Epistemological constraints
Universities are generally
organised in terms of either disciplines (e.g., sociology) or practices (e.g.,
education). The disciplines identify some kind of phenomenon in the world and
make that the focus of their interest. The practices take a problem of a
particular kind as their focus. Implicitly and explicitly, in both cases, these
starting points structure the understanding that can be reached as well as the
behaviours of practitioners. Both disciplines and practices are supported by
structural features such as appointment and promotion procedures and a
hierarchy of publications which serve to reinforce the assumptions held by
those disciplines/practices and militate against interdisciplinary practice
which does not conform to those assumptions. We trace some of the consequences
and argue for interdisciplinary practice‘s power to achieve something neither
disciplines nor practices can – the reformulation of knowledge.
Multi-, inter- or trans-disciplinary?
The simplest and most common way in which disciplines work
together is simply additive, “when the work of each of them is added to that of
all the others” (McDonnell 2000: 27) and we understand this to be the
multidisciplinary or cross-disciplinary approach. This leaves each of the
contributing disciplines to work within their own worldview with their own
standard methods, and this is an approach often seen in community development.
But some particular someone is left to do the addition. If this happens during
the compilation of a single summary report, those preparing it will inevitably
do so from their own perspective or that of the commissioning body. If, on the
other hand, the contribution of each discipline is supplied alongside that of
the others with no attempt at synthesis, as in some edited collections, it is
left once again to the individual reader to make what connections they will. In
some development settings funding bodies take this approach when they
commission a range of specialists from different disciplines with no or little
co-ordination between them. Doubts have been raised over whether this is the
best way to address complex problems such as those which arise in management of
the environment, urban planning, public health, technology, community
development and education (Klein et al., 2001). Instead a new approach which
seeks new formulations of, and approaches to, such situations is widely
advocated. There is some argument over whether this should be called
interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity and what the significance of any
difference may be.
The most contrastive understanding of these terms would have
interdisciplinarity as an approach which starts with a complex problem,
simplifies it by reduction to parts that can be dealt with by separate
disciplines and then, as it were, reassembles the resulting findings into an
integrated answer (Lawrence & Despres, 2004). Newell (2000: 43) reminds us
that “a perspective developed through interdisciplinarity is constructed for a
limited use and may clash with another interdisciplinary perspective
constructed from the insights of other disciplines to address a different
question, issue or problem”. On the other hand, transdisciplinarity is often
represented as a new way of understanding reality which acknowledges and works
with its complexity by establishing new sets of axioms across sets of
disciplines and yet is not to be seen as a new or super-discipline (Klein,
2004). While the impulse to avoid the messy time-consuming constant negotiation
that interdisciplinarity involves is understandable, the tendency of
transdisciplinarity towards the creation of new silos seems to us hard to
resist. So while there may be much to be gained from conceiving of community
development as a transdiscipline, we prefer to maintain the flexibility and
excitement that comes with the interdisciplinary task of responding to constantly
changing circumstances with constantly changing approaches. In order to
theorise interdisciplinary findings so that they have wider significance than
the solution of particular problems, Rowland (2003:17) advocates a ‘critical
interdisciplinarity’ which “involves the learner in confronting the critique
which emerges as different disciplines contest each other’s theoretical
frameworks, perspectives and practices”. It is this kind of interdisciplinarity
that we suggest offers the most productive outcome in community development
settings when the confrontation involved can be turned to good uses.
Crucial issues in research and intervention
We have found that working between disciplines requires a special
approach. With Katherine Young (2000: 221) we believe that this kind of work
requires a problem focus as well as “expertise combined with an open and
experimental approach; a common goal and recognition of the need for a common
(or integrative) methodology; respect and trust among those working together; willingness
to accept leadership; leadership itself; clearly defined tasks and deadlines;
and ethical accountability.” In particular, our experience emphasises the need
for rethinking more global aspects of research and intervention projects. The
total time allocated to the project may need to be extended to allow for the
contributions of various disciplines, especially where participant observation
is to be employed. Time management can also become an issue where different
disciplines, funding bodies and client groups have different notions of the
proper tempo at which work should proceed (Coco,
2004). Care needs to be taken to avoid privileging one type of data or analysis
and allowing for different participants’ needs in terms of publications and
career progression. Commitment to regular and extended team meetings is
necessary from all team members to keep such issues in everyone’s sights and,
most importantly, to build and maintain ways of conceptualising the problem
that different discourses can understand (i.e., bridging epistemologies:
Toussaint, 2005). Even between disciplines that may be considered quite close
such as anthropology and sociology, there is a need to find tropes from all
participating disciplines’ discourses which resonate with the partners and
allow the development of a common language. We will illustrate some of these
points drawing on our experience across many disciplines and settings.
Bridging
epistemologies
Toussaint (2005) describes her difficulties in getting natural
scientists to overcome their dedication to the notion of absolute truth and
appreciate the relativity of knowledge, in order to get local communities’
points of view taken into account in water management schemes. She did this by
using a standard text from physics which deals with the difference between
observations made from different positions. The natural scientists felt at home
with such an explanation and from there she was able to lead to wider meanings
of relative knowledge. This is, of course, a familiar technique for specialists
who need to introduce lay persons in the community to technical terms and
understandings. One starts from the knowledge people have to develop new
understandings. Sometimes the development goes the other way and it is the
specialists who need to adopt new ways of seeing a problem. For instance,
during a project to address domestic violence in an indigenous community, we
found we were having trouble making clear to the community just what phenomenon
we were talking about. After many meetings and discussion, finally one old man
said “Oh, you mean that husband-wife business”. In the context his term not
only defined the scope and setting of the issue but carried implications that,
in local understanding, this was the business of husbands and wives and no-one
else. Knowing that obviously changed subsequent attempts to address the issue.
Another kind of epistemological problem has emerged for us when
working with professional and workplace communities. There we find that
technical social science terms such as ‘culture’ are in common use but not in
the same way we would like to use them. The anthropologists among us sometimes
feel hamstrung by, on the one hand, the co-option of this term by management
personnel and, on the other, by its dismissal by technical professionals such
as engineers. Our position is not helped by the fact that for us ‘culture’
carries a host of implications for fine grained analysis and intervention but
these implications are not easily reduced to a simple definition or set of
procedures. In one typical instance regarding the introduction of new
electronic management technology in a workplace dominated by engineers,
recommendations about aspects of the work culture and improvements needed were
ignored in favour of improving the technology itself. Such cases raise
complicated questions about the power of single disciplines to define just what
the problem is and what should be done about it. While we have had some success
speaking to engineers in terms of systems rather than culture, their
understanding of how the world works will always predispose them to certain
kinds of solutions. For instance, in the introduction of the new technology
they recognised that there would be resistance from all levels of staff, but
their solution was to make the technology more user-friendly. The fact that the
engineering outlook carried considerable power in this workplace also had
implications for how the development was carried out. We discuss the
privileging of some epistemologies over others below.
Nor is it only across wide disciplinary gulfs such as that between
the technical and social sciences that epistemological bridges are necessary,
as we found when two psychologists and two anthropologists in our team started
a project to address excessively masculinist attitudes and behaviours among
sportsmen and their audiences (Jolly et al., 2005). The anthropologists
favoured an inductive method which the psychologists found hard to work with. A
grounded anthropological approach first asks what can be observed in the world,
whereas the psychologists want to proceed deductively with questions derived
from existing theories or previous investigations. Luckily the participants all
knew each other well, so the considerable discussion of what should be asked
and what should be done was facilitated by mutual regard, but it complicated
and extended the process. When it came to publication of the results we found
ourselves stymied again because although we had worked out a mutual
understanding we had to try to write to the content, style and methods expected
in existing disciplinary discourses. In the end we split the results of the
work into a more deductive, statistical paper and a more ethnographic and
qualitative one. Whether this reflected the reality of the project may be
doubted.
Privileged
Epistemologies
This kind of pressure of pre-existing expectations can have more
immediate effect on interdisciplinary work. As we mentioned above, in certain
settings, the prestige of locally valued epistemologies can render others
almost silent, as when engineers’ or scientists’ positivist understandings of
the world come into conflict with those of the social sciences. In one project
we had to go into mediation with members of the steering committee over this issue,
so severe was their discomfort with the style of our investigation and
reporting. Numbers really are king in many instances, and for good reason. They
are commonly the only measure of progress and success that funding bodies pay
real attention to. The consequence for interdisciplinary teams is that the
‘soft’, qualitative side of the work tends to be undervalued and in risk of
being squeezed out, especially when time and funding become tight. This can
only be combated by open negotiation amongst all stakeholders from the start of
the project. Which brings us to the time issues involved in
interdisciplinarity.
Time
All of the issues referred to above require significant time and
mutual commitment for the team to work through. As Young (2000, quoted above) implies,
the commitment must come first but in our experience the dedication of
significant amounts of time to regular team meetings is the only way to achieve
a common understanding of the goals (as expressed through constantly
renegotiated bridging epistemologies), effective leadership and ethical
accountability. In 2000 some of us formed a team to help develop computer
literacy in a low socio-economic neighbourhood. It was the first time we had
worked together and we were content to let various members of the team pursue
their various interests with the community with only occasional management
meetings on the team’s part. In retrospect, this proved to be a mistake. Different
team members went into the community at different times for different purposes
and were not always fully aware of what else was going on. The community
meanwhile expected to be able to talk to anyone from the team about all of
their issues and became dissatisfied when this didn’t happen. Team members, for
their part ended the project with the feeling that they had not achieved as
much as they might either in terms of intervention or in terms of their
professional interests. It was only when the same group of people got together
on a project looking at home, school and community collaborations in children’s
numeracy that we fully realised what opportunities had been lost in the first
project. In the numeracy project strict time constraints applied by the funding
body encouraged us to have regular lengthy meetings, set explicit interim
objectives and keep to our timeline for delivery. Although such constraints
could cause problems in other instances, for instance where the need to deliver
interim results crowded out the time needed for careful qualitative work with
communities, here we were able to use it to our advantage. Our ability to do so
was dependant, however, on our previous experience in the computer literacy
project, which is to say on the amount of time we had put into getting to know
each other. We had already built at least the beginnings of a bridging
epistemology we could all work with, a set of common ethical standards and
mutual respect for everyone on the team’s contribution.
Timing, or tempo, can also be a problem amongst the various
stakeholders in community work. We have previously documented (Coco &
Jolly, 2003; Coco 2004) how the bureaucratic needs of powerful institutions can
sidetrack community projects, not least because of the different timetables
involved. Where multiple funding bodies are involved the situation can be
complicated by different budget cycles and workers from various disciplines can
be frustrated by the tempo of others’ work patterns. For instance, some
specialists expect to come to the community fully prepared and work at a smooth
even pace with regular communication of results. Others prefer to spend time
with the community, only gradually gaining tempo in results. These approaches
can be equally frustrating within the one team and both can run foul of the
community’s natural desire to operate according to its own tempo. As always,
respect, negotiation, long-term commitment and the freedom to spend time
together as collaborators is the only way over such difficulties.
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