JRP Submission ID#163
Title: Sustainability Networks: Vicarious Interdisciplinarity and the Conundrum of Succession
Category: Main Article
Submitted: Jan 26, 2009
Size: About 10,000 words

ABSTRACT

Establishing interdisciplinary academic departments is a common response to the challenge of solving complex problems, but the assumptions that guide their formation are rarely tested. Additionally, the designers and managers of interdisciplinary academic departments on any topic struggle to set an organisational culture appropriate to the diversity of their members. This paper presents a preliminary analysis of collaborative dynamics within two Australian interdisciplinary university departments focussed on sustainability, 2000-2004. Social network diagrams and metrics of co-authorship and co-supervision are analysed qualitatively. Results show two very different models of collaboration choices at play in the two academic activities, which impact differently on academics as their careers progress. A "vicarious interdisciplinarity" was identified among key academics working narrowly in order to earn the resources that allow them to support others working interdisciplinarily. Those supported in this way appear to benefit from the esteem and non-redundant collaborative connections their mentors provide via this strategy, but they experience uncertainty about their own career opportunities in similar settings. This paper thus unearths a conundrum of succession in interdisciplinary academic settings. Additional research on scholarly progress, staff succession and student destinations in such settings is needed to inform departmental working cultures.

EXCERPTS

The analysis presented here explores the academic interactions between individual academics and research students in the key interdisciplinary, sustainability-focused department at those same institutions. This preliminary analysis suggests that the pro-collaboration rhetoric that justifies the founding of interdisciplinary, problem-based departments on cross-cutting topics like sustainability has limited applicability. While this current analysis is itself preliminary, it sets the stage for a research agenda on the organisational cultures of such interdisciplinary units, while they are multiplying world-wide.

This paper will first provide background to the challenges to individuals and institutions of interdisciplinarity in universities and some of the sociological methods and theories adapted here to investigate it. The two cases are briefly introduced, and a combination of custom metrics, visualisations and qualitative analyses used to glean common patterns. Finally, a thought experiment is used to play these patterns forward to understand their impacts on individual careers, universities and 'sustainability science'.
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Reviewers familiar with these issues may kindly respond.

DP
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