Abstract
This paper identifies what can be called the ‘paradox of interdisciplinarity’ (Weingart 2000) in Australian higher education research governance and explores some of its constitutive dimensions. In the Australian context, the paradox of interdisciplinarity primarily concerns the proliferation of a programmatic discourse of interdisciplinarity in government reports and government policy and strategy documents, often tied to notions of innovation and applicability, parallel to the persistence or even reinforcement of modes of governance and associated mechanisms that almost exclusively rely on rigid discipline-based classification systems to evaluate and fund research. Two interrelated dimensions of this apparent paradox are discussed. First, the conceptions of knowledge that underpin the use of notions of disciplinarity as well as interdisciplinarity in Australian government reports and policy and strategy papers are analysed. Second, an analysis of the Australian research governance system and its underlying mechanisms is presented, as they pertain to interdisciplinary forms of research. On the basis of these analyses, it is concluded that there is a significant mismatch between the discourse of interdisciplinarity and associated conceptions of knowledge on the one hand, and current, relatively inflexible governmental research funding and evaluation practices on the other. It is finally proposed that the occurrence and perpetuation of such a mismatch in the Australian context can only be understood properly if placed in the context of a more general paradox of research governance, where a politically charged rhetoric of innovation conflicts with the actual trend toward an increasingly diminishing scope for the self-organisation of knowledge.
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Notes
In the Australian context, the ARC is responsible for providing grants for basic and applied research activities in all fields except those undertaken in medicine and dentistry.
The other two sets of classification are ‘type of activity’ (e.g., pure basic research or applied research) and ‘socio-economic objective’.
The term ‘interdisciplinarity’ as such appears for the first time in the 1998 ASRC in the form of various references to the ‘discipline’ of ‘interdisciplinary engineering’. In both the 1993 and 1998 ASRC documents one can further find a few references to multidisciplinary research, where such research appears to be conceived as the collaboration of various, disparate fields, without involving synthesis or integration (ABS 1993, 2; ABS 1998, 3).
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Acknowledgments
We wish to acknowledge Australian Research Council funding support for the research project ‘Knowledge Building in Schooling and Higher Education: Policy strategies and effects’ (ARC Discovery Project 2011–13, DP110102466, Chief Investigator Prof. Lyn Yates). We would also like to thank the other researchers on the project, Prof. Lyn Yates and Kate O'Connor, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their feedback and suggestions.
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Woelert, P., Millar, V. The ‘paradox of interdisciplinarity’ in Australian research governance. High Educ 66, 755–767 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-013-9634-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-013-9634-8