Dear Colleagues/Friends,
I’m conducting and informal survey on multidisciplinary research. This stems from a keynote paper I delivered at the international conference on advanced multidisciplinary studies (ICAMR). If you have time, your input is extremely valuable and highly appreciated.
Conference Paper Advanced Multidisciplinary Studies: History, Problems, Solut...
The basic questions I pose:
1. Pros/Benefits/Advantages:
2. Cons/Detriments/Disadvantages:
3. Problems/Roadblocks:
4. Recommendations/Solutions:
5. Examples (should you have time):
Personally, I am a very strong advocate of team-based applied multidisciplinary research across hard (natural) sciences, soft (social) sciences, and humanities. I have been involved with a wide spectrum of international multidisciplinary projects for 30 years. I understand tradeoffs while insisting on fair stakeholder identification, engagement, inclusion, and benefits across the board. I firmly believe that’s the ultimate goal for most of us.
Despite lip service claiming to welcome and promote multidisciplinary research, I find many roadblocks remain unnecessarily common, counter-productive and sometimes insurmountable – especially between stove-piped disciplines and their administrations at multiple scales: for example, 1) among practitioners, 2) within institutions (private, public, government, academic, corporate, think tanks, universities, international organizations, NGOs, grass roots organizations, religious institutions, etc.), 3) among multiple institutions, and 4) among multiple countries and their institutions at the international scale. Some are expected and unavoidable. I get it. It’s part of the necessary aspects of the administrative process, etc. However, there must be solutions for many other common issues and ways that many processes can be streamlined. The intention of this survey is to fix problems and provide a qualitative and quantitative study on the benefits and problems with a summary of recommendations and solutions.
Thank you in advance for your considerations and cooperation.
Yours sincerely and best regards,
DKL
Hi David - An excellent question. One of the reasons I chose to retire from academia a couple years ago was related to your concerns. I came to academia after a 20 year career in industry where I led multidisciplinary teams to develop and deliver large infrastructure construction projects. My research field is construction engineering, not civil engineering, which is by definition a multidisciplinary field of research, covering a diverse range of disciplines ranging from law to finance to management to engineering design.
Given the above, let me offer a couple of observations gathered after 25 years of academic research experience. I find the major barrier to multidisciplinary research teams is the sense of elitism that is deeply ingrained in traditional academic research, i.e.the "MY field is the most important" attitude. This is brought on I believe by the "lone wolf" environment in which a budding researcher is raised and where teamwork is only paid lip service but never taught. Hence, there is very little motivation to support other team members if there is little reward for the lone wolf, superstar.
The second reason is a total ignorance of other fields' value imparted by the stovepipe, specialist organizational mentality of both university and industry entities. Hence, it is impossible for the average academic or practitioner to fathom the true whys and hows of interdisciplinary collaboration, much less invest in it.
I try to pride myself on not just pointing out problems but also offering solutions. Unfortunately, I spent a couple of decades searching for one and found that the only solution came down to individual personalities, not organizational concepts that can be generalized to improve the state of the practice. The research success I achieved was by building an international, multidisciplinary team of friends that I trusted and trusted me. That team is composed in colleagues like myself who had practiced what they preach in industry prior to entering academia. We recruited students based on industry experience, leadership potential, and professional maturity, not grade point average.
So to conclude, it became evident that pushing the boulder up the traditional academic mountain had a very poor return on investment. So I retired and now continue to compete for and complete the same research without the constraints of being a member of a university.
Don't mistake my discussion as sour grapes. I truly enjoyed and was rewarded by my academic career, retiring on good terms for a number of other, more significant reasons than the one cited above. The observations I have offered are deeply ingrained in the system and will continue to retard the growth of truly interdisciplinary research. In that challenge lies an opportunity for future researchers interested in this endeavor to build their own teams of trusted colleagues and advance the body of knowledge with very little of the divisive competition sparked by the specialist elitists.
Cheers
Doug
Hello, it is a great question!
Personally and professionally I consider that multidisciplinary work is potentially more relevant in the long term due to the amount of variables and points of view that are taken into consideration. To answer your question, I've found that:
1. The advantages are: a broader perspective of the issue or question; conclusions that are applicable with little resistance or adaptation to real situations (for example, an economic program for a small community that takes in consideration other subjects such as law, political science, medicine, anthropology, natural resources management, etc); new lines of research in you field that have been brought up to your attention by researcher of another discipline.
2. The disadvantages: Some lack of depth in specific issues; conflict between the priority of discipline to be used as the main one in the research, vs. those that are supporting the findings.
3. I find that most of the problems tend to arise from lack of a clear plan, and often due to lack of communication. Sometimes you could find confusing interactions between researchers of different fields, but that again boils down to a mismanagement of the plan.
4.The best way to begin is to lay out the rules of the game. Clear timelines, chains of command, communication and language standards.
5. Example: a research project was conducted in the coast of Ecuador aimed to improve the living standards of small scale seafood foragers (I apologise fo the lack of detail, but we are still under a publishing bar). The project not only involved economists, but also anthropologists, marine biologists, commercial consultants, NGO workers, Government officials, local leaders, and, marketing and logistics experts. It is needless to say that everyone was speaking what seemed to be a foreign language when trying to come up with a viable plan. It was challenging, but at the end, the economic plan had to take into consideration every single one of those points of view in order to become a scheme worth implementing.
Today's world problems are multifaceted and that require multiple solutions only multidisciplinary would be possible lower cost solution
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