Introduction

As early as the 1920s, the US Social Science Research Council (SSRC) recognized that, in only several decades after its invention, the departmental/disciplinary structure of the university was becoming an obstacle to effectively addressing comprehensive social problems. Especially in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the Rockefeller Foundation and then the Ford Foundation worked with the SSRC to fund interdisciplinary research and teaching in US higher education. In the early Cold War era, area studies programs were major recipients of that funding. As a consequence, international studies during this period were often conceptualized as interdisciplinary (Calhoun, 2017). At the founding of the International Studies Association (ISA) in 1959, its mission statement explicitly states that the ISA “promotes interdisciplinary approaches to problems that cannot fruitfully be examined from the confines of a single discipline” (International Studies Perspectives, May, 2007, back cover).

The first section of this essay is a historical survey of selected professional literature on interdisciplinary studies, beginning with the classic 1972 OECD Report on its Paris conference (Apostel, 1972). It was the first major book entitled Interdisciplinarity. To achieve some conceptual clarity on the many varieties of interdisciplinary activity in the academy, basic terms were defined and a typology proposed. The second major part of this essay is structured by that typology of multidisciplinary, crossdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches. Since all of these categories rely on disciplines as the core ingredient, discipline is also defined.

In recent years, the concept interdisciplinarity has become popular among scholars. Many books and articles have it in their titles. Books on interdisciplinary approaches vary from those promoting interdisciplinarity (Farrell, Lusatia, & Vanden Hove, 2013) to those denigrating it and praising the superior qualities of the disciplines (Jacobs, 2014). Furthermore, the widespread discussion of interdisciplinarity does not mean that it has politically succeeded in the academy. By and large the conventional disciplines have maintained their power over the university and funding bureaucracies. The last section of this essay discusses the varying fortunes of interdisciplinary approaches in the academy, especially in reference to international relations.

Historical Survey of Select Literature

The noun interdisciplinarity made its professional debut in a 1972 publication from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The report, entitled Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities (Apostel, 1972), was sponsored by OECD’s Parisian-based Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. The Report had chapters written by scholars from six different European countries: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Though there were many differences between them, they all shared the thought that the scientific enterprise had become less effective due to disciplinary fragmentation, and that a counter movement for the unification of knowledge was the proper response. The problem was “how to unify knowledge and what the many implications of such unity are for teaching and research in the universities …” (Apostel, 1972, p. 11). Unification “means the integration of concepts and methods in these disciplines” (pp. 11–12). A number of unifying schemas were proposed, including mathematics, linguistic structuralism, Marxism and general systems. Although the authors had different “transdisciplinary” proposals, they all agreed that “interdisciplinarity is a way of life. It is basically a mental outlook which combines curiosity with open mindedness and a spirit of adventure and discovery. . . .” It is practiced collectively. . . . It teaches that there can be no discontinuity between education and research” (Apostel, p. 285).

In addition to a number of important theoretical articles, the OECD report had a major emphasis on the design and implementation of interdisciplinary universities. The authors of that section, Asa Briggs of Sussex University and Guy Michaud of the University of Paris, gave as their sample model an interdisciplinary university with a special emphasis on international relations. They believed that because the field of international relations had the most complex connections, it necessarily involved the study of many methods, disciplines, issues, languages, and geographical areas. All students of their proposed university were expected to be familiar with the basic approaches and concepts of anthropology, politics, economics, international law, ecology, geography, history, sociology, and ethno-psychology (Apostel, 1972, pp. 253–257).

Chronologically, the next major book that addressed the general issue of interdisciplinarity in the university setting was entitled Interdisciplinarity and Higher Education. It was published in 1979, and its editor was Joseph Kockelmans, the Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Pennsylvania State University. Possibly because he was European-educated, his orientation was similar to the authors of the OECD Report. He argued that only through “philosophical reflection” can the society’s intellectuals approach the “totality of meaning.” To overcome the fragmented worlds that they have created, they need to reach agreement not only on the position of the sciences, but also on “religion, morality, the arts and our sociopolitical praxis” (Kockelmans, 1979, pp. 153–158). However, Kockelmans was opposed to using a pre-existing framework, such as the ones listed above in the OECD Report, or the logical positivism of the Unification of Science movement spearheaded by the Vienna Circle in the 1930s. None of them fulfilled the comprehensive vision that Kockelmans advocated.

In October of 1984, OECD, in collaboration with the Swedish National Board of Universities and Colleges, decided to hold a conference to revisit the concept and experience of interdisciplinarity. More than half of the participants were from Sweden, and almost half of them were from one university, Linköping. Linköping University was especially interested in the topic because it had instituted a doctoral program based on four interdisciplinary themes (technology and social change, water in environment and society, health and society, and communication). The proceedings of the conference were published under the title Interdisciplinarity Revisited: Re-Assessing the Concept in the Light of Institutional Experience (Levin & Lind, 1985). Essentially the conferees agreed that the early enthusiasm for an interdisciplinary revolution was dampened by the realities of societal and institutional politics. Interdisciplinary research and teaching were still happening, but they were easier to accomplish if the participants did not boldly label them as such. The advisability of keeping a low profile was due to the fact that the “magical slot” from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s, in which interdisciplinary innovation had flourished, was replaced by a more conservative period in which disciplines reasserted their authority. George Papadopoulos of the OECD concluded that, “interdisciplinarity, even when it succeeds in unscrambling existing curricula, remains a hostage to the disciplines” (Levin & Lind, 1985, p. 208).

The first major work on interdisciplinarity by an American-educated scholar was published in 1990 by Julie Thompson Klein, professor of humanities at Wayne State University. Her book is entitled Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory and Practice. Rather than making an argument for a particular approach, Klein provided a compilation of all the existing literature across all fields of knowledge. She concluded her extensive survey by observing:

Interdisciplinarity has been variously defined in this century: as a methodology, a concept, a process, a way of thinking, a philosophy, and a reflexive ideology. It has been linked with attempts to expose the dangers of fragmentation, to reestablish old connections, to explore emerging relationships, and to create new subjects adequate to handle our practical and conceptual needs. Cutting across all these theories is one recurring idea. Interdisciplinarity is a means of solving problems and answering questions that cannot be satisfactorily addressed using single methods or approaches. Whether the context is a short-range instrumentality or a long-range reconceptualization of epistemology, the concept represents an important attempt to define and establish common ground.

(Klein, 1990, p. 196)

Nowhere in Julie Klein’s extensive bibliography (97 pages long) is there mention of the term international relations or international studies, although she does have a section on area studies.

In 1997, the Academia Europaea and the European Commission organized a conference in Cambridge, England around the topic “Interdisciplinarity and the Organisation of Knowledge in Europe.” The conference proceedings were published in 1999 under the same title (Cunningham, ed.). There were 24 contributors from 11 countries with most (9) coming from the United Kingdom. Several contributors referred back to the seminal article by Erich Jantsch in the 1972 OECD pioneering publication. Collectively they agreed that modern disciplines were a product of the scientific revolution of the 19th century. The specialized research entities of the University of Berlin seem to have been the origin of the disciplinary structure of knowledge. “Focusing scholarly attention on the essence or nucleus of the individual subject led inevitably to the putting-up of barriers” (Rüegg, 1999, pp. 34–35). The division into insular, specialized disciplines was seen by sociologists as an almost inevitable outcome of the differentiation associated with the process of industrialization. John Ziman argued that the impetus toward greater and greater specialization had to do with the scholarly requirement for originality. It’s easier to be a “big frog in a small pond” (Ziman, 1999, pp. 74–75). He concluded his essay by contending that “disciplines stand for stability and uniformity,” whereas “interdisciplinarity is a code word for diversity and adaptability” (pp. 81–82).

In the United States, some of the young scholars in international relations observed the disciplinary narrowing of the field and decided to publish a book in 2000 entitled Beyond Boundaries: Disciplines, Paradigms, and Theoretical Integration in International Studies (Sil & Doherty, 2000). A review (Miller, 2001) appearing in the newsletter of the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies observed that the book does not deliver on its promise to meaningfully discuss disciplines, paradigms, and theoretical integration; however, it does juxtapose different theoretical positions while calling for international relations scholars to be tolerant and willing to cross boundaries between disciplines and schools of thought.

In 2002, an English academic, Joe Moran, published a book that he simply entitled Interdisciplinarity. Though broad in comprehension, it focuses on English and cultural studies. He argued that the institutional implications of openly pursuing interdisciplinary approaches are inevitably political, both in the hierarchy of knowledge and in the allocation of material resources (Moran, 2002). Oxford University Press decided to enter this academic realm by publishing the Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (Froderman, Klein, & Mitcham, 2010). None of the 37 chapters are primarily on international studies, though one of the chapters uses area studies as an example (Calhoun & Rhoten, 2010). In 2017, the Handbook came out in a second edition (Froderman). Its 46 chapters address many issues, ranging from funding to pedagogy. However, there is still no chapter dedicated to international studies. The philosopher and editor Robert Froderman argued that “interdisciplinarity is the bridge between academic sophists (disciplinarians) and the rest of society” (p. 7).

In 2009, Pami Aalto of Tampere University in Finland embarked on a major project to discuss and showcase interdisciplinary approaches in international studies. Two books emerged from the project. The first was International Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches (Aalto, Harle & Moisio, 2011), and the second, Global and Regional Problems: Towards an Interdisciplinary Study (Aalto, Harle, & Moisio, 2012). Aalto and his fellow editors argue, “We want to assert that International Studies—as a wider field of studies than International Relations—must necessarily be more interdisciplinary than International Relations ever was during its golden era from the 1950s onwards” (Aalto et al., 2011, p. 3). They observed that, in the inter-war period, international studies was an interdisciplinary field with materials and perspectives drawn from many fields and disciplines. They noted that this sense of the field was spelled out in the 1939 League of Nations publication University Teaching of International Relations (Zimmern) as well as Quincy Wright’s magnum opus The Study of International Relations (1955). Despite Wright’s extraordinary effort to synthesize over 20 fields into the study of international relations, his influence over the subsequent development of the field has been minimal. International relations, especially in the United States from the 1950s on, has become more and more embedded in political science. A key reason for this evolution was the focus on the cold war power conflict. Ironically, a major intellectual force in this development was Quincy Wright’s colleague at the University of Chicago, Hans Morgenthau. However, with the end of the Cold War era, Aalto and his fellow editors were hoping for the emergence of a broader, more diverse, interdisciplinary approach to international studies (Aalto et al., 2011, pp. 11–19).

In 2013, two European-based scholars, Andrew Barry and Georgina Born, published a book in which they claimed to rethink what is meant by interdisciplinarity, entitled Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences. For instance, the authors challenge the conventional statement that interdisciplinary activity is about combining and integrating knowledge from existing disciplines. They believe that interdisciplinarity is about gathering knowledge from all available sources, not just disciplines. They point to community-based knowledge, local experience, and indigenous knowledge, among other sources. Also, they start with the premise that neither disciplinary nor interdisciplinary activities are monolithic or unchanging. Disciplines do have the political advantage in the academy because they usually control the curriculum and the budgets that include faculty hiring. Thus, the disciplines have considerable control over the conditions that determine the degree of receptivity to interdisciplinary research and teaching in any particular university setting. In Barry and Born’s opinion, truly interdisciplinary activities have qualities that differentiate them positively from the disciplines. These three qualities are accountability, innovation, and ontology. Accountability means being more responsive to societal needs. Innovation means being more practical about the problems that are addressed. And ontology means that interdisciplinary activities are more likely to be relational, holistic, and to view humans as being embedded in nature. Also, they respect the participation of the public in the discovery and application of knowledge. But interdisciplinary programs come and go. Some have staying power and become established interdisciplines, even new disciplines. Some get absorbed, whereas others disappear altogether. “The chapters in this book attest to the heterogeneity that characterises both disciplines and interdisciplines and the necessity of probing the genealogies of particular interdisciplinary problematics” (Barry & Born, 2013, p. 41).

The American Political Science Association noted the increasing popularity of interdisciplinary rhetoric and practice, and in 2007, they established a Task Force to study it. The report of the Task Force was published under the title Interdisciplinarity: Its Role in a Discipline-Based Academy (Aldrich, 2014). The report is interesting because of the obvious tension that permeates the document between proponents of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. The first chapter reiterates the value of disciplines. The Task Force Chair, John Aldrich, argued that disciplines are the foundation of knowledge and the academy. In his view, interdisciplinary efforts often lack valid and reliable measures for judging scholarship and teaching, and thus are inherently inferior. Nevertheless, in a subsequent chapter, four pioneers of interdisciplinary scholarship argued for the superior merits of interdisciplinary approaches. The four are David Easton (systems), R. Duncan Luce (cognitive science), and Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph (area studies). In fact, Easton stated, “I don’t see anything that can possibly be exciting and not be interdisciplinary. I think the disciplines have sort of exhausted their contributions to our understanding of politics” (Aldrich, 2014, p. 55). Lloyd Rudolph concluded his interview by offering this reflection: “I realize that it is not only that I value interdisciplinarity but also that I value being allowed to think out of the box of disciplinary methods. New concepts reveal new realities” (Aldrich, 2014, p. 72).

In 2013 and 2015, two books were published that had both “interdisciplinary” and “international relations” in their titles. The first was Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International Law and International Relations: The State of the Art, edited by Jeffrey Dunoff and Mark Pollack (2013). A more accurate title would have been “interdisciplinary perspectives on the historical relationship between international law and international relations.” The authors noted that during the inter-war period, scholars in the two fields worked very closely together. However, with the advent of World War II and the rise of realism as the dominant theory in international relations, the study of law was considered irrelevant, as unenforceable international law does not affect the behavior of nation-states. Furthermore, normative law was considered too non-scientific for the post-World War II behavioralists/positivists political scientists. It’s worth noting that the editors consider international relations a discipline and that they seem to use it interchangeably with political science. With the rise of other theories in international relations that challenged the dominance of realism, international law became a more acceptable ingredient of international relations scholarship in the 1990s and thereafter. However, instead of a more equal relationship between two disciplines, international law was often considered a subject rather than a discipline. Or as the editors put it, “the intellectual terms of trade were asymmetrical” (Dunoff & Pollack, 2013, p. 649). The interdisciplinary perspective of the editors and their fellow authors is reflected in their call for more pragmatic, eclectic theoretical approaches drawn from both international relations and international law. “Our call therefore is not for token inclusion of international law approaches, but rather for an interdisciplinary version of the pragmatic, analytically eclectic, tool-kit approach” (p. 653).

The second book, edited by Patrick James and Steve Yetiv, was Advancing Interdisciplinary Approaches to International Relations (Yetiv & James, 2015). Their advancement illustration is the application of many perspectives from different disciplines and interdisciplines to the topic of conflict studies. These include history, political science, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, gender studies, technology studies, demography, and systems analysis (p. 324).

In 2016, the British Academy published a report on its investigation of interdisciplinary research and teaching in higher education in the United Kingdom. It is entitled Crossing Paths: Interdisciplinary Institutions, Careers, Education and Applications. The working group was chaired by David Soskice of the London School of Economics. In his preface, he recognized the need to promote interdisciplinarity. According to him, this was necessary because the universities, the research councils, the journals and publishers were organized along disciplinary lines. “The incentive structures set up by the interplay of these institutions militates against interdisciplinarity” (p. 5). Then, paradoxically, Soskice went on to argue, as did the group report, that the best way to promote interdisciplinarity is the support of “strong disciplines” (Soskice, 2016, p. 6). This seems like a strategy that would perpetuate the problem they have identified. The group recommended that junior faculty should first make their reputations in a home discipline. Only then would it be safe to venture into interdisciplinary territory (p. 9). However, once socialized in the discipline’s world view, it’s less likely that faculty will venture into interdisciplinary territory.

The British Academy report recognizes that getting a credible and fair evaluation of interdisciplinary research is very difficult in a discipline-controlled environment. Nevertheless, the working group recommended “evaluating the whole and not just disciplinary parts of any interdisciplinary output. The quality of interdisciplinary work lies in the way that it brings disciplines together” (Soskice, 2016, p. 10). The evaluation chapter provides a set of guidance questions for research-review panels for evaluating interdisciplinary research proposals. One of the questions asks whether the proposal shows “an understanding of the challenges of interdisciplinary integration, including methodological integration, and the human side of fostering interactions and communication.” Therefore, it is not surprising that the chapter ends with the statement, “a focus on interdisciplinarity revives a sense of the academy as a holistic intellectual and social organism, integrated into the wider community, in which multiple flows and exchanges between all of its parts ensure its vitality” (Soskice, 2016, p. 70).

In 2019, Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies dedicated an entire issue to the work of the most prolific American scholar of interdisciplinarity, Julie Thompson-Klein (Augsburg, 2019). Her newest book is scheduled to be published in 2021 with the title Beyond Interdisciplinarity: Boundary Work, Communication, and Collaboration in the 21st Century. The book focuses on a full range of sector-crossing, including not only academic disciplines, but also occupational professions, interdisciplinary fields, public and private spheres, local communities, project stakeholders, and countries and cultures across the globe, wherever knowledge production is occurring. This new book is an update and extension of her earlier work, Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities (1996).

Academic Discipline

Disciplines are the basic units in the structure of knowledge that have been “historically delineated by departmentalization. Within each discipline there are rational, accidental, and arbitrary factors responsible for the peculiar combination of subject matter, techniques of investigation, orienting thought models, principles of analysis, methods of explanation and aesthetic standards” (Miller, 1982, p. 4). They constitute the bureaucratic subcultures of the modern university. The modern disciplinary system was established at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century.

Many scholars have tried their hand at the task of explicating the characteristics of an academic discipline, but the list provided by Arthur King and John Brownell (1966) in The Curriculum and the Disciplines of Knowledge still seems among the clearest and most comprehensive. Below is this author’s version of their original list:

Ideal-type conceptualizations of this nature have great heuristic value, but applying them in the “real world” becomes problematic. After all, every group of faculty organized around a defined academic interest that has aspirations for permanence, wish to be known, at least eventually, as a discipline. Recognition as a discipline means more prestige and the prospect of more dependable institutional support. A working solution to this definitional problem is to limit the designation of discipline to those departmental groupings that appeared at the beginning of the 20th century and have institutionally solidified their presence in the academy over the past 100 plus years. John Ziman called them the “Grand Old Disciplines” (1999, p. 73). Thus, in the social sciences, the conventional and building-block disciplines would be Anthropology, Economics, Geography, History, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology. Without some kind of limitation on the use of the designation discipline, even the distinction between discipline and interdisciplinary can become meaningless. Nevertheless, the solution proposed is admittedly an arbitrary one, but the historical process that created these disciplinary conglomerates in the first place was also a relatively arbitrary process. Eric Wolf argued that the field of classical political economy was divided into the specialized disciplines of economics, political science, sociology and anthropology in a process that lost touch with the real world.

Ostensibly engaged in the study of human behavior, the various disciplines parcel out the subject among themselves. Each then proceeds to set up a model, seemingly a means to explain “hard,” observable facts, yet actually an ideologically loaded scheme geared to a narrow definition of subject matter.

(Wolf, 1982, p. 10)

The establishment of these specialized disciplines at the beginning of the 20th century has been called the “academic enclosure” process (Becher, 1989). In a few decades, these disciplines had enclosed themselves in departmental organizations that gave them long-term bureaucratic protection. Yet these disciplines, according to Weingart and Stehr, are “the eyes through which modern society sees and forms its images about the world, frames its experience, and learns, thus shaping its own future or reconstituting the past” (Weingart & Stehr, 1999, p. xi). Stephen Turner argued that “disciplines are shotgun marriages . . . and are kept together by the reality of the market and the value of the protection of the market that has been created by employment requirements and expectations (Turner, 1999, p. 55). Turner believed that the disciplines’ animosity toward interdisciplinary initiatives was primarily driven by protectionism (p. 50).

The seventh disciplinary characteristic notes that the first six qualities come together in a world view that is unique to each discipline. Comparing world view components is a useful method for both disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholars. The concept has German origins and has been productively utilized in many academic and non-academic venues for 150 years. This author was introduced into the way anthropologists use the world view method by Robert Redfield (1956). According to Redfield, every culture or sub-culture has a world view, its embedded “mental map.” It provides guidance on the nature of the world, how we know the truth about it, what is right and wrong behavior, and what emotionally matters the most. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff contended that “World views are complex neural circuits fixed in the brain. People can only understand what fits the neural circuitry in their brains. Real facts can be filtered out by world views” (Lakoff, 2017). Critical psychologist Michael Mascolo noted “the concept of world view is founded on the epistemological principle that observation of the physical and social world is a mediated rather than a direct process” (Mascolo, 2014, p. 2086). He reaffirmed Redfield’s point that a complete world view has an ontology, an epistemology, and a normative belief system.

This author has used world view as the comparative method in understanding the different schools of thought in international political economy (Miller, 2018). One step in this process was identifying the comparative attributes of the basic contributing disciplines. A summary of that analysis is in Table 1: Post World War II Macro Social Sciences: Comparative Attributes. Economics, political science, and sociology are compared in six fundamental dimensions: core subject matter, central concepts, explanatory strategies, normative orientation, data collection, and data analysis.

Interdisciplinary Approaches

Crossdisciplinary Approaches

Transdisciplinary Approaches

Advocates for transdisciplinary approaches often directly challenge the efficacy of conventional disciplines, claiming that they are part of the problem rather than the solution, especially when the objective is the mitigation of complex social problems. Proponents of transdisciplinary approaches frequently accuse the hegemonic conventional disciplines of protecting the status quo rather than promoting progressive change. The framers of some transdisciplinary approaches see them as providing alternatives to the world views of the conventional disciplines that they would replace. Examples of discipline-replacement transdisciplinary approaches would be general systems theory, Marxism, cultural studies and sustainability studies. Examples of transdisciplinary approaches that could supplement rather than replace conventional disciplines would be symbolic interactionism, rational choice theory, and gender theory (Miller, 1982).

General systems theory, the transdisciplinary approach that Jantsch favored, contends that nature is a hierarchy of similar structures up through the whole succession of physical, biological, and social systems. There are similar developmental patterns throughout nature, but there are different paths that can lead to the same destination. Through the organization of energy from the environment (negative entropy) and communication with the environment (negative feedback), systems seek to maintain dynamic equilibria. This theory conceives of nature as a holistic set of relationships that thrives on diversity.

David Easton introduced systems thinking to political science in the 1950s and 1960s because he felt the discipline was too narrow. “I am not a political scientist but rather a social scientist interested in political problems” (Aldrich, 2014, pp. 52–53). Currently, Carolyn and Patrick James continue Easton’s systems approach with their application of “systemism” to foreign policy analysis. However, in their view, systemism moves away from Easton’s bias toward homeostatic proclivities and emphasis on the macro level. Systemism includes both the macro and the micro and all forms of interaction between them (James & James, 2015).

Since the 1960s, general systems theory has been the main transdisciplinary approach of environmental or ecological studies (Costanza, 1990). Today, this field is most likely to be called sustainability studies. In a major conference on transdisciplinarity held in Switzerland in 2000, sustainability was put forward not only as the major reason for the necessity of transdisciplinarity, but also as a transdisciplinary approach in itself (Klein et al., 2001). However, Egon Becker argues that sustainability studies is a “transdisciplinary field” that is more of a “conceptual and heuristic framework” than a general theory (1999, pp. 284–285).

The lack of an agreed-upon general theory for engaging in the intellectual process of integrating across disciplines led William Newell to search for the most comprehensive and functionally effective transdisciplinary theory. He decided on general systems. But the first difficulty that Newell faced was deciding on which version of general systems theory to embrace. He identified eight possibilities: chaos, complex systems, fractal geometry, nonlinear dynamics, second-order cybernetics, self-organizing criticality, neo-evolutionary biology, and quantum mechanics (Newell, 2001). After studying them all, he chose complex systems as the preferred approach. Newell (2001, p. 7) explains: “Specifically, the theory of interdisciplinarity studies that I am advocating focuses on the form of complexity that is a feature of the structure as well as the behavior of a complex system, on complexity generated by nonlinear relationships among a large number of components, and on the influence of the components and relationships of the system on its overall pattern of behavior.” Newell presented his preferred theory to a panel of well-known interdisciplinarians for their reactions. None of the six respondents agreed with his suggestion, primarily because they did not believe that the range and diversity of interdisciplinary possibilities could be captured within one theoretical framework (Issues in Integrative Studies 19, 2001, pp, 1–148)

One of the respondents to Newell’s proposal, Richard Carp (2001), took issue with his basic premise, namely that the knowledge to be integrated via complex systems theory comes exclusively from existing disciplines. Carp insisted on widening the knowledge sources. He stated that we should stop thinking of “the disciplines as unique sources or resources for knowledge and thought” (Carp, 2001, p. 74). Carp argued that we should “learn from multiple knowledge formations” (p. 75). Disciplines should not be the “gatekeepers.” The universities are just one of the many institutions in society that not only possess knowledge but can also create it. We should not be talking about interdisciplinary studies but “knowledge formations” (p. 75).

In Europe, the transdisciplinary movement has taken several different directions. The Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences conference in 2000 promoted a process form of transdisciplinarity that transcended not only disciplinary boundaries, but also the boundary between the scientific establishment on the one hand and the users of the results of scientific research on the other hand. Users include government agencies, businesses, non-profit organizations, and members of the general public. Since all of these groups are stakeholders in the solution of the societal problems that science has an obligation to address, they should all be present at the table in the research process. In fact, the more stakeholders involved, the more “robust” the research. “We take the contributions to the informing and the rationalizing of actions in their societal context to be the main performance of problem-oriented research, and by implication, also of transdisciplinary research” (Zierhofer & Burger, 2007, p. 57). In other words, according to the Swiss school, the purpose of transdisciplinary research is to seek and facilitate the implementation of solutions for societal problems, such as violence, poverty, and global warming, that serve the common good (Pohl & Hadorn, 2008). Norwegian professor Willy Ostreng, in his major book on interdisciplinary research, agrees and adds that as transdisciplinarity traverses the boundaries between science and stakeholder expertise it creates a new science, a “post-normal” science (Ostreng, 2010, pp. 29–33).

Another European school of transdisciplinarity is centered around Basarab Nicolescu, a French academic. His group is organized around the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research. The movement’s objective is the achievement of the totality of meaning across all the sciences, art, religion, and cultural perspectives. That endeavor involves the search for relations and isomorphisms across all realms. The French school’s epistemology is explicitly non-Aristotelian in that it wishes to go beyond lineal and binary logic. They recognize different levels of reality in which different modes of understanding prevail. They start with the differences between classical physics and quantum physics, between reason and intuition, between information and consciousness, and between linear and non-linear logics. Non-linear logic is explained as the unity of oppositions, the inclusion of the excluded middle, and the evolutionary process of ever more comprehensive syntheses. Manfred Max-Neef calls this epistemology “strong transdisciplinarity.” He sees some of it in the natural sciences, especially in quantum physics and complexity theories. However, he does not see any of it in the social sciences. He sees economics as the most retrogressive and therefore one of the biggest obstacles to a unified, spiritually evolved, sustainable future (Max-Neef, 2005, pp. 5–16).

There are some interesting analogies between “strong transdisciplinarity” and the field of cultural studies, for which many claim transdisciplinary status. Both approaches are strongly critical of the excessive reliance on rationality and analytic reductionism, as well as of the fragmented specialization of the structure of knowledge. The location of cultural studies at the interface of the humanities and the social sciences enables its practitioners to bring together their different concepts of culture and then to add the additional dimension of everyday meanings and practices present among the broader population (Moran, 2002).

It is generally agreed that the institutional origin of cultural studies was at Birmingham University in 1964. The founders had an anti-establishment orientation informed by Italian neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci and French post-structuralist Michel Foucault. The Birmingham group wished to understand and challenge the power over the general population that the cultural elites exercised through the mass media and the power that the intellectual elites exercised through their control of the structure of knowledge, that is, the departmental/disciplinary structure of the academy. When cultural studies diffused to the United States, the field lost some of its political agenda; however, it retained its emphasis on popular culture. Numerous academic fields are identified as contributing to cultural studies, including cultural anthropology, textual criticism, art and social history, linguistics, sociology, aural and visual culture, philosophy of science, political economy, communication studies, psychology, and feminism. These multiple sources led Joe Moran (2002, p. 50) to comment, “Cultural studies could be said to be synonymous with interdisciplinarity itself.” It is both ironic and instructive then that the founding enclave of cultural studies, the Birmingham Centre, was shut down by the higher education authorities of the United Kingdom in 2002, presumably because of the “low quality of its research production” (Klein, 2005, pp. 52–53).

Consequences

Advocating explicitly for interdisciplinary approaches in a discipline-controlled environment can be risky. It can be politically risky for administrative units and personally risky for faculty, especially for junior faculty. Interdisciplinary approaches do have implications for the structure and politics of knowledge. They have implications for International Relations, especially if the study of international relations is considered an interdisciplinary field. A 2002 publication assessing the field came to this conclusion:

While there seems to be little problem in designating international relations as a “field,” the symposium left unclear whether this field is most properly a subfield of political science, a subfield of several disciplines, an amalgam of the subfields of multiple disciplines or an academic discipline in its own right.

(Puchala, 2002, pp. xvi–xvii)

The dominant location for International Relations in the United States is as a subfield of Political Science (Aldrich, 2014, p. 5). In the United Kingdom, however, the field of International Relations is more often treated as a separate discipline (Waever, 1998). How the field is conceptualized and institutionalized does have implications for its intellectual strategies, the identities of its practitioners, and its access to resources, both on and off-campus. David Long has argued that “it matters whether IR is considered a discipline in its own right or not. It matters in teaching and research not only by what is cut off, but what is encouraged” (Long, 2011, pp. 59–60). Rudra Sil warned that “inflexible disciplinary structures may very well come to constitute a hindrance to whatever ‘progress’ is possible in our collective efforts to understand aspects of international life” (Sil & Doherty, 2000, p. 6). Nevertheless, American political scientists are firmly committed to keeping international relations within their fold. A 2002 doctoral dissertation tells the tale of how, in 1986, the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) successfully absorbed the multidisciplinary graduate program in International Relations. It is an interesting tale of money and powerful personalities, and it would probably be more accurately described as a hostile takeover (Plantan, 2002).

Even though the author of the dissertation, Frank Plantan, used the language of interdisciplinarity, he did not employ the conceptual distinctions presented above. That is partly because the graduate program of International Relations at Penn was just a multidisciplinary collection of volunteer faculty members from 10 different departments with no separate, dedicated financial support. By centering his analysis on the Penn case study, Plantan limited the operational meaning of interdisciplinary to this loose arrangement of multidisciplinary specialists, an unstable and vulnerable setup. Yet in his discussion of the intellectual development of the field he mentioned several integrating strategies that have crossdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary qualities. His examples included realism, functionalism, behavioralism, neoliberal institutionalism, rational choice, and constructivism. However, in his historical analysis Plantan saw these theoretical perspectives as ideas to fight over rather than as integrating strategies. In his experience, the competitive departmental environment triumphed over interdisciplinary cooperation. Plantan (2002, pp. 374–375) concluded, “The hefty sunk costs of an existing tenured faculty and staff, and a historic mission (however dubious) in the colleges or university’s broader curriculum, accords them a staying power, an inertia, that no interdisciplinary program can hope to achieve whatever its intellectual merit.”

When Robert Axelrod, the President of the American Political Science Association, established a Task Force in 2007 on Interdisciplinarity, he argued that interdisciplinary research is borrowing across disciplinary boundaries, both importing and exporting, but especially exporting (Axelrod, 2008). The Task Force Report (Aldrich, 2014) argued that interdisciplinary work begins with faculty who are prepared with accumulated deep knowledge in a discipline. To insure that interdisciplinary teaching and research do not endanger the institutional power of the conventional disciplines, the Report placed a major emphasis on discipline-based peer review. They contended that peer review is the preeminent means by which “the value of scientific knowledge can be established,” and peer review is only credible if it comes from an established discipline (Aldrich, 2014, pp. 13–23). They continued, “Disciplinarity has not yet been successfully transcended as a means to address key values of scholarship—particularly to resolve contested claims about knowledge, to anchor peer review and the authority it carries with it to protect academic freedom, or to manage the labor market” (p. 23).

Interdisciplinarians would find this reasoning self-serving at the very least. After all, one of the main reasons for engaging in truly innovative interdisciplinary activity is to break free of the narrow, restrictive and presumably inadequate contexts of the established disciplines. The National Academies Report (2005) argues that there are four “drivers” for interdisciplinary research: inherent complexity of nature and society, need to explore areas that are not confined to a single discipline, need to solve societal problems, and the power of new technologies (p. 40). This Report gives several examples, but the most comprehensive is the case of climate change. Research on this complex and vital issue involves 10,000 scientists in 80 countries from more than 20 disciplines, including agricultural scientists, archeologists, atmospheric chemists, biologists, climatologists, ecologists, economists, environmental historians, geographers, geologists, hydrologists, mathematicians, meteorologists, plant physiologists, political scientists, oceanographers, remote sensing scientists, and sociologists (p. 31).

The established disciplines have been attacked by the post-structuralists for being Eurocentric, sexist, racist, pseudo-objective, status quo-protective and structured in a way that is disconnected from reality. To this group of critics both the ontologies and epistemologies of the conventional structure of knowledge are unacceptable (Moran, 2002). Paradoxically, some of the academics who espouse these views have managed to find an institutionalized niche in the university in departments or centers of cultural studies, ethnic studies, post-colonial studies, and women’s studies. However, in the process of institutionalization, they seem to have followed the advice of the Political Science Task Force Report: if interdisciplinary projects want to be successful—that is, achieve bureaucratic recognition with regular budgets and assigned faculty positions—you need to behave like an established discipline (Messer-Davidow, 2002). Besides those interdisciplines that have successfully entered the university structure since the 1960s, there were many generic interdisciplinary programs that also evolved into departments even though they were founded as challengers to the disciplinary/departmental system. Evidently, the generic-interdisciplinary departments were perceived by the established departments as the most threatening as well as the most vulnerable. As a consequence, whenever conventional departments found sympathetic administrators they embarked on a campaign for their abolition. In the Politics of Interdisciplinary Studies the stories of several of these program eliminations are told. They include programs at Wayne State, Miami of Ohio, Appalachian State, and San Francisco State, among others. (Augsburg & Henry, 2009).

The Political Science Task Force Report also describes how the discipline-based peer-review process works in the federal grant-making process, the largest source of extramural funding in the United States. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is probably organized the most pervasively around the conventional or established disciplines. Therefore, disciplinary criteria are used to evaluate most grant proposals submitted to the NSF. There are small programs within NSF that seem to facilitate interdisciplinary projects: The Measurement, Methodology and Statistics Program and the Human and Social Dynamics Program.

Although the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is organized functionally, its reviewing process also relies largely on disciplinary faculty and their criteria for quality. Federal funding agencies reflect and respect disciplinary boundaries, though they do seek ways to attack new problems through interdisciplinary efforts (Aldrich, 2014, pp. 101–111). However, the ostensibly integrative interdisciplinary projects they fund frequently end up as merely multidisciplinary.

A group that studied the grant-making experience of the Academy of Finland from 1997–2004 discovered, to their surprise, that almost half of the grants (42%) had some degree of interdisciplinarity despite the disciplinary orientations of the review boards. The solution of the study authors to the disciplinary/interdisciplinary divide is to consider all research interdisciplinary. They reason that since disciplinary boundaries are so amorphous and so frequently permeated that maintaining these distinctions is artificial and inhibitive of creativity in research (Bruun, Hukkinen, Huutoniemi, & Klein, 2005, p. 169). However, ignoring disciplinary boundaries and their associated departmental bureaucracy seems not only unrealistic about the confining power of the disciplinary structure of knowledge, but also politically naive as well.

A further interesting dimension of the International Studies Association (ISA) is the relationship between its many crossdisciplinary sections and the dominant Political Science discipline. Of the 29 sections (2019), 22 seem crossdisciplinary in nature. Examples include interdisciplinary studies, human rights studies, environmental studies, peace studies, feminist theory and gender studies, and global development studies. For years the leadership of the ISA seemed merely to presume, despite the organization’s claim to interdisciplinarity, that all the section program chairs could gather at the annual Political Science Convention to review the draft program of the upcoming ISA Convention. The implicit assumption in this past ISA practice was that the section program chairs were most likely political scientists who would be attending the annual Political Science Convention. This assumption always struck this author as problematic, especially in light of the organization’s mission statement and its interdisciplinary membership. The greater efficiency of the Internet facilitated the discontinuance of this practice.

The history of the relationship of area studies to International Relations is a fascinating one in itself. The ISA section sponsoring this contribution, the Interdisciplinary Studies Section, was originally established by area studies scholars according to Fred Riggs, one of its founders. In the 1970s, area studies scholars were contemplating founding a separate umbrella organization for all area studies programs, but they were persuaded to stay within the ISA as an independent section. Area studies centers were established in elite universities after WWII as part of a national Cold War strategy. They were “among the most far-reaching interdisciplinary projects in American higher education” (Aldrich, 2014, p. 89). Their responsibility was to provide information on the geographic regions of the world in support of the national interests of the United States. Participating faculty came mostly from language, literature, anthropology, history, and political science (international relations) departments. The centers, despite their holistic aspirations, were multidisciplinary in form and particularistic in methodology. Money and guidance ostensibly came from private sources, such as the Ford Foundation and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), but they actually came from the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency (Cumings, 2002).

In the first few decades after World War II, the study of international relations was significantly oriented to area studies because the money flowing into the universities supported area studies type of knowledge. The legacy of that emphasis is reflected in a 2006 Teagle Foundation survey that found in the responses of 109 Liberal Arts Colleges, half of the top ten interdisciplinary majors were in area and international studies. Since the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, extramural teaching and research support has dwindled significantly for area and international studies. Lloyd Rudolph comments, “after the close of the Cold War, the disciplines and the ‘methodists’ succeeded in attacking and defeating the area studies orientation of Ford and via Ford the SSRC” (Aldrich, 2014, p. 70). Area studies programs have had to endure criticism from those who see them as a “colonial enterprise” (faculty in post-colonial and ethnic studies programs), while many in the disciplines see them as lacking any theoretical coherence and methodological rigor. From the perspective of conventional disciplinarians, their region-centric particularism and their multidisciplinary structures make them the poster examples of what ails interdisciplinary programs (Miyoshi & Harootunian, 2002; Szanton, 2004).

Nevertheless, despite the continuing identity crises in area studies, they have managed to survive. Their latest restoration positions them as part of the internationalization of the academy, presumably made necessary by the knowledge demands of globalization and regional hot spots such as the Middle East. However, the continuing viability of area studies remains uncertain. As one observer noted, the different area studies faculties are as separated from each other as the members of disciplines are from each other. “By and large, the world area studies tribes inhabit relatively watertight intellectual domains” (Lambert, 1991, p. 184). This observation is consistent with the author’s experience. As an administrator in charge of curriculum development, he suggested that the area studies programs could share a core course in which the common methodological principles of area studies could be explored. The area studies faculty, however, were not interested. Nevertheless, David Szanton hopes that participation in area studies programs have helped to “deparochialize” disciplinary faculty, though it does not seem to have lowered the heights of the disciplinary walls. Maybe by being one of the first interdisciplinary programs to use identity as one of its key concepts, area studies may have prepared the way for ethnic studies, women’s studies and post-colonial studies (Szanton, 2004).

The case of international political economy (IPE) also raises a number of interesting interdisciplinary issues. In its reincarnation over the last four decades or so, it fits in the category of crossdisciplinary hybrids. IPE’s location in the structure of knowledge is as confused as International Relations. The disciplines of Economics, Political Science and Sociology all claim IPE as a subfield. However, Marxists, in the tradition of classical political economy, see political economy as an overarching, holistic frame in which cultural, economic, political, and social dimensions are inter-related subsets. According to Marxists, the establishment of the specialized disciplines around these dimensions is a part of the hegemonic strategy of capitalism to obfuscate the oppressive nature of the capitalist system.

The late British political economist Susan Strange, a non-Marxist, complained about the lack of knowledge sharing across disciplinary boundaries. She was especially critical of the way in which economists and political scientists ignored each other and their respective knowledge domains. She accused American scholars of International Relations of being too narrowly connected to state-centric political models that did not include serious economic analysis. In fact, she argued, “Far from being a subdiscipline of international relations, IPE should claim that international relations are a subdiscipline of IPE” (see Strange, in Lawton, Rosenau, & Verdun, 2000, p. 412). Susan Strange is among the “Magnificent Seven” that Benjamin Cohen singled out in his intellectual history of international political economy (Cohen, 2008, p. 8). She was the leader of the “British School,” which is more holistic, interdisciplinary, and explicitly normative in contrast to the “American School,” which is more positivistic in orientation. Cohen continued his geographic schools of thought analysis of IPE in a 2014 publication, Advanced Introduction to International Political Economy. In response to criticism of the limitations of his original dichotomy, he added schools of thought based in continental Europe, Latin America, and China. He also recognized “leftist” or “heterodox” schools in the United States and the British Commonwealth. However, his geographic schools of thought approach focused primarily on national/regional and cultural differences, rather than theoretical.

Members of all schools of international political economy would probably be comfortable having their field identified as an “interdiscipline” (Underhill, 2000). An interdiscipline is a crossdisciplinary field that approximates the characteristics of an academic discipline, but it does not qualify as a 20th century conventional discipline. In fact, maybe International Relations would also best be characterized as an “interdiscipline.” However, that identification still leaves unanswered where International Relations fits in the power hierarchy of knowledge.

According to Barry Buzan and Richard Little, members of the English or British School of International Relations, the widespread placement of International Relations in the United States as a subfield of Political Science has significantly limited its theoretical potential. Buzan and Little (2001) argued that American International Relations is dominated by an ahistorical, Eurocentric, Westphalian, political/military model. One of the consequences of this approach is the preference for “fragmentation into the anarchy of self-governing and paradigm-warring islands of theory rather than integration into the imperial or federative archipelago of theoretically pluralist grand theory” (Buzan & Little, 2001, p. 31). Margaret Hermann, in her 1998 ISA presidential address, expressed seemingly similar sentiments about fragmentation: “The field has become an administrative holding company rather than an intellectually coherent area of inquiry or a community of scholars” (Hermann, 2002, p. 16). However, her solution is a respectful dialogue that builds a “mosaic of multiple perspectives” around problems that are issues of “world politics” (pp. 31–33). She does not seem to be recommending “grand theory” nor going beyond Political Science. Thus, hers is an intra-disciplinary rather than an inter-disciplinary solution. On the other hand, Hermann does seem to embrace the “interdisciplinary mental outlook” advocated by the authors of the pioneering OECD Report (Apostel, 1972).

Understanding the different types of interdisciplinary approaches and their differentiation from disciplinary approaches gives one deeper insight into the knowledge production and transmission process. If International Relations is to be a truly independent, interdisciplinary field that can take full advantage of multiple perspectives and methodologies in order to deal more effectively with global problems, it needs to liberate itself from the embrace of confining disciplines, especially Political Science.