An academic discipline or academic field is a subdivision of
knowledge that is
taught and
researched at the college or university level. Disciplines are defined (in part) and recognized by the
academic journals in which
research is published, and the
learned societies and
academic departments or faculties within colleges and universities to which their practitioners belong. Academic disciplines are conventionally divided into the
humanities, including language, art and cultural studies, and the
scientific disciplines, such as
physics,
chemistry, and
biology; the
social sciences are sometimes considered a third category.
Individuals associated with academic disciplines are commonly referred to as ''
experts'' or ''specialists''. Others, who may have studied
liberal arts or
systems theory rather than concentrating in a specific academic discipline, are classified as ''generalists''.
While academic disciplines in and of themselves are more or less focused practices, scholarly approaches such as
multidisciplinarity/interdisciplinarity,
transdisciplinarity, and
cross-disciplinarity integrate aspects from multiple academic disciplines, therefore addressing any problems that may arise from narrow concentration within specialized fields of study. For example, professionals may encounter trouble communicating across academic disciplines because of differences in language, specified concepts or methodology.
Some researchers believe that academic disciplines may, in the future, be replaced by what is known as
Mode 2 or "post-academic science", which involves the acquisition of cross-disciplinary knowledge through collaboration of specialists from various academic disciplines.
Terminology
Also known as a ''field of study'', ''field of inquiry'', ''research field'' and ''branch of knowledge''. The different terms are used in different countries and fields.
History of the concept
The
University of Paris in 1231 consisted of four
faculties:
Theology,
Medicine,
Canon Law and
Arts. Educational institutions originally used the term "discipline" to catalog and archive the new and expanding body of information produced by the scholarly community. Disciplinary designations originated in German universities during the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Most academic disciplines have their roots in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century
secularization of universities, when the traditional
curricula were supplemented with non-classical languages and
literatures,
social sciences such as
political science,
economics,
sociology and
public administration, and
natural science and
technology disciplines such as
physics,
chemistry,
biology, and
engineering.
In the early twentieth century, new academic disciplines such as
education and
psychology were added. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was an explosion of new academic disciplines focusing on specific themes, such as
media studies,
women's studies, and
Africana studies. Many academic disciplines designed as preparation for careers and professions, such as
nursing,
hospitality management, and
corrections, also emerged in the universities. Finally, interdisciplinary scientific fields of study such as
biochemistry and
geophysics gained prominence as their contribution to knowledge became widely recognized. Some new disciplines, such as
public administration, can be found in more than one disciplinary setting; some public administration programs are associated with business schools (thus emphasizing the public management aspect), while others are linked to the political science field (emphasizing the
policy analysis aspect).
As the twentieth century approached, these designations were gradually adopted by other countries and became the accepted conventional subjects. However, these designations differed between various countries. In the twentieth century, the natural science disciplines included:
physics,
chemistry,
biology,
geology, and
astronomy. The social science disciplines included:
economics,
politics,
sociology, and
psychology.
Prior to the twentieth century, categories were broad and general, which was expected due to the lack of interest in science at the time. With rare exceptions, practitioners of science tended to be amateurs and were referred to as "natural historians" and "natural philosophers"—labels that date back to Aristotle—instead of "scientists". Natural history referred to what we now call life sciences and natural philosophy referred to the current physical sciences.
Prior to the twentieth century, few opportunities existed for science as an occupation outside the educational system. Higher education provided the institutional structure for scientific investigation, as well as economic support for research and teaching. Soon, the volume of scientific information rapidly increased and researchers realized the importance of concentrating on smaller, narrower fields of scientific activity. Because of this narrowing, scientific specializations emerged. As these specializations developed, modern scientific disciplines in universities also improved their sophistication. Eventually, academia's identified disciplines became the foundations for scholars of specific specialized interests and expertise.
Functions and criticism
An influential critique of the concept of academic disciplines came from
Michel Foucault in his 1975 book, ''
Discipline and Punish''. Foucault asserts that academic disciplines originate from the same social movements and mechanisms of control that established the modern prison and penal system in eighteenth-century
France, and that this fact reveals essential aspects they continue to have in common: "The disciplines characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate." (Foucault, 1975/1979, p. 223)
Communities of academic disciplines
Communities of academic disciplines can be found outside academia within corporations, government agencies, and independent organizations, where they take the form of associations of professionals with common interests and specific knowledge. Such communities include corporate
think tanks,
NASA, and
IUPAC. Communities such as these exist to benefit the organizations affiliated with them by providing specialized new ideas, research, and findings.
Nations at various developmental stages will find need for different academic disciplines during different times of growth. A newly developing nation will likely prioritize government, political matters and engineering over those of the humanities, arts and social sciences. On the other hand, a well-developed nation may be capable of investing more in the arts and social sciences. Communities of academic disciplines would contribute at varying levels of importance during different stages of development.
Interactions
These categories explain how the different academic disciplines interact with one another.
Multidisciplinary
Multidisciplinary knowledge is associated with more than one existing academic discipline or profession.
A multidisciplinary community or project is made up of people from different academic disciplines and professions. These people are engaged in working together as equal stakeholders in addressing a common challenge. A multidisciplinary person is one with degrees from two or more academic disciplines. This one person can take the place of two or more people in a multidisciplinary community. Over time, multidisciplinary work does not typically lead to an increase or a decrease in the number of academic disciplines. One key question is how well the challenge can be decomposed into subparts, and then addressed via the distributed knowledge in the community. The lack of shared vocabulary between people and communication overhead can sometimes be an issue in these communities and projects. If challenges of a particular type need to be repeatedly addressed so that each one can be properly decomposed, a multidisciplinary community can be exceptionally efficient and effective.
There are many examples of a particular idea appearing in different academic disciplines, all of which came about around the same time. One example of this scenario is the shift from the approach of focusing on sensory awareness of the whole, "an attention to the 'total field, a "sense of the whole pattern, of form and function as a unity", an "integral idea of structure and configuration". This has happened in art (in the form of cubism), physics, poetry, communication and educational theory. According to
Marshall McLuhan, this paradigm shift was due to the passage from the era of mechanization, which brought sequentiality, to the era of the instant speed of electricity, which brought simultaneity.
Multidisciplinary approaches also encourage people to help shape the innovation of the future. The political dimensions of forming new multidisciplinary partnerships to solve the so-called societal Grand Challenges were presented in the Innovation Union and in the European Framework Programme, the
Horizon 2020 operational overlay. Innovation across academic disciplines is considered the pivotal foresight of the creation of new products, systems, and processes for the benefit of all societies' growth and wellbeing. Regional examples such as Biopeople and industry-academia initiatives in translational medicine such as SHARE.ku.dk in Denmark provides the evidence of the successful endeavour of multidisciplinary innovation and facilitation of the paradigm shift.
Transdisciplinary
In practice, transdisciplinary can be thought of as the union of all interdisciplinary efforts. While interdisciplinary teams may be creating new knowledge that lies between several existing disciplines, a transdisciplinary team is more holistic and seeks to relate all disciplines into a coherent whole.
Cross-disciplinary
Cross-disciplinary knowledge is that which explains aspects of one discipline in terms of another. Common examples of cross-disciplinary approaches are studies of the
physics of
music or the
politics of
literature.
Bibliometric studies of disciplines
Bibliometrics can be used to map several issues in relation to disciplines, for example the flow of ideas within and among disciplines (Lindholm-Romantschuk, 1998) or the existence of specific national traditions within disciplines. Scholarly impact and influence of one discipline on another may be understood by analyzing the flow of citations.
The Bibliometrics approach is described as straightforward because it is based on simple counting. The method is also objective but the quantitative method may not be compatible with a qualitative assessment and therefore manipulated. The number of citations is dependent on the number of persons working in the same domain instead of inherent quality or published result's originality.
See also
*
Outline of academic disciplines
*
List of academic fields
References
Further reading
* Abbott, A. (1988). ''The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor'', University of Chicago Press.
* Augsburg, T. (2005), Becoming Interdisciplinary: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies.
* Dogan, M. & Pahre, R. (1990). "The fate of formal disciplines: from coherence to dispersion." In ''Creative Marginality: Innovation at the Intersections of Social Sciences''. Boulder, CO: Westview. pp. 85–113.
* Dullemeijer, P. (1980).
Dividing biology into disciplines: Chaos or multiformity? ''Journal Acta Biotheoretica'', 29(2), 87–93.
* Fagin, R.; Halpern, J.Y.; Moses, Y. & Vardi, M.Y. (1995). ''Reasoning about Knowledge'', MIT Press.
* Gibbons, M.; Limoges, C.; Nowotny, H.; Schwartzman, S.; Scott, P. & Trow, M. (1994).
The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies'. London: Sage.
* Golinski, J. (1998/2005). ''Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivis, and the History of Science''. New York: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 2: "Identity and discipline." Part II: ''The Disciplinary Mold''. pp. 66–78.
* Hicks, D. (2004).
The Four Literatures of Social Science. IN: ''Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research: The Use of Publication and Patent Statistics in Studies of S&T Systems''. Ed. Henk Moed. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
* Hyland, K. (2004). ''Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing''. New edition. University of Michigan Press/ESL.
* Klein, J.T. (1990). ''Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice''. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
*
* Leydesdorff, L. & Rafols, I. (2008)
A global map of science based on the ISI subject categories ''Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology''.
* Lindholm-Romantschuk, Y. (1998).
Scholarly Book Reviewing in the Social Sciences and Humanities: The Flow of Ideas within and among Disciplines'. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
* Martin, B. (1998).
Information Liberation: Challenging the Corruptions of Information Power'. London: Freedom Press
* Morillo, F.; Bordons, M. & Gomez, I. (2001).
An approach to interdisciplinarity bibliometric indicators" ''Scientometrics'', 51(1), 203–22.
* Morillo, F.; Bordons, M. & Gomez, I. (2003). "Interdisciplinarity in science: A tentative typology of disciplines and research areas". ''Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology'', 54(13), 1237–49.
* Newell, A. (1983). "Reflections on the structure of an interdiscipline." In Machlup, F. & U. Mansfield (Eds.), ''The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages''. pp. 99–110. NY: John Wiley & Sons.
* Pierce, S.J. (1991). "Subject areas, disciplines and the concept of authority". ''Library and Information Science Research'', 13, 21–35.
* Porter, A.L.; Roessner, J.D.; Cohen, A.S. & Perreault, M. (2006).
Interdisciplinary research: meaning, metrics and nurture" ''Research Evaluation'', 15(3), 187–95.
* Prior, P. (1998).
Writing/Disciplinarity: A Sociohistoric Account of Literate Activity in the Academy'. Lawrence Erlbaum. (Rhetoric, Knowledge and Society Series)
* Qin, J.; Lancaster, F.W. & Allen, B. (1997).
Types and levels of collaboration in interdisciplinary research in the sciences" ''Journal of the American Society for Information Science'', 48(10), 893–916.
* Rinia, E.J.; van Leeuwen, T.N.; Bruins, E.E.W.; van Vuren, H.G. & van Raan, A.F.J. (2002).
Measuring knowledge transfer between fields of science" ''Scientometrics'', 54(3), 347–62.
* Sanz-Menendez, L.; Bordons, M. & Zulueta, M. A. (2001). "
tp://ftp.repec.org/opt/ReDIF/RePEc/ipp/wpaper/dt-0104.pdf Interdisciplinarity as a multidimensional concept: its measure in three different research areas" ''Research Evaluation'', 10(1), 47–58.
* Stichweh, R. (2001). "Scientific Disciplines, History of". Smelser, N.J. & Baltes, P.B. (eds.). ''International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences''. Oxford: Elsevier Science. pp. 13727–31.
* Szostak, R. (October 2000). Superdisciplinarity: A Simple Definition of Interdisciplinarity With Profound Implications. Association for Integrative Studies, Portland, Oregon. (Meeting presentation)
* Tengström, E. (1993). Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskapen – ett fler- eller tvärvetenskapligt område? Svensk Biblioteksforskning (1), 9–20.
* Tomov, D.T. & Mutafov, H.G. (1996). "Comparative indicators of interdisciplinarity in modern science." ''Scientometrics'', 37(2), 267–78.
* van Leeuwen, T.N. & Tijssen, R.J.W. (1993). "Assessing multidisciplinary areas of science and technology – A synthetic bibliometric study of Dutch nuclear-energy research." ''Scientometrics'', 26(1), 115–33.
* van Leeuwen, T.N. & Tijssen, R.J.W. (2000). "Interdisciplinary dynamics of modern science: analysis of cross-disciplinary citation flows." ''Research Evaluation'', 9(3), 183–87.
* Weisgerber, D.W. (1993). "Interdisciplinary searching – problems and suggested remedies – A Report from the ICSTI Group on Interdisciplinary Searching." ''Journal of Documentation'', 49(3), 231–54.
* Wittrock, B. (2001). "Disciplines, History of, in the Social Sciences." ''International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences'', pp. 3721–28. Smeltser, N.J. & Baltes, P.B. (eds.). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
External links
Association for Interdisciplinary StudiesRyan Shaw. 2020. "Periodizationin ''ISKO Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization'', eds. Birger Hjørland and Claudio Gnoli.
Sandoz, R. (ed.), ''Interactive Historical Atlas of the Disciplines'', University of Geneva
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