ABSTRACT
The basic argument of this essay is that disintegrated disciplines with many different and incompatible standards for what is good work tend to be precarious in academic settings. Geography, speech or rhetoric, organiza tional behavior or management studies, comparative literature, fine arts, communication studies, urban studies, evolutionary biology, history, phi losophy, and sociology seem to me to have similar problems in justifying their continued existence. (A justification for parts of this list of comparable cases, and of contrasting cases in the argument below, may be extracted from Whitley, 1984:90-94,130-148, 155,158,168-208.) What is good in them does not depend on the disciplines’ corporate existence; what is bad in them discredits the disciplines.
