs and Frickel2009) found 2,366 centers at the 25 leading research universities. Some initiatives are “bottom up,” beginning with faculty and students; others are “top down,” from administrators at the level of deans and above, and from external sponsors. Academic writing about interdisciplinarity has grown steadily to 300–400 articles a year. There is much discussion of reducing barriers and creating incentives (ibid.; see also Jacobs Reference Jacobs2013). But the uses—or, depending on one's understanding, abuses—of interdisciplinarity are contradictory intellectually, politically, and economically. With intellectual excitement come fears, likely increasing (Brint Reference Brint and Brint2002, Reference Brint2005; Brint et al. Reference Brint, Riddle, Turk-Bicakci and Levy2005).

At the same time, serious criticism of interdisciplinarity mounts. Jerry Jacobs, in particular, has voiced skepticism about the theory, need for, and practice of interdisciplinarity. Jacobs and Frickel (Reference Jacobs and Frickel2009: 52) refer to the “relative absence of epistemic clarity” and warn about potential harm to the disciplines, including fragmentation. They are not alone. Other criticism comes from promoters of “transdisciplinarity and hybridity.” Critics of interdisciplinarity express concern about inadequate or absent research evaluation. Some criticisms concern the influence of factors external to universities and issues of objectivity and neutrality, while others question the extent of applied research and professional programs. Jacobs and Frickel conclude, “We do not believe that the case has been fully made, theoretically or empirically, for the general superiority of interdisciplinary over disciplinary knowledge” (ibid.: 60). It is not clear, however, what such a case might be, or if the question of “superiority” is a “general” or more specific issue.

Regardless of the hopes and prayers of some inter- and transdisciplinary believers, the disciplines are not about to wither away. Studies regularly document their relative dominance and stability, sometimes to researchers’ relief and sometimes to their chagrin.Footnote ²² “The established disciplines are not as static or as isolated as advocates of interdisciplinarity sometimes suggest. . . . Established academic disciplines remain dynamic centers of knowledge production that are open to external developments even while insisting on internal standards” (Abbot 2011: 138). Abbott underscores the long history and stability of interdisciplinarity as well as disciplinarity throughout the twentieth century. With others, he notes the role of academic labor markets as well as other institutional factors. Summing up, Craig Calhoun (Reference Calhoun2000: 74) writes that, because of growth in scale, interinstitutional mobility, and related factors, “A crucial dimension of all this is the development of highly distinct academic disciplines. This is not just—or perhaps even crucially—a matter of intellectual distinctions. It is a matter of power and turf control.” It is also, critically, a matter of recognizing the inextricable historical and continuing interrelationships of disciplinarity and disciplines, and interdisciplinarity and interdisciplines. At the same time, we must ponder in new ways the organization of research and teaching, universities and scholarly support structures.

These are among the reasons why interdisciplinarity—especially in the abstract—generates such strong and conflicting responses and can be taken at once as the promise of a better future or a path destined to fail. Although the choices are sometimes put in those terms, it is not a zero-sum game. Both past and present join in demonstrating that. Too many conceptions unduly limit our choices and promote contradictory, limiting dichotomies, rather than inter/disciplinary relationships and flexible, multiple organizational and locational arrangements. Understandably, the circumstances give rise to anxiety, conflict, and contradiction.

Explaining Interdisciplinarity

Efforts aimed at explaining interdisciplinarity also exhibit the problems of conflict and contradiction. The formulations of major explanations play a part in both clarifying and reinforcing myths of interdisciplinarity. From boundary making and maintenance to conflict, specialization, and unity, the list of explanations is exemplary. They also reflect the strong influence—dare we say bias?—of a smaller number of scholarly areas: science studies, especially the philosophy and sociology of science; organizational theories principally from sociology; labor market and more general market considerations; boundaries and regulation in sociology and economics. While not searching for single-factor explanations, researchers aim to isolate a relatively few overriding factors. Ironically, the domination of disciplinary approaches among efforts to understand interdisciplinarity (rather than interdisciplinary ones) limits our explanations. The relatively traditional set of issues also detracts from exploring complexity, similarities and differences among interdisciplines, interactions among disciplines and interdisciplines, and connections among internal and external elements.Footnote ²³

Jacobs and Frickel identify approaches that probe the historical contingency of both interdisciplines and disciplines; the cultural production of knowledge; rhetoric and ideology; and social and political movements, including the extracurricular commitments of researchers. They note the lack of studies that take historical context seriously into account. “Interdisciplines are shaped by social forces beyond disciplinary labor markets,” for example, movements for civil rights, equality for women, and protection for the environmental marked students’ demand for programs. “Institutional instability. . . can provide conditions for the emergence of interdisciplinary SIMs [Scientific/Intellectual Movements]” (Jacobs and Frickel Reference Jacobs and Frickel2009: 38). They point to “the concentration of new interdisciplinary fields in the 1970s in the social sciences and the humanities [as] related to that decade's signature social movements,” but also note that “the creation of area studies programs in previous decades is more likely an outcome of national security interests.” In contrast, “[I]nterdiscipline formation in the 1980s and 1990s in the life sciences was likely spurred by instabilities created by technological innovation and changes in the legal structures governing proprietary knowledge.” Despite this variation and apparent trend, “Researchers have yet to study in any detail the rise of interdisciplines comparatively or over broad historical periods” (ibid.: 37–38).Footnote ²⁴

Studies of interdisciplinarity reveal expectations of similarity among interdisciplines, including the sciences. Those assumptions interfere with much-needed comparisons of different interdisciplines from different disciplinary clusters, institutions, times, and places. Missing have been case studies and comparative studies of interdisciplines that explore intellectual dimensions, internal and external elements, and patterns of similarity and difference: variability, complexity, comparison, contextual, and historical dimensions (Graff Reference Graff2015).

A Social History of Interdisciplinarity

Interdisciplinarity can be better understood when it is situated within a longer chronological span of intellectual and sociocultural development and examined with a broader, more dynamic focus on its place among a wide array of disciplines and institutional locations. Social, cultural, political, and economic factors and developments presumed to be external to the normal workings of a discipline or field, such as wartime needs; consequences of global cross-cultural contacts and colonialism; discovery of new social problems; economic downturns; and health or ecological fears, combine, often contradictorily, with shifting currents within and across disciplines. They may then stimulate changing views that, in the context of universities and their organization of knowledge, lead to criticism, different assertions, and sometimes institutional articulations both within and outside the boundaries of departments or divisions that take the name of interdisciplinarity.

Abbott neatly captures this dynamic: “There are in fact no given bodies of academic work. Bodies of academic work are perpetually being redefined, reshaped and recast by the activities of disciplines trying to take work from one another or to dominate one another.” Highlighting conflict and competition, he continues, “These moves—intellectual moves of interdisciplinary deconstruction and reconstruction—are the tactical engagements of interdisciplinary conflict.” As a result, “[N]ew areas emerge not only through conflict, but also from the processes of fractal combination and recombination. . . processes that are in the first instance internal to disciplines” (Abbott Reference Abbott2001: 138).

Abbott concludes, “It is common for new groups to emerge at disciplinary margins, as for example did biochemistry.” But that is not the only consequence: “In other cases, bordering disciplines stably coexist, physical chemistry and chemical physics being an example. Often this leads to effective merger” (ibid.: 139). These are important implications for how we construe both disciplines and interdisciplines actively, relationally, and historically. They underscore that interdisciplinary development results in different locations—within a department or disciplinary cluster, or in a separate and distinct location—with differing relationships to related departments.

Abbott further suggests that “interdisciplinarism has generally been problem driven, and problems. . . have their own life cycle. There is ample evidence that problem-oriented empirical work does not create enduring, self-reproducing communities like disciplines, except in areas with stable and strongly institutionalized external clienteles like criminology” (ibid.: 134). Thus, one path toward interdisciplinarity sees it as a construction that is chronologically linked to a social/intellectual problem specific, unlike most disciplinary arrangements.

Other paths exist; they demand identification. Both longitudinal and time-specific questions about social organization and social relationships; different forms of social, economic, cultural, and political development; ecological interactions across environments and species, often comparative over time and across groups and space, to mention only a few, raise issues that go beyond “problems” into broader relationships of theories and research practices both within and selectively across disciplines, subdisciplines, and interdisciplinary fields. The field of play is broad. Some interdisciplines, perhaps most, are likely to be shorter-lived, not “enduring, self-reproducing communities” (ibid.: 139). That recognition might be very useful, and potentially liberating.

Interdisciplinary developments follow different paths toward a variety of institutional, intellectual, and societal ends, along timelines and lifetimes. They prove influential without attaining the niche and continuity of disciplines. That is one of their strengths whose understanding may carry benefits.

The stirring story of interdisciplinarity told in biology, medicine, or physics is an incomplete, misleading guide. Beginning with the World War II era and science and technology, the standard version shortens the historical time of interdisciplinarity. It also reduces the means by which we may identify and understand the varied processes of interdisciplinary development. Broadening the scope chronologically, conceptually, and interpretively and ranging widely across the disciplines that constitute the modern university historicizes interdisciplinarity. In the reconceptualization, disciplines and disciplinary clusters, their relationships, and their university bases all become active elements.

In the standard version of interdisciplinarity, the sciences and certain other fields such as cognitive science and operations research appropriate both the parts and the whole. Other efforts in the humanities, human sciences, and communication do not always find their place. All interdisciplinary efforts reflect external factors. But they may be more diffuse outside the sciences and social sciences. Among the sciences, identification and institutionalization more often but not always lead to separate location and degree of independence. Centers, institutes, committees, schools, new departments, and joint sponsorship or locations are among the forms of organization and locations. That is not the only sign of success. Other indicators include identification and recognition, sponsors and funding, professional organization, communications, and reorganization of disciplines and disciplinary clusters (Graff Reference Graff2015).

Interdisciplinarity is neither a dream nor a nightmare. A romantic, nostalgic golden age of integrated, unified knowledge did not exist before the triumph of modern disciplines. Instead, we must continue to ask: What are the similarities and differences of interdisciplinarity across the disciplines and disciplinary clusters? What are the limits of interdisciplinarity? When and why does interdisciplinarity develop? What (kinds of) institutions promote interdisciplinarity or limit it? What does it mean to develop from disciplinary to interdisciplinary? How important are external factors, like war, economic decline, health, and environmental questions—and also changes in the organization and promoted missions of universities and research institutions? How are “success” or “failure” determined? We must be suspicious of easy or transitory answers.

To conclude, I ask briefly how this broad exploration of interdisciplinarity speaks to the Social Science History Association (SSHA) at the time of its 40th anniversary. This is an issue I have raised before: in my 2000 SSHA 25th anniversary presidential address (Graff Reference Graff2001) and in one of the case study chapters of Undisciplining Knowledge (Graff Reference Graff2015). My evolving view simultaneously celebrates the achievements of the “new histories” —many but not all of them interdisciplinary—and appreciates their limits. On the one hand, social science histories have shared certain integrative questions in human social, cultural, and economic history. A level of common inquiry allows them to continue, despite the successive waves of conflicting methodological and interpretative “turns” that arise typically within the disciplines. On the other hand, social science histories have been bounded in part organizationally and in part disciplinarily. They reflect the many contradictions discussed here. Often they constitute what I call “interdisciplinarity within a discipline.” Regardless of its limits, that important path to interdisciplinarity is obscured, when not dismissed, by myths of novel, independent interdisciplines (Graff Reference Graff2015). That, in fact, is one form of interdisciplinarity.

In accord with the themes of this critique, I think that we have much to learn from the history and the historicity of interdisciplinarity. I do not think that we are sufficiently critically and comparatively aware of the wide spectrum of interdisciplinary relationships and their rootedness in the reciprocal interconnectedness of the disciplines and various efforts at interdisciplinarity. How frequently do we settle for simple formulae, too often dichotomous substitutes for dialectical, mutually informing definitions, conceptualizations, and practices? A certain rhetoric accompanies that set of expectations. I urge social science historians to think more about the multiple meanings and practices of interdisciplinarity, for ourselves, our colleagues, our students, and our inquiries.

Similarly, we should think more about the organization, institutional and professional relationships, and institutional locations of interdisciplinarity. This moves us beyond the discomforts of our own universities, the variable settings of our own disciplinary departments, and the comforts of multidisciplinary research centers and initiatives. I suggest that there is more than irony in the relationships that tie the personal to the professional and the organization of our scholarly practices. Might it be fitting for the SSHA to explore the terms, including the history and the contradictions, of its own interdisciplinarity, and to compare relationships within and across its defining and sustaining networks as part of the project for the decade leading to its 50th anniversary?