Assche, K.A.M., van

English

Name not available

Understanding the nature of disciplinary boundaries as a reason for success in interdisciplinary research

Wageningen Yield 

be better to say that the shape of the jigsaw pieces changes, that the overall
shape of the puzzle changes and that the resulting picture can vary markedly
across time and space. This is the case because science is not a reflection of re-
ality but a construction of reality, and not only a body of knowledge but also a
group of people. A discipline is not an amount of knowledge related to one of
the subjects on the puzzle that shows us reality. It is an amount of knowledge,
yes. But since this knowledge is socially constructed, we should also consider
that a discipline is a group of people. 
Evident and trivial as it may seem, this simple assertion has consequences
not always understood in research contexts. Some of the consequences are re-
lated to the nature of disciplinary boundaries. What the French sociologist
Bourdieu called the sociology of the academy plays a pivotal role in the cre-
ation of knowledge. Knowledge is created in an institute; some knowledge is
more probable than other to emerge from this context. The rules and codes of
the institute influence the interpretation and validation of produced knowl-
edge. If I decide to dye my hair green and purple, I make a slim chance to be tak-
en seriously within the scientific community in general and the community of
my discipline in specific. 
A scientific discipline is part of an institute. Institutions, like all organisa-
tions, cannot easily erase themselves; they have a tendency to perpetuate them-
selves. This can imply several things. One of them is the solidification of the
disciplinary boundaries. Since reputations are built within disciplines, recog-
nition is gained within a disciplinary community, funding is organised along
disciplinary lines, validation procedures are routed in disciplines, the discipli-
nary boundaries are not likely to disappear. Scientific specialisation is creating
more and more boundaries.   
A discipline is also a group as such, by which I mean just a group of people,
regardless of other characteristics, comparable to an ethnic group. And ethnic
groups unavoidably have ethnic boundaries. The moment a group of people
starts to perceive itself as a group different from other groups, ethnic bound-
aries are emerging. People define themselves in contrast to others. The small-
er the difference between two groups may appear to an outsider, the more
DELTA SERIES 2 . 101
Understanding the nature of disciplinary boundaries
as a reason for success in interdisciplinary research
Kristof Van Assche
Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands
kristof.vanassche@wur.nl
Interdisciplinary research can succeed or not. Reasons for success and fail-
ure are manifold. I argue that one of the explanations for success is a thorough
understanding of the nature of disciplinary boundaries. These boundaries are
the rivers evidently to be crossed to create something like an interdisciplinary
research project. If one fails to grasp the nature of the boundaries involved, the
bridges will unavoidably collapse or will not be constructed at all, leaving a sum
of disciplinary motivated projects instead of an interdisciplinary one. Consid-
ering the amount of literature devoted to boundaries and interdisciplinary re-
search, and considering the available space in this article, we must limit our-
selves to a very concise treatment of the subject. However, I hope to convince
the reader of at least one thing: that disciplinary boundaries have several na-
tures, and that this should be kept in mind constantly when conducting inter-
disciplinary research.
Let’s start with a metaphor: knowledge is a puzzle. Very few people might
agree on this at first, but it can be a proper description of an assumption com-
monly held by scientists, maybe more widely spread throughout the natural sci-
ences. If we say a lot of scientists tend to see knowledge as a puzzle, we intend
to say that they consider the whole of all possible knowledge of the world as a
puzzle. So, at every moment in time some pieces are missing and some are at
the wrong place. Scientific progress creates a better picture of reality. Disci-
plines in this view are groups of pieces with a common subject, e.g. the castle
on a picture of a Swiss jigsaw-landscape. 
Of course, this is partly true. Like every metaphor, it is also partly untrue.
Knowledge is also a social product, and it bears the mark of its origin. It would
100 . DELTA SERIES 2
ogy in the development and the self-definition of positive sciences. A disci-
pline’s path of evolution is partly determined by the machines and methods
developed and used. If another method had been invented, the discipline would
have looked differently, and the same goes for the reality produced. At the same
time, methods and machines define the group of people using them: we are not
only the people who study proteins, not only the people different from others,
but also the people using these methods and these techniques. Upon hearing a
question addressed to them, scientists often run quickly to familiar methods
and techniques, because they are familiar and because they are part of their self-
definition as this or that kind of scientist.     
So, a discipline is also a discourse. This implies that it unveils certain as-
pects of reality while covering other aspects at the same time. In the Foucal-
dian perspective, this is the paradoxical nature of human knowledge: the struc-
tures producing knowledge hide other knowledge, make some other knowl-
edge-producing structures less likely to be developed. Here we appear to hear
a compelling argument for interdisciplinary research. If every discipline hides
knowledge, another one can fill the gaps. Then we would end up with the puz-
zle after all.
Unfortunately, Foucault did not make life so easy for us. A discipline is not
just covering a part of reality, no, it creates it owns image of it, thanks to all the
mechanisms mentioned in this text, among which the strongest are the bound-
ary- maintaining mechanisms. We could use the metaphor of the filter: if a
discipline is a filter, then an interdisciplinary research project can be a series of
filters. Crossing the boundaries then implies filtering information several times
in a row. The result would be a very poor image of reality instead of a richer one. 
This does not mean that interdisciplinary research is impossible; it rather
suggests that the reflection on a common language is of foremost importance.
It also suggests that a common language should not be defined by simply find-
ing the common denominator of the participating discipline’s languages. In-
stead, there is a need of constant reflection on the used language and concepts,
and an effort to construct a common conceptual framework, featuring at least
some new concepts. 
DELTA SERIES 2 . 103
minute differentiae will be stressed by themselves. A discipline needs identity
and identity necessarily creates and maintains difference. In this respect the fo-
cus on details to highlight the difference between Germans and Dutch, in spite
of their general similarity, is comparable to identity formation with and bound-
ary maintenance between planners and architects.
A group of people can use everything as a sign of its identity. An organisa-
tion, like a discipline, can actively maintain the difference with other groups
and therefore strengthen the group identity. It is also a symbol for this identity.
Dress codes, hairstyles, hobbies, political orientation, it can all become a sign
for the disciplinary identity, and solidify the boundaries. 
A special group of distinguishing codes is codes of communication. Vo-
cabulary, syntax and style are different in every discipline. Obviously, this is re-
lated to the subject. In mathematics, one will rarely meet the word ‘dog’. How-
ever, the language used in a discipline is also a tool to refrain the public and oth-
er disciplines from participating freely in internal discussions. Because such a
weak boundary could mean for outsiders that the discipline is a soft one, that it
is not very scientific, disciplinary language produces a smoke-curtain.   
At this point, it seems fruitful to move back to the puzzle and the domain of
knowledge and reality. It was said that the shape of the puzzle and everything on
it, are constantly changing. It can also be repeated that language creates and main-
tains disciplinary boundaries. Now I want to link these assertions to the notion of
discourse proposed by the French sociologist and philosopher Michel Foucault. A
discipline is a discourse in his sense; it is a structured set of ideas and the language
associated to it that makes reality accessible for human thought. In the same
movement, it creates reality. Discourses are contingent, cannot escape historicity,
they are dynamic, and they partly define a group of people. Foucault showed how
disciplines are discourses, how they originated in contexts strongly defined by
power relations and by the contingent, historic, content of certain basic concepts
like body, soul, matter and order. And he showed that the further evolution of the
disciplines couldn’t be explained without recourse to the starting point. 
Bruno Latour, our next French sociologist, added fascinating glosses on
this theory by pointing at the importance of methods, techniques and technol-
102 . DELTA SERIES 2
Notes on the discussion on this paper at the Alterra- seminar
1. A distinction was made by Nick Winder between discipline and commu-
nity, where discipline is considered as the top-down aspect of the knowledge-
system, the institutionalized context of the knowledge-production. Commu-
nity is in his view the group of people sharing [scientific] views, a bottom-up
phenomenon. I presented concepts comparable to discipline and community
while talking about institute and group, as aspects of the multiple identity of
discipline. Therefore, I partly agree with him. The importance of his distinction
deserves to be underlined, but could be placed in a somewhat different context
[a disciplines’ identity has many sides]. 
I do not fully agree with the linkage he makes between the concept couple
discipline – community and the couple top-down – bottom-up. Indeed, the
concept of institute is likely to entail more notions of hierarchy than the con-
cept of group. But at the same time, groups can partly identify themselves by re-
ferring to and attaching to the structures of an institute. Order can be imposed
and order can be asked for. A prisoner needs the prison after twenty years of im-
prisonment. He identifies with the institution, its rules, its order. Therefore, it
seems difficult to maintain that a discipline in Nick Winder’s conception [dis-
cipline as institution] is fully a top-down phenomenon and irrelevant for the
formation of identity. 
2. Arnold van der Valk mentioned the numerous difficulties experienced in
the practical application of my plea for a constant reflection on common lan-
guage and common frameworks. I wish not to deny these difficulties. It should
also be acknowledged that some projects can fail because the task implied in
the plea is in some cases an impossible one. However, I do not consider the plea
as something trivial or unrealistic, since a lot of very real projects start with the
definition of a common language or at least a common conceptual framework,
before going back to usual, which is monodisciplinary work or interdiscipli-
nary work without reflection on the communication. Some of these very real
projects fail because after a while people started to realize that the commu-
nicative transparency created by the common framework was a false one, that
people were referring to different things and concepts all the time, and using
DELTA SERIES 2 . 105
The reader has noticed that an analysis of disciplinary boundaries has in
this text been combined with an analysis of the concept of discipline. I consid-
er this necessary, because disciplines define themselves and can be defined in
several ways, and the chosen type of definition evidently influences the charac-
teristics and the role of boundaries: 
A discipline is an amount of knowledge on a certain subject.
A discipline is something creating its own subject.    
A discipline is a discourse, a structure producing knowledge. It is something contingent,
historic, dynamic, linked to a group of people.
A discipline is an organisation of people, an institution, self- perpetuating.
A discipline is a group of people, using all types of distinctive codes.
A discipline is a language.
Such a list reflects the complex identity of a scientific discipline. Every as-
pect of its identity produces and maintains its own type of boundaries, using
different mechanisms. Identities, boundaries and mechanisms could very par-
tially be unveiled in this text. It may however stand out very clearly that one im-
portant reason for success and failure in interdisciplinary research is a raised
awareness of the nature of the disciplinary boundaries to be crossed. Some
bridges are likely to be built, others not.
References
Assche, K. Van, Jacobs, M., Kwaliteit in complexiteit. Ruimtelijke kwaliteit en de kennisontwik-
keling daarover. (Alterra rapport 601), Wageningen, 2002.
Bastide, R., The semiotic analysis of scientific discourse, Paris, 1985.
Foucault, M., Les mots et les choses, Paris, 1968.
Foucault, M., L’ordre du discours, Paris, 1970.
Foucault, M., Surveiller et punir, Paris, 1975.
Latour, B., Wetenschap in actie, Amsterdam, 1995. [original title: Science in action] 
104 . DELTA SERIES 2
Disciplinary perception and interdisciplinary 
communication in management of natural resources
E. Heleen van Haaften
Vabene, Wageningen, The Netherlands
heleenvanhaaften@vabene-research.nl
Introduction
It is recognized worldwide that problems related to sustainable production
are complex and can only be resolved through interdisciplinary cooperation.
Problems related to interdisciplinarity are experienced in any project where dis-
ciplines work together to achieve sustainability. These universal problems are
the subject of this statement. They are discussed in the context of sustainable
management of natural resources.
DELTA SERIES 2 . 107
different basic assumptions without being aware of that. Far from stating that
a complete awareness of one’s own conceptual world is ever possible, I only
wanted to stress the necessity in interdisciplinary projects to raise this aware-
ness.  
106 . DELTA SERIES 2
Figure 1. The eco-cultural model: three groups of sciences (ecology, production, social) perceive
sustainable production in different ways (adapted from Berry et al., 1998) 


Understanding the nature of disciplinary boundaries as a reason for success in interdisciplinary research

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Name not available

Wageningen Yield

NARCIS