ABSTRACT
No one doubts the historically significant role of disciplines in shaping some academic practices, and the Biglan typology has been deployed in a number of studies (Neumann 2001: 144). What is in doubt is the extent to which disciplinary explanations help us to understand the messy reality of academic work and practices in the modern university. Fanghanel (2009: 567) points out that Biglan, Becher and others tending toward structuralism ‘tend to yield a normalised view of practice, emphasising similarities between disciplinary “tribes” and “territories” while glossing over internal differences’ – the influence of other factors such as local context or individual ideology is understated. She reminds us about the tensions between the cognitive and the social, not addressed in these perspectives. For Fanghanel, discipline is both ‘a knowledge field and … a sociological object’ (Fanghanel 2009: 568), which Becher and Trowler (2001) also acknowledged. In Biglan’s terms, the intellectual territory is on a continuum of hard to soft fields, and pure to applied ones. On the social continua are Biglan’s convergent, divergent, urban and rural dimensions. However, even the most Biglanesque of writers acknowledge that these dimensions are relative rather than absolute (Kekale 2002: 68), and that boundaries are complex (Becher 1989). Malcolm and Zucas (2009: 498–9) tell us that ‘disciplinary boundaries and identities are constantly shifting, contested and dissolving’ and ‘attempts to divide the “mess” of academic work into essentially artificial categories’ can lead to confusion and fragmentation. Like many other current writers, they exhort us to take a more ‘nuanced’ approach to understanding academic life. Smeby (1996) too suggests that more complex analytical schemes are necessary for consideration of such disciplinary differences.
