ABSTRACT
The various disciplines in the social and human sciences have each built up their own worlds of theory, each designed to clarify a selected aspect or aspects of life. But if one wishes to understand a particular person, group, locality or country, a particular situation, one must become ‘interdisciplinary’: one must attend to diverse aspects and how they inter-relate. This chapter explores the problematique of interdisciplinarity and asks that doctoral researchers give careful thought to how their own research might benefit from an interdisciplinary approach. If, for example, one studies the impacts of education in and on the state of Kerala in India, one cannot sensibly ignore cultural impacts, such that almost no one with a certain amount of schooling will now do heavy manual work: a major economic, as well as educational, fact. Similar considerations apply when we consider interdisciplinarity in policy-oriented
research, including in the field of education. Much policy-oriented research is again situation-and context-focused, although some aspires to widely applicable generalisations. If we find, for example, that in Indonesia private school graduates earn more, and have also learnt more, more cost-effectively, than state school graduates (Bedi and Garg 2000), we cannot directly conclude a need for greater private participation in the education sector, without also giving attention to issues such as future brain-drain, nationbuilding, willingness to work in priority sectors, and possibilities for reforming state schools. The complexity of policy cases frequently exceeds the grasp of discipline-gained
knowledge, even when brought together from various disciplines. Much interdisciplinarity arises, then, in response to practical and immediate life-problem situations, where we cannot wait for discipline-gained knowledge that is not yet available. Such work oriented to life-problems might not be conventionally scientifically elegant, but it draws on sophisticated craft skills of selection, synthesis and judgement (Rein and Schon 1994; Brewer 1999). Public administration and urban and regional planning, to take two important exam-
ples, are better seen as ‘interdisciplinary fields’ than as conventional scientific disciplines (Gasper 1990; 2000a; Rutgers 1998). Public administration works at the crossroads of several disciplines and a set of practical demands. Compared to general management it requires stronger involvement from law, history and economics, and it cannot be simply
a sub-discipline of management or political science. Whereas disciplines can attain a high degree of enclosure around self-defined concepts, methods and questions, and leave aside matters not convenient for this disciplinary matrix, a practically oriented public-servant enterprise like public administration should never adopt such a prioritisation of tidiness above usefulness. It has to draw on various types of understanding in order to tackle various types of pressing and interconnected real issues; it links material from different fields without unifying them (Gasper 2000a). Even for theorising, single-disciplinary abstracted theory has serious limits. If we
cannot analyse education in Kerala while ignoring the indirect economic impacts of mass aversion to menial work, or analyse the results of economic liberalism while ignoring the impacts of massive concentrations of wealth upon politics and conflict, then neither can we ignore such aspects in a general theory of economic adjustment or human development. We will see that there are many types and usages of ‘interdisciplinarity’, ranging from
mere juxtaposition of disciplines that do not interact but do acknowledge each other’s contribution; through a variety of forms of interaction, giving a range of types of interdisciplinarity; all the way to ‘transdisciplinarity’, where disciplines are left in the background and we focus afresh on situations.
