Final Report, National Science Foundation,
Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BCS-0129573)
Principal Investigator: Diana Rhoten, Ph.D.
September 2003
[PDF]

ABSTRACT

At the 1999 Annual Meeting of the History of Science Society, Sheila Jasanoff, professor of science and public policy at Harvard University and then president of the Society for Social Studies of Science, made the following remarks:

“Both historical and contemporary studies have done much in recent years to bring greater transparency to the inner workings of science and technology. Making the process of science more accessible by illuminating the normally invisible backstages of laboratories and other scientific spaces, … much wisdom can be gained from looking at science and technology as social institutions in which people collaborate and compete, struggle for credibility, seek to make livings, and yearn for success or glory … [However,] science’s specialness derives from the objects of its quest, not from the strategies by which scientists try to achieve it.”

While we agree with Jasanoff that there is value in examining the internal workings of scientific institutions, we agree with this sentiment precisely because of the importance we attribute to the process, as well as the products, of science.

This project has concerned itself with the strategies of collaboration, and specifically with those strategies as implemented in and emerging from interdisciplinary research centers. In recent years, interdisciplinarity has become synonymous with all things modern, creative and progressive about scientific research. The interdisciplinary imperative has arisen not from a simple philosophic belief in “interdisciplinarity” or “heterogeneity” but from the character of problems currently under study, many of which require the combined efforts of scholars trained in different disciplines. Thus, just as industry has used flexible, cross-disciplinary teams to spark innovation, many academics now seek new kinds of intellectual alliances to address complex social and scientific problems. As a result, interdisciplinary research centers have sprung up at universities around the country, hosting agendas, affiliates, and activities that span traditional epistemological as well as organizational boundaries.

At the same time that interdisciplinary research centers have become increasingly important at universities in the United States, we have learned little about how they originate and operate. There is a vast body of theoretical literature in the sociology of science about how interdisciplinary research should be organized, how scientists might behave in interdisciplinary collaboration, and how such activities could be facilitated through better management. However, to date, there is a lack of empirical work dedicated to understanding how centers are organized, how researchers do behave, and how their activities are facilitated. Thus, while there is a general acceptance of interdisciplinary collaboration as both a worthy and authentic component of “new” science and scientific research in theory, the idea remains largely misunderstood, misconstrued, and mismeasured in practice.

We believe that before funding agencies, university leaders, and individual scholars promote and pursue these centers further, the academic, science and policy communities should have a better understanding of the factors that influence their formation and functionality. Thus, we challenge Jasanoff’s conclusion, arguing that the emergence of new interdisciplinary research centers begs investigators from the various communities of science studies to find new ways of talking about the objects of science at the same time that it also demands scholars of organizational studies to develop new ways of framing and assessing the strategies that scientists employ in their quests for these objects.