Disciplines and their dynamics

1
Interactive agenda Setting 18th and 19th
November 2004, Coseners House, Abingdon

• Disciplines and their dynamics

• The character and structure of academic
  disciplines
• The careers of ideas and of individual
  researchers
• The institutional contexts of academic research -
  and what these mean for the production of new
  knowledge
• The relation between 'internal' and 'external'
  influences on knowledge development

2

• Fractal Division and disciplinary development
• (Abbott, The Chaos of Disciplines, 2001)
• All disciplines follow a similar pattern of
  fractal division.
• These divisions are repeated throughout the
  fabric of the discipline

• Even as the difference between positions narrows,
  the oppositions repeat themselves.
• Aims to reflects the positioning strategies of
  discipline practitioners, as well as cognitive
  structuring of disciplines

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• At the edges of fractal patterning, positions can
  have more in common with those from other
  disciplines than their own

• Rather than expand indefinitely, some branches,
  or lines of enquiry, will wither away their
  concerns can be remapped onto existing or
  emerging branches
• Through this cycle of split, conflict and
  ingestion, the cyclical recurrence of sets of
  ideas and concepts is explained

4

• The fractal pattern will expand into the
  available space set by external factors academic
  positions, research funding, space in journals
• An abundance of resources suggests eclectic
  disciplinary content
• Limited resources suggests less diversity
• Positions an internalist argument about
  discipline development within the confines of
  external factors

5

• Tribes and territories
• (Becher and Trowler Academic Tribes and
  Territories 2001)
• Basic argument that the social and institutional
  characteristics of knowledge communities or
  tribes affect the epistemological properties of
  the knowledge they produce.
• Distinguish between four types of knowledge which
  mediate the effect and the impact of external
  changes in social and institutional contexts. For
  instance applied subjects are more open to
  non-academic influence than pure

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• A further dimension of how a discipline handles
  external challenges depends on its novelty or
  maturity
• However, disciplines are constituted and
  reproduced by their practitioners recruitment
  and reproduction are vital.
• So contextual factors such as university and
  faculty organisation or research funding
  availability can affect processes of recruitment
  and the activities of recruits and therefore a
  discipline's trajectory
• And the assumed goal of academic tribes is to be
  able to resist external influence on their
  territories
• A high degree of consensus and stability within
  the networks of affiliation and association
  between practitioners reduces the potential for
  disruption
• In contrast a less homogeneous (pre-paradigmatic)
  discipline might be characterised by a number of
  conflicting networks there is less consensus by
  which to settle dispute and defection

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• Becher and Trowler also distinguish urban and
  rural modes of knowledge production

Urban (close knit) Rural (loose knit)
Clustered Demarcated problems Few topics Quick solutions Competition Close communication Dispersed Less delineated problems Multiple topics Long range view Division of academic labour Dispersed communication

• Again, the intimation is that disciplines
  constituted within urban modes are more able to
  resist external influence, whether regarding the
  practices of disciples (e.g. managerialism) or
  the knowledge itself (e.g. research funder
  influence on research topics)

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• A System of disciplines
• Whitley The intellectual and social organisation
  of the sciences (1984)
• Develops a systematic map of academic endeavour
• Characterises intellectual fields, as social
  organisations like any other where raw materials
  are converted into outputs (new knowledge)
• But they have two distinctive and contradictory
  features the pursuit of novelty and the need to
  conform to collective standards of research
  practice and new knowledge creation.

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• Reputation and reward are the main factors
  driving the activities of people within fields,
  and access to these is provided by
• The disciplinary elites (who have reputation
  already) who judge the validity and quality of
  research
• University structures which control access to
  resources
• The balance of power between discipline and
  institution is what Whitley call the dual
  system
• Whitley then offers two ways to distinguish
  different fields through mutual dependence and
  task uncertainty
• Mutual dependence refers to the types of
  relations researchers must build in order to
  acquire reputation and reward.
• Task uncertainty is about balance between
  predictable outcomes (from bureaucratic /
  institutional control) and novel knowledge
  generation

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• This allows Whitley to provide a matrix of
  fields, based on their relations to task
  uncertainty and mutual dependence

 
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• What do these approaches offer a discussion of
  interactive agenda setting?
• For all of these approaches, diversity and
  novelty arises when there are multiple and
  divergent controlling forces for instance an
  abundance of outside resources or plural
  audiences for research
• But the goal of discipline change is positioned
  as striving for homogeneity and consensus
  disciplines as things striving for internal
  coherence in the face of external forces pulling
  in different (and seemingly unwelcome)
  directions.
• So have positions of us and them
• The idea of reputation and reward as influencing
  the activities occurring within disciplines and
  controlled by a mix of internal and external
  bodies is potentially useful in understanding how
  challenging or novel ideas and research questions
  flourish or fail.
• Also, novelty, as a desirable feature, is seen as
  a function of having external influences on
  disciplinary content and activities

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• Ideas and interactive agenda setting
• Abbott comes closest in thinking about how ideas
  contribute to disciplinary development
• However, this is in contrast to how trends and
  positions are usually set out in historical
  accounts (i.e.from Marx, Weber and Durkheim, to
  functionalism, symbolic interactionism,
  structural Marxism to post-structuralism) here
  there is little, if any connection to external
  influences.
• So where, and how, do the interactions between
  ideas, disciplines and research agendas, occur?

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• Themes of the workshop
• Fashions and trends
• How do new research topics come and go?
• How do previously popular topics decline?
• The career of ideas
• How do disciplines and sub-disciplines develop?
• How do sequences of argument and debate play out,
  and what influences them?
• Reproducing and transforming disciplines and
  their followers
• How are people attracted to new topics?
• How does work shape disciplinary trajectories?
• How do different careers follow and contribute to
  disciplinary change?
• The outside world and setting priorities
• How does disciplinary change relate to
  non-academic priorities and pressures?
• How are non-academic priorities influences by
  disciplines and academia?