مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Despite the fact that research is generally not interdisciplinary (Zürcher, 2007) there is a conventional discourse in favour of interdisciplinary research and, at the same time, much indifference or even disregard for such research (Sperber, 2003). In addition, research shows that constraints to interdisciplinarity are posed both in scientific terms (e.g.: Collinet et al., 2013) but also in institutional terms (e.g.: Su, 2014), especially concerning governance modes (Cooper, 2013). The idea that interdisciplinarity in higher education is related to the framework of institutions, departments and courses is not new (e.g.: Carpenter, 1995; Pirrie et al, 1999; Wall and Shankar, 2008; Dykes et al., 2009). Curiously, for the most part, academic staff are positive about their own experiences of interdisciplinarity research but many are negative about attempts to promote this in ways that force the dominant university logic. For some, interdisciplinary research is seen as privileging over other types of research. For others, it is possible to see themselves as working in an interdisciplinary fashion without necessarily collaborating with anyone (Pisapia, 2012). In turn, Horta and Lacey (2011) showed that factors like international visibility and academic’s communication are positively affected by research unit size. As a matter of fact, one of the dominant features of education in universities is that it is usually confined within one subject area and often to one discipline, especially in countries like England, Spain or Portugal. On the other hand, despite technological and economic forces for integration, or convergence, there are equal or perhaps greater forces for fragmentation that hinder truly interdisciplinary research. Literature (e.g. Seeber, 2013) shows that university steering is effective in some disciplines, suggesting that a managerial-like steering may privilege strongest groups and paradigms, while marginalizing minor or emerging streams of research. In this work, as a departure point, the term discipline regards the schema used by Biglan and Becher (1973, 1987) as it has been cited widely in higher education literature and has proven to be a useful tool for viewing disciplinary values, norms, and beliefs as they relate to teaching and research. Becher’s typology classifies disciplines according to whether they are hard or soft (according to their level of paradigm development), and whether they are pure or applied (depending on the extent to which they are concerned with practical application).

Considering the institutional embeddedness of researchers, the focus of this paper is on researcher’s set of relationships that shape the interdisciplinarity of their research. The purpose is to identify what aspects of the researcher’s affiliation influence their personal networks and the interdisciplinarity of research. Looking at the disciplinary diversity of researcher’s knowledge networks, the analysis puts forward systemic connexions between the rise of knowledge networks and the characteristics of departments that may promote or hinder interdisciplinarity among researchers. In this paper, departments are seen as a cluster to the extent that they are a spatially concentrated group of researchers competing in the same or related fields linked through vertical or horizontal couplings oriented to the transfer and creation of specific knowledge and exchange of ideas. Departments, regardless of the organizational model of their institutions, stem from specialisation, though that is more acute in university research centres than in teaching departments (Su, 2014). In this study, the concept of department will not be restrained to teaching departments as our focus is on research. Given the political context of Catalonia, where the data was collected, three types of institutional departments are surveyed and considered with regard to the respondents (the whole set of relations studied belong to a wider range of institutions): two public universities, the Spanish National Research Council that belongs to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the Secretary of State for Research, Development and Innovation (the largest public institution dedicated only to research in Spain and third largest in Europe) and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies, which is supported by the Catalan Government and directed by a Board of Trustees.