Discipline (academia)

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"Academic discipline" redirects here. It is not to be confused with School discipline.
For a topical guide to this subject, see Outline of academic disciplines.

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An academic discipline is a branch of knowledge. It incorporates expertise, people,
projects, communities, challenges, studies, inquiry, and research areas that are strongly
associated with a given academic discipline. For example, the branches of science are
commonly referred to as the scientific disciplines, e.g. physics, mathematics, computer
science.
Individuals associated with academic disciplines are commonly referred to as experts or
specialists. Others, who may have studied liberal arts or systems theory rather than
concentrating in a specific academic discipline are classified asgeneralists.
While academic disciplines in and of themselves are more or less focused practices,
scholarly approaches such asmultidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity,
and crossdisciplinarity, integrate aspects from multiple academic disciplines, therefore
addressing any problems that may arise from narrow concentration within specialized fields
of study. For example, professionals may encounter trouble communicating across
academic disciplines because of differences in language and/or specified concepts.
Some researchers believe that academic disciplines may be replaced by what is known
as Mode 2[1] or "post academic science",[2] which involves the acquisition of crossdisciplinary knowledge through collaboration of specialists from various academic
disciplines.

Contents
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1History of the concept

2Functions and criticism
3Communities of academic disciplines
4Variations
4.1Multidisciplinary
4.2Interdisciplinary
4.3Transdisciplinary
4.4Cross-disciplinary
5Bibliometric studies of disciplines
6References
7Further reading

8External links

History of the concept[edit]

The University of Paris in 1231 consisted of four faculties: Theology, Medicine, Canon
Law and Arts.[3]
Educational institutions originally used the term "discipline" to catalog and archive the new
and expanding body of information produced by the scientific community. Disciplinary
designations originated in German Universities during the beginning of the nineteenth
century.
Most academic disciplines have their roots in the mid-to-late-19th century secularization of
universities, when the traditionalcurricula were supplemented with non-classical languages
and literatures, social sciences such as political science,economics, sociology and public
administration, and natural science and technology disciplines such
as physics, chemistry,biology, and engineering.
In the early 20th century, new academic disciplines such
as education and psychology were added. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was an explosion
of new academic disciplines focusing on specific themes, such as media studies, women's
studies, and black studies. Many academic disciplines designed as preparation for careers
and professions, such as nursing,hospitality management, and corrections, also emerged
in the universities. Finally, interdisciplinary scientific fields of study such
as biochemistry and geophysics gained prominence as their contribution to knowledge
became widely recognized.
As the twentieth century approached, these designations were gradually adopted by other
countries and became the accepted conventional subjects. However, these designations
differed between various countries.[4] In the twentieth century, the science disciplines
included: physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy. The social science
disciplines included: economics, politics, sociology, and psychology.
Prior to the twentieth century, categories were broad and general, which was expected due
to the lack of interest in science at the time. With rare exceptions, practitioners of science
tended to be amateurs and were referred to as "natural historians" and "natural
philosophers"labels that date back to Aristotleinstead of "scientists". [5] Natural history
referred to what we now call life sciences and natural philosophy referred to the current
physical sciences.
Few opportunities existed for science as an occupation outside of the educational system.
Higher education provided the institutional structure for scientific investigation, as well as
economic support. Soon, the volume of scientific information rapidly increased and people
realized the importance of concentrating on smaller fields of scientific activity. Because of
this, scientific specializations emerged. As these specializations developed, modern
scientific disciplines in universities also improved. Eventually, academia's identified
disciplines became the foundations for people of specific specialized interests and
expertise.[6]

Functions and criticism[edit]

A very influential critique of the concept of academic disciplines came from Michel
Foucault in his 1975 book, Discipline and Punish. Foucault asserts that academic
disciplines originate from the same social movements and mechanisms of control that
established the modern prison and penal system in 18th century France, and that this fact
reveals essential aspects they continue to have in common: "The disciplines characterize,
classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in
relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate." (Foucault, 1975/1979, p
223.[7])

Communities of academic disciplines[edit]

Communities of academic disciplines can be found outside of academia within
corporations, government agencies, and independent organizations, where they take the
form of associations of professionals with common interests and specific knowledge. Such
communities include corporate think tanks, NASA, and IUPAC. Communities such as these
exist to benefit the organizations affiliated with them by providing specialized new ideas,
research, and findings.
Nations at various developmental stages will find need for different academic disciplines
during different times of growth. A newly developing nation will likely prioritize government
and political matters over those of the arts and sciences. On the other hand, a welldeveloped nation may be capable of investing more into the arts and sciences.
Communities of academic disciplines would contribute at varying levels of importance
during different stages of development.

Variations[edit]
These categories explain how the different academic disciplines interact with one another.

Multidisciplinary[edit]
Main article: Multidisciplinary approach
Multidisciplinary' knowledge is associated with more than one existing academic discipline
or profession.
A multidisciplinary community or project is made up of people from different academic
disciplines and professions. These people are engaged in working together as equal
stakeholders in addressing a common challenge. A multidisciplinary person is one with
degrees from two or more academic disciplines. This one person can take the place of two
or more people in a multidisciplinary community. Over time, multidisciplinary work does not
typically lead to an increase or a decrease in the number of academic disciplines. One key
question is how well the challenge can be decomposed into subparts, and then addressed
via the distributed knowledge in the community. The lack of shared vocabulary between
people and communication overhead can sometimes be an issue in these communities and
projects. If challenges of a particular type need to be repeatedly addressed so that each
one can be properly decomposed, a multidisciplinary community can be exceptionally
efficient and effective.[citation needed]
There are many examples of a particular idea appearing in different academic disciplines,
all of which came about around the same time. One example of this scenario is the shift
from the approach of focusing on sensory awareness of the whole, "an attention to the 'total
field'", a "sense of the whole pattern, of form and function as a unity", an "integral idea of
structure and configuration". This has happened in art (in the form of cubism), physics,
poetry, communication and educational theory. According to Marshall McLuhan, this
paradigm shift was due to the passage from the era of mechanization, which brought
sequentiality, to the era of the instant speed of electricity, which brought simultaneity.[8]
Multidisciplinary approaches also encourage people to help shape the innovation of the
future. The political dimensions of forming new multidisciplinary partnerships to solve the
so-called societal Grand Challenges were presented in the Innovation Union and in the
European Framework Programme, the Horizon 2020 operational overlay. Innovation across
academic disciplines is considered the pivotal foresight of the creation of new products,
systems, and processes for the benefit of all societies' growth and wellbeing. Regional
examples such as Biopeople and industry-academia initiatives in translational medicine
such as SHARE.ku.dk in Denmark provides the evidence of the successful endavour of
multidisciplinary innovation and facilitation of the paradigm shift. [citation needed]

Interdisciplinary[edit]
Main article: Interdisciplinarity

Interdisciplinary knowledge is the extent of knowledge that exists between or beyond

existing academic disciplines or professions. The new knowledge may be claimed by
members of none, one, both, or an emerging new academic discipline or profession.
An interdisciplinary community, or project, is made up of people from multiple disciplines
and professions who are engaged in creating and applying new knowledge as they work
together as equal stakeholders in addressing a common challenge. The key question is,
what new knowledge (of an academic discipline nature), which is outside the existing
disciplines, is required to address the challenge? Aspects of the challenge cannot be
addressed easily with existing distributed knowledge, and acquiring new knowledge
becomes a primary subgoal of addressing the common challenge. The nature of the
challenge, either its scale or complexity, requires that many people have interactional
expertise to improve their efficiency working across multiple disciplines as well as within the
new interdisciplinary area. An interdisciplinarian is a person with degrees and additional
interactional expertise from/in one or more academic disciplines, and new knowledge that
is claimed by more than one discipline. Over time, interdisciplinary work can lead to an
increase or a decrease in the number of academic disciplines. [citation needed]

Transdisciplinary[edit]
Main article: Transdisciplinarity
In practice, transdisciplinary can be thought of as the union of all interdisciplinary efforts.
While interdisciplinary teams may be creating new knowledge that lies between several
existing disciplines, a transdisciplinary team is more holistic and seeks to relate all
disciplines into a coherent whole.

Cross-disciplinary[edit]
Cross-disciplinary knowledge is that which explains aspects of one discipline in terms of
another. Common examples of cross-disciplinary approaches are studies of
the physics of music or the politics of literature.

Bibliometric studies of disciplines[edit]

Bibliometrics can be used to map several issues in relation to disciplines, for example the
flow of ideas within and among disciplines (Lindholm-Romantschuk, 1998) [9] or the
existence of specific national traditions within disciplines. [10] Scholarly impact and influence
of one discipline on another may be understood by analyzing the flow of citations. [11]

References[edit]
1.

Jump up^ Gibbons, Michael; Camille Limoges, Helga

Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott, & Martin Trow
(1994). The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of
Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London:
Sage.
2.
Jump up^ Ziman, John (2000). Real Science: What It Is,
and What It Means. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3.
Jump up^ History of Education, Encyclopdia Britannica
(1977, 15th edition), Macropaedia Volume 6, p. 337
4.
Jump up^ Jacques Revel (2003). "21". In Porter,
Theodore; Ross, Dorothy. Cambridge History of Science: The
Modern Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. p. 391-404. ISBN 0521594421.

5.

Jump up^ "How The Word 'Scientist' Came To

Be". npr.org. National Public Radio. Retrieved November
3, 2014.
6.
Jump up^ Cohen, E; Lloyd, S. "Disciplinary Evolution and
the Rise of Transdiscipline" (PDF). Informing Science: the
International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline,.
7.
Jump up^ Foucault, Michel (1977). Discipline and Punish:
The birth of the prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage.
(Translation of: Surveiller et punir; naissance de la prison.
[Paris] : Gallimard, 1975).
8.
Jump up^ "McLuhan: Understanding
Media". Understanding Media. 1964. p. 13. Archived from the
original on October 6, 2008.
9.
Jump up^ Lindholm-Romantschuk, Y. (1998). Scholarly
book reviewing in the social sciences and humanities. The flow
of ideas within and among disciplines. Westport, Connecticut:
Greenwood Press.
10.
Jump up^ Ohlsson, H. (1999). Is there a Scandinavian
psychology? A bibliometric note on the publication profiles of
Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Scandinavian Journal
of Psychology, 40, 235239.
11.
Jump up^ Serenko, A. & Bontis, N. (2013). The
intellectual core and impact of the knowledge management
academic discipline.Journal of Knowledge Management, 17(1),
137-155.

Further reading[edit]
This article's further reading may not follow
Wikipedia's content policies orguidelines.
Please improve this article by removing excessive,
less relevant or many publications with the same
point of view; or by incorporating the relevant
publications into the body of the article through
appropriate citations. (August 2015)

R. Fagin, J. Y. Halpern, Y. Moses, and M. Y. Vardi. Reasoning about Knowledge,

The MIT Press, 1995. ISBN 0-262-56200-6
A. Abbott. The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor,
University of Chicago Press, 1988. ISBN 978-0-226-00069-5
Augsburg, Tanya. (2005), Becoming Interdisciplinary: An Introduction to
Interdisciplinary Studies.
Dogan, Mattei & Pahre, R. (1990). "The fate of formal disciplines: from coherence
to dispersion." In Creative Marginality: Innovation at the Intersections of Social
Sciences. Boulder, CO: Westview. pp. 85113.

Dullemeijer, P. (1980). "Dividing biology into disciplines: Chaos or

multiformity?" Journal Acta Biotheoretica, 29(2), 8793.
Gibbons, M.; Limoges, C.; Nowotny, H.; Schwartzman,S.; Scott, P. & Trow, M.
(1994). The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in
Contemporary Societies. London: Sage.
Golinski, Jan (1998/2005). Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivis, and the
History of Science. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Chapter 2: "Identity and discipline." Part II: The Disciplinary Mold (pp. 6678).
Hicks, Diana (2004). "The Four Literatures of Social Science". IN: Handbook of
Quantitative Science and Technology Research: The Use of Publication and Patent
Statistics in Studies of S&T Systems. Ed. Henk Moed. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Hyland, Ken (2004). Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic
Writing. New edition. University of Michigan Press/ESL.
Klein, J. T. (1990). Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice. Detroit: Wayne
State University Press.
Leydesdorff, Loet & Rafols, Ismael. (2008). A global map of science based on the
ISI subject categories. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and
Technology. The decomposition of scientific literature into disciplinary and
subdisciplinary structures is one of the core goals of scientometrics. How can we
achieve a good decomposition? The ISI subject categories classify journals included in
the Science Citation Index (SCI). The aggregated journal-journal citation matrix
contained in the Journal Citation Reports can be aggregated on the basis of these
categories. This leads to an asymmetrical matrix (citing versus cited) that is much more
densely populated than the underlying matrix at the journal level. Exploratory factor
analysis of the matrix of subject categories suggests a 14-factor solution. This solution
could be interpreted as the disciplinary structure of science.
Lindholm-Romantschuk, Y. (1998). Scholarly Book Reviewing in the Social
Sciences and Humanities: The Flow of Ideas within and among Disciplines. Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
Martin, B. (1998). Information Liberation: Challenging the Corruptions of
Information Power. London: Freedom Press. Book freely available.
Morillo, F.; Bordons, M. & Gomez, I. (2003). "Interdisciplinarity in science: A
tentative typology of disciplines and research areas". Journal of the American Society
for Information Science and Technology, 54(13), 12371249.
Morillo, F.; Bordons, M; & Gomez, I. (2001). "An approach to interdisciplinarity
bibliometric indicators." Scientometrics, 51(1), 203222.
Newell, A. (1983). "Reflections on the structure of an interdiscipline." In Machlup, F.
& U. Mansfield (Eds.), The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages (pp. 99
110). NY: John Wiley & Sons.
Pierce, S. J. (1991). "Subject areas, disciplines and the concept of
authority". Library and Information Science Research, 13, 2135.
Porter, A. L.; Roessner, J. D.; Cohen, A. S. & Perreault, M. (2006). "Interdisciplinary
research: meaning, metrics and nurture." Research Evaluation, 15(3), 187195.
Prior, Paul (1998). Writing/Disciplinarity: A Sociohistoric Account of Literate Activity
in the Academy. Lawrence Erlbaum. (Rhetoric, Knowledge and Society Series)
Qin, J.; Lancaster, F. W. & Allen, B. (1997). "Types and levels of collaboration in
interdisciplinary research in the sciences." Journal of the American Society for
Information Science, 48(10), 893916.
Rinia, E. J.; van Leeuwen, T. N.; Bruins, E. E. W.; van Vuren, H. G. & van Raan, A.
F. J. (2002). "Measuring knowledge transfer between fields of science." Scientometrics,
54(3), 347362.
Sanz-Menendez, L.; Bordons, M. & Zulueta, M. A. (2001). "Interdisciplinarity as a
multidimensional concept: its measure in three different research areas." Research
Evaluation, 10(1), 4758.

Stichweh, R. (2001). "Scientific Disciplines, History of". IN: Smelser, N. J. & Baltes,
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2000. (Meeting presentation)
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tvrvetenskapligt omrde? Svensk Biblioteksforskning(1), 920.
Tomov, D. T.& Mutafov, H. G. (1996). "Comparative indicators of interdisciplinarity in
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van Leeuwen, T. N. & Tijssen, R. J. W. (1993). "Assessing multidisciplinary areas of
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van Leeuwen, T. N. & Tijssen, R. J. W. (2000). "Interdisciplinary dynamics of
modern science: analysis of cross-disciplinary citation flows." Research Evaluation,
9(3), 183187.
Weisgerber, D. W. (1993). "Interdisciplinary searching problems and suggested
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