Focus: Interdisciplinarity in Research Groups

Our research group brings together five disciplines and subdisciplines. Even in the genesis of our research application, group members gained deepening awareness of their different disciplinary cultures – in terms of research questions, methods and privileged analytic procedures. “Knowledge” simply takes on different forms depending on whether one works within law, economics, cultural anthropology, or ethnology.  Science and technology studies (STS) is used here to cast a glance at such difficulties. The STS-approach helps to grasp the difficulties of interdisciplinarity (deriving from heterogenous research traditions) as a potential for success. 
Studies in STS show that new technologies have a greater chance to succeed if they not only meet a special “need” but also do not break with accustomed practices and routines. For example, the adaptation of the cellular telephone in the 1990s happened subtly while the introduction of the first telephones around the turn of the 19^th to the  20^th century was accompanied by extensive efforts, such as telephone lessons in school. The cell phone thus took hold in everyday life smoothly, drawing on already established telecommunicative practice while the break-through of the first telephone required a great deal of investment. A similar process can be observed in interdisciplinary research: if an argument integrates the debates that are formative for its discipline (and if the question it addresses derives from these discourses), it is more likely that this paper is referred to in other publications. A paper that draws on positions from different disciplines, much like a new technological tool, will face an uphill struggle to find integration in the broader scholarly conversation.
Interdisciplinary research happens at the borders of disciplines, a space which is often not yet defined by a discourse. This happens when different disciplines meet for the first time to answer a question which cannot be solved within one traditional disciplinary context. An inquiry of the constitution of cultural property is such a question. For the participants in our research group the collaboration of economics, institutional law, international law and two quite distinct fields of cultural research, namely cultural anthropology (Volkskunde) and ethnology (Völkerkunde) thus face the challenge of bridging issues arising in the different modes of disciplinary communication. The project designers soon identified initial communication problems as occasioned by their fundamentally divergent biases of knowledge production: it was found that legal and economic studies are searching for normative knowledge, while anthropologists sought to document and understand given situations, refraining from normative claims. Identifying and understanding disciplinary difference thus from the beginning became a second goal of the research group.  
After a cross-disciplinary reading seminar for project leaders and junior researchers alike early on in the joint work, the group held a workshop with sociologist Prof. Sabine Maasen  (Basel) in January 2009. Maasen has conducted a great deal of empirical research on inter- and transdisciplinary work and offered her expertise to our specific research situation. Various measures to foster interdisciplinary rapprochment were evaluated. Maasen’s experience shows that other interdisciplinary research groups face very similar uncertainties, e.g. that there are not yet quality criteria defined for what can be regarded as a “good” interdisciplinary study, or how interdisciplinarity can “happen” in practice. The workshop concluded with a number of suggested, practical steps to foster deepening exchange in our group: The central terms of our joint project require constant re-illumination and refinement. In order for each discipline to work effectively toward its partial goals within the whole endeavor, concise, disciplinary definitions and broader, interdisciplinary definitions should continue to co-exist. A further measure to keep interdisciplinary channels open is the writing of joint papers which is currently under way. On the more abstract level of the sociologist of science, one acceptable insight of interdisciplinary research ventures can consist of the recognition that interdisciplinarity may not be possible – which does not undermine the results arrived at within participating disciplines. 
A middle range theory in Cultural Anthropology describes knowledge as dependent on the social organisation it happens in. From this relativistic approach we learn that the tasks western “scientific truth” is performing in our society are different from functions knowledge is fulfilling in other societies. Thus, we must also keep in mind that in our research setting various “scientific truths” collide, and that each of them meets special needs in its discipline. Interdisciplinarity as a new design of knowledge production can provide a fruitful research context when it is grounded in disciplinary certainties. The junior scholars participating in our group have the opportunity to evaluate their (disciplinary PhD) projects in a broader theoretical framework and to gain what Giddens, Lash and Nowotny call “Mode-2”-practice. Keeping the balance between joint work and disciplinary work will remain a permanent task for all participants of our team.