Long-Term Consequences of Interdisciplinarity: How the Need to Sell Work Shapes a Discipline Over Time

• In Event: Coordination/Collaboration in and Across Organizations

Abstract

Interdisciplinarity is often viewed as a key source of innovation in modern work environments. A robust stream of research has demonstrated, however, that communicative pressures at disciplinary boundaries can lead communities to modify how they conceptualize and perform their disciplinary work. Although we have identified local modifications to work, we know little about if and how these changes persist across relationships. In this paper, I take an initial step toward understanding the long-term consequences of interdisciplinarity through an ethnographic exploration of how a disciplinary community of applied weather researchers established new cross-disciplinary partnerships. I find that researchers faced strong communicative pressures when seeking to sell their ideas to new partners. The evidence suggests these mechanisms reinforced shifts in disciplinary practice that occurred in previous interdisciplinary relationships. Drawing on situated learning theory and path dependency, I close by developing a set of testable network propositions about how the repeated interdisciplinarity can affect a community over time.

Author

• William C. Barley, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign