ABSTRACT
Over the course of the late twentieth century, academic science has evolved from a logic of science for its own sake where the search for truth had intrinsic value (Friedland and Alford 1991) to a logic where science has become increasingly evaluated on the basis of its economic value and societal usefulness (Gumport 2000, Popp Berman 2012a, 2012b, Slaughter and Leslie 1997).The view of science that underpins this vision is one where scientists tackle so-called “real-world problems” and find solutions that benefit society in varied ways, what Gibbons and his colleagues call “Mode 2”knowledge production (1994) and Ramirez (2006, 2010) has characterized as the shift toward the socially useful university: one that behaves like a rational actor and shows its importance for the broader society. Canada has followed these global trends. SinceWorldWar II, Canada’s science policy agenda
has emphasized collaborative research, in the hopes of increasing the utility and use of academic knowledge. A cluster of new policy and funding initiatives based on a market logic were implemented to facilitate interdisciplinary research, accelerate collaboration and commercialize academic research (Albert and McGuire 2014, Cameron 2004, Fisher et al. 2001, 2005, Polster 2002, Snowdon 2005). The value and contribution of interdisciplinarity to the knowledge production exercise is
now taken for granted, and only rarely contested (among the few critical perspectives on interdisciplinarity see Cooper 2012,Moore 2011, Hoffman 2011, Jacobs and Frickel 2009, Laberge et al. 2009, Weingart 2000). Proponents believe it is a means to maximize innovation and economic growth and see it, in its ideal or idealized form, as a proven way to generate “better” research and better solutions3 (for example, see Committee on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research 2004, Frodeman et al. 2010, Hadorn et al. 2008, Hall et al. 2012). Better research is thought to arise from interdisciplinarity when a plurality of approaches are brought to the study of a “problem” by a diverse set of researchers brought together in research teams, centres, departments or faculties. One of the assumptions made by this model is that researchers from all disciplines will equally contribute to the research design and participate in the study of the problem, but our research suggests that several structural barriers limit social scientists’ and
humanists’ ability to be full contributors in the health research field. Indeed, these barriers make it impossible for their excellence to be recognized, and their epistemes to enrich and transform health research. In the health research field, interdisciplinarity is also increasingly valued and can be seen in
the transformation of both research funding and at the level of medical school faculty. Many funding agencies have developed programs specifically to intensify interdisciplinary research, and some were created for this specific purpose. For example, in 2000, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) was established with an express mandate to forge a health research agenda across disciplines (Government of Canada 2000). Seven years later, the U.S. National Institutes of Health created 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 2007).Within medical schools in the United States and Canada, the number of faculty with PhDs has grown impressively (from 21,932 in 1997 to 30,363 in 2008, a 38% growth in 11 years), showing a growing commitment to research and a diversification of their staff.Within clinical departments in particular, the number of PhDs grew by 50%, from 11,479 to 17,182 during the same period (AAMC 1998, 2009). In this chapter, we would like to trouble what we believe is the embellished story of inter-
disciplinarity. It is not fully demonstrated, we argue, that interdisciplinary research finds holistic solutions to “real,” complex “problems” through the equal contributions of scholars across a range of disciplines.We focus on the untold story of social scientists and humanists who work in medical schools to show how interdisciplinarity has mostly resulted in these scholars’ adaptation to the rules of the health research field dominated by the biomedical sciences, rather than in a transformation of the health research field to be inclusive of their different epistemic habitus. We use neo-institutional theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory to show how the discourse of interdisciplinarity is decoupled from – i.e., does not fit – its actual practice, and how the interdisciplinary health research field creates new power hierarchies or reproduces old ones among scientific disciplines. Using a broad range of data (institutional, financial and interview data), we question the
feasibility and expected outcomes of interdisciplinarity by showing how the different disciplines that discursively constitute the interdisciplinary health research field (biomedical sciences, health services, epidemiology/public health, the social sciences and humanities) actually hold different levels of legitimacy and thus different scientific authority to define and lead research agendas. In the Canadian context, this disparity manifests itself through a broad range of symbolic and organizational acts of domination.We organize these data using the different types of decoupling outlined by Bromley and Powell (2012), making visible the gaps among the policy, practices and purported outcomes of interdisciplinarity. First, we focus on the underrepresentation of social scientists and humanists on various decisional and advisory committees in the country’s largest interdisciplinary health research funding agency. Second,we explore the financial decoupling faced by social scientists and humanists, which limits their ability to fully participate in the health research enterprise, disseminate their work and network with other health research colleagues. Third, we discuss the everyday professional experiences of social scientists and humanists working in medicine to show how the practice of interdisciplinarity sometimes gets in the way of doing better science. Two major aspects of our study distinguish it from previous research on interdisciplinarity.First,
many studies have favored ethnographic and phenomenological approaches without consideration of the structural aspects of research environments and the power relations that result. Several of these studies have as an objective the improvement of the interdisciplinary collaborative process through the identification of the elements enabling or limiting collaboration (see, for example,
Dewulf et al. 2007, Jeffrey 2003, Lau and Pasquini 2004, Lélé and Norgaard 2005,Maasen 2000). In contrast, our study is rooted in the principle that research environments are inherently structured, such that the question of power must necessarily be taken into consideration if we are to understand relationships among disciplines, and the organization of scientific work. Our study thus moves away from interactionist approaches that focus solely on visible interactions among actors (as though they were living in a cultural and structural vacuum) and is inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s (1987) “constructivist structuralist” approach. According to this approach, actors are embedded in a social universe where social and symbolic structures, which predate their own entry into this universe, influence actions and social relations. Actors contribute to the reproduction of these structures or transform them based on their own practices and on the power they hold within this structure. A second distinctive aspect of this study is the environment it is concerned with: faculties
of medicine. Several studies of interdisciplinarity have focused on emerging or temporary interdisciplinary teams, for example the creation and functioning of new teams or interdisciplinary research centers (for example, Jeffrey 2003, Stokols et al. 2003). Because of their recent development, these environments are typically only partly institutionalized. The power relations among disciplines, while present (MacMynowski 2007, Williams et al. 2002), are not fully cemented into an established social order. In contrast, faculties of medicine are highly institutionalized and hierarchical organizations where various structural mechanisms (standardized evaluation criteria, policies governing the supervision of graduate students based on funding held by scientists, temporary and non-tenured faculty positions, etc.) maintain and reproduce the social order. Social science and humanities researchers who join a faculty of medicine thus enter a material and symbolic space that was stratified prior to their entry. Consequently, the challenges they face and their work experiences are likely to be different from those they would face in a context where norms are still emerging.
