Abstract
This chapter draws on research with historians and physicists to elucidate a bottom-up perspective on two knowledge agendas within research policy and funding mechanisms in Australia. On the one hand the government and universities are concerned with quality and international rankings that are underpinned by disciplinary categorizations and direct and indirect peer review. On the other hand there is a drive to produce greater economic impact and shorter-term utilitarian outcomes, an agenda frequently conflated with a prioritization of interdisciplinarity and collaboration with industry. The chapter shows that the historians and physicists prize their initial disciplinary identity and training and see it as an important foundation for new interdisciplinary work. They are irritated by what they see as rigid top-down forms of research steering and funding and see some of this as counter-productive. In contrast to some policy reports, they do not see disciplinary and interdisciplinary agendas in binary terms but as important sources of mutual renewal, and largely find ways of complying with externally imposed changing agendas without changing their fundamental research commitments.
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- 1.
The Australian federal government awards almost all recurrent research funding to universities on performance-based grounds, using the funding formula mentioned above. This sets the Australian case apart from other countries such as Norway or Sweden where some recurrent funding has been more recently tied to universities’ research outputs, but where universities still receive significant proportions of their recurrent research funding through a (non performance-based) block grant (see Aagaard 2015).
- 2.
This implies that where new interdisciplinary combinations have become well-established, for example, in nanotechnology or bio-science, they can become recognized in these classifications, but as part of a scheme which essentially accords them ‘discipline-like’ character of boundaries, methodologies and shared problems.
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Yates, L., Woelert, P., Millar, V., O’Connor, K. (2018). From Disciplinary Excellence to Interdisciplinary Collaboration: How Australian Academics Negotiate Competing Knowledge Agendas. In: Maassen, P., Nerland, M., Yates, L. (eds) Reconfiguring Knowledge in Higher Education. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 50. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72832-2_3
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