In the last decade, we have seen an increasing call for more interdisciplinary research. This call has pervaded funding agencies – some of which now explicitly require ‘interdisciplinary’ teams in many funding proposals – journals, faculty hiring and promotion, and PhD programmes. At my institution, the University of Leeds, we even have a Dean of Interdisciplinarity, whose role is ostensibly to promote interdisciplinary research across the university. It is not uncommon to hear researchers and PhD students to start their talks with statements about the ‘interdisciplinarity’ nature of their research. However, what is interesting about the rise of an organic interdisciplinarity agenda in the physical and social sciences, is the lack of any debate as to whether the pressure toward the interdisciplinarity of science is beneficial or not. Overall, the evidence is mixed. Research on citation impact shows that more interdisciplinary papers have fewer field adjusted citations per paper, with the negative effect being related to the distance between the disciplines being integrated in the work (Porter & Ismael, 2009; Yegros-Yegros, Rafols & D’Este, 2015). In addition, evidence from Australia shows that interdisciplinary proposals are rated poorer and funded at a lower rate than disciplinary submissions, despite the research council’s avowed policy of promoting interdisciplinarity (Bromham, Dinnage & Hua, 2016). While I have nothing more than anecdotal evidence as it relates to academic hiring and promotion, my view is that candidates without strong evidence of disciplinary strength – either in training, topics and publications – suffer against more narrow disciplinary peers, although this may be changing. This appears to be reinforced by the fact that interdisciplinary journals are viewed as being of lower quality (Leydesdorff & Rafols, 2011; Millar, 2013) and hence influence the perceptions of the quality of the scholarship and the people doing the work.
One question that immediately arises – but is never asked – is why the pressure toward interdisciplinary research has arisen now. My view is that there are two fundamental pressures, both of which are related to dissatisfaction with the state of many areas of research. A recent NBER article asked the question “are we running out of ideas?” (Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen & Webb, 2017) and concludes that there may be significant diminishing returns to science at the present time. Their conclusions are reflected in the number of introspective editorials in business and management journals over the last decade. Concerns about the material impact of our research – e.g., the debate over ‘effects’ versus ‘significance’ – and the validity of past research – e.g., the so-called replication crisis. For example, Ellis (2010) shows that most IB variables published in JIBS has no real effect. The failure to find material effects on hypothesized relationships is now seen as common in many other management and social science fields (e.g., Szuc & Ioannidis, 2017; Johnson, et. al, 2017). The second pressure is coming from funding agencies and users of research. This reflects a dis-satisfaction with disciplinary approaches to important problems. Funders, policy makers and corporations need good advice and guidance based on evidence and their call for new perspectives is rooted in their lack of confidence in the old way of doing science. In private interactions with a UK funding body, they commented that they wanted to look beyond ‘standard’ interdisciplinarity and see proposals that had more ‘radical’ interdisciplinary teams; this despite the previously mentioned research that showed that the greater the variance of team variance the lower the overall citation impact. One implication is that while scholars might worry about how their articles are cited, the funding agencies are increasingly concerned about more material commercial and policy impact.
All of this begs the question of what it means to be interdisciplinary. I had an informed conversation with several individuals in research council panels about what they viewed as interdisciplinary. Many business school academics would argue they are interdisciplinary if they use economic or financial models in international business research or apply cultural models from international business in human resources or finance and accounting or that they research is interdisciplinary if it is conducted with co-authors from other business disciplines. However, interestingly, my colleagues outside business did not view this as the case at all. Their view was that everything in business and economics is one discipline just like Chemistry is Chemistry and Biology is Biology. Interdisciplinary research to them involved Chemists working with Economists or Physicists, not varieties of Chemistry scholars working together. In other words, their view of interdisciplinary work involves a collection of disciplinary experts. And from their perspective, what we view as interdisciplinary research would not be truly interdisciplinary. Their view point emphasises the need of specific skills to solve big problems, rather than simply broadening a skill set because of a belief that the goal is the broadening itself.
For me this was quite a revelation. What it implied is that we may believe that we are interdisciplinary, but we are unlikely to be pushing the boundaries because we view being interdisciplinary as an individual trait, while true interdisciplinarity is a team-based phenomenon to be applied to major gnarly problems that have failed to be solved from specific disciplinary perspectives. So, in coming to the question of do we need interdisciplinary research the answer is a strong yes but for a different reason that most IB scholars would argue. What we need is to push broader, truly interdisciplinary research teams that address more compelling and impactful problems. We sometimes hear complaints that much of what we do gets ignored by other disciplines – e.g., trade theorists, political scientist, psychologist, sociologists – but I view much of this as our failure to engage in the sort of broad interdisciplinary team-based approach that can truly examine major questions that are compelling to policy makers, corporations, and other stakeholders potentially interested in what we have to offer.
References
Bloom, N., Jones, C.I., Van Reenen, J. & M. Webb, 2017. Are ideas getting harder to find? Unpublished NBER Working Paper No. 23782, September.
Bromham, L., Dinnage, R. & X. Hua. 2016. Interdisciplinary research has consistently lower funding success. 534(7609): 684-687.
Ellis, P.D. 2010. Effect sizes and the interpretation of research results in international business. Journal of International Business Studies, 41(9): 1581-1588.
Leydesdorff, L. & I. Rafols. 2011. Indicators of the interdisciplinarity of journals: Diversity, centrality, and citations. Journal of Informetrics, 5 (1): 87-100.
Millar, M.M. 2013. Interdisciplinary research and the early career: The effect of interdisciplinary dissertation research on career placement and publication productivity of doctoral graduates in the sciences. Research Policy, 42(5): 1152-1164.
Porter, A.L. & R. Ismael. 2009. Is science becoming more interdisciplinary? Measuring and mapping six research fields over time. Scientometrics, 81 (3): 719-745.
Szucs, D. & J. P. A. Ioannidis. 2017. Empirical assessment of published effect sizes and power in the recent cognitive neuroscience and psychology literature, PLOS Biology.
Johnson, V.E., Payne, R.D., Wang, T.-Y., Asher A. & S. Mandal. 2017. On the reproducibility of psychological science, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 112(517): 1-10.
Yegros-Yegros, A., Rafols, I. & P. D’Este. 2015. Does interdisciplinary research lead to higher citation impact? The different effect of proximal and distal interdisciplinarity. PLOS One.
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