“A Culture Of Curious And Interdisciplinary Vagabonding”? Challenges In Interdisciplinary Collaboration In Two Different Contexts

• In Event: Struggles for Power, Legitimacy, and Control between Disciplines within Interdisciplinary Research Organizations - I

Abstract

Scientific collaboration is considered vital to address complex challenges both in research itself and in wider society. However, collaborations are not only related to various advantages, e.g. synergies, pooling of resources, but also to tensions frequently revolving around trust, reciprocity, power struggles, or prerogative of interpretation, that hold the potential to create conflict. Likewise, collaborations oscillate between different poles, e.g. between inter-, trans- and monodisciplinarity, basic and applied research, or bottom-up and top-down research. In this study, we take this spectrum as a starting point to examine the determinants and effects of scientific collaboration in diverging contexts and embrace the explanatory role of varying, heterogeneous disciplinary cultures and constellations. Based on two comparative case studies in the fields of translational biomedical and interdisciplinary biodiversity research, we intend to elucidate three research questions: 1) What are the manifestations and sources of conflict in research collaborations? 2) What is the role of the disciplinary cultures and constellations in research collaborations when it comes to the emergence of conflict and to what extent do these overlap with other explanatory factors, e.g. gender? 3) How do organizations and individual researchers respond to conflict and by which means do they navigate and resolve conflict?
To provide answers to these question, we combine bibliometric data with qualitative in-depth analysis. This allows us to link changes in patterns of collaborative behaviour with the internal dynamics of collaboration that aren´t identifiable from the published record, such as the reasons, practices and the policies enabling, pushing or impeding collaboration.

Author

• Melike Janssen, German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW)