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110-548: Interdisciplinarity or interdisciplinary studies involves the combination of multiple academic disciplines into one activity (e.g., a research project). It draws knowledge from several fields like sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, etc. It is related to an interdiscipline or an interdisciplinary field, which is an organizational unit that crosses traditional boundaries between academic disciplines or schools of thought , as new needs and professions emerge. Large engineering teams are usually interdisciplinary, as

220-447: A power station or mobile phone or other project requires the melding of several specialties. However, the term "interdisciplinary" is sometimes confined to academic settings. The term interdisciplinary is applied within education and training pedagogies to describe studies that use methods and insights of several established disciplines or traditional fields of study. Interdisciplinarity involves researchers, students, and teachers in

330-402: A commitment to interdisciplinary research will increase the risk of being denied tenure. Interdisciplinary programs may also fail if they are not given sufficient autonomy. For example, interdisciplinary faculty are usually recruited to a joint appointment , with responsibilities in both an interdisciplinary program (such as women's studies ) and a traditional discipline (such as history ). If

440-464: A crowd of cases, as seventeenth-century Leibniz's task to create a system of universal justice, which required linguistics, economics, management, ethics, law philosophy, politics, and even sinology. Interdisciplinary programs sometimes arise from a shared conviction that the traditional disciplines are unable or unwilling to address an important problem. For example, social science disciplines such as anthropology and sociology paid little attention to

550-437: 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,

660-558: A discipline can be conveniently defined as any comparatively self-contained and isolated domain of human experience which possesses its own community of experts. Interdisciplinarity is best seen as bringing together distinctive components of two or more disciplines. In academic discourse, interdisciplinarity typically applies to four realms: knowledge, research, education, and theory. Interdisciplinary knowledge involves familiarity with components of two or more disciplines. Interdisciplinary research combines components of two or more disciplines in

770-688: A feminist lens. The "turn to technology" helped to cement an already growing awareness of underlying unity among the various emerging STS programs. More recently, there has been an associated turn to ecology, nature, and materiality in general, whereby the socio-technical and natural/material co-produce each other. This is especially evident in work in STS analyses of biomedicine (such as Carl May and Annemarie Mol ) and ecological interventions (such as Bruno Latour , Sheila Jasanoff , Matthias Gross , Sara B. Pritchard , and S. Lochlann Jain ). Social constructions are human-created ideas, objects, or events created by

880-494: A fixed, unified reality. According to this approach, identity could no longer be treated as causal in human interactions with technology as it cannot exist prior to that interaction, feminist STS researchers proposing a "double-constructivist" approach to account for this contradiction. John Law credits feminist STS scholars for contributing material-semiotic approaches to the broader discipline of STS, stating that research not only attempts to describe reality, but enacts it through

990-503: A large government such as that of the United States. However, things similar to this have been implemented in small, local governments like New England towns and villages. New England town hall meetings are a good example of deliberative democracy in a realistic setting. An ideal deliberative democracy balances the voice and influence of all participants. While the main aim is to reach consensus, deliberative democracy should encourage

1100-417: A life necessity. By utilizing the "veil of ignorance", one can overcome the barrier of legacy thinking as it requires a person to imagine that they are unaware of their own circumstances, allowing them to free themselves from externally imposed thoughts or widely accepted ideas. STS is taught in several countries. According to the STS wiki, STS programs can be found in twenty countries, including 45 programs in

1210-552: A merely specialized skill [...]. The great event was the pentathlon , if you won this, you were a man. Needless to say, the Marathon race was never heard of until modern times: the Greeks would have regarded it as a monstrosity." "Previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He

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1320-405: A more meaningful conversation between the public and those developing the technology. Bruce Ackerman and James S. Fishkin offered an example of a reform in their paper "Deliberation Day." The deliberation is to enhance public understanding of popular, complex and controversial issues through devices such as Fishkin's deliberative polling , though implementation of these reforms is unlikely in

1430-415: A multidisciplinary community can be exceptionally efficient and effective. 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

1540-639: A new perspective for their legal regulation. Technoscience is a subset of Science, Technology, and Society studies that focuses on the inseparable connection between science and technology. It states that fields are linked and grow together, and scientific knowledge requires an infrastructure of technology in order to remain stationary or move forward. Both technological development and scientific discovery drive one another towards more advancement. Technoscience excels at shaping human thoughts and behavior by opening up new possibilities that gradually or quickly come to be perceived as necessities. "Technological action

1650-574: A particular idea, almost in the same period, arises in different disciplines. One case is the shift from the approach of focusing on "specialized segments of attention" (adopting one particular perspective), to the idea of "instant 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 painting (with cubism ), physics, poetry, communication and educational theory . According to Marshall McLuhan , this paradigm shift

1760-439: A qualitative assessment and therefore manipulated. The number of citations is dependent on the number of persons working in the same domain instead of inherent quality or published result's originality. Science, technology and society Like most interdisciplinary fields of study, STS emerged from the confluence of a variety of disciplines and disciplinary subfields, all of which had developed an interest—typically, during

1870-528: A research area deals with problems requiring analysis and synthesis across economic, social and environmental spheres; often an integration of multiple social and natural science disciplines. Interdisciplinary research is also key to the study of health sciences, for example in studying optimal solutions to diseases. Some institutions of higher education offer accredited degree programs in Interdisciplinary Studies. At another level, interdisciplinarity

1980-657: A result of the interaction of both. The term was coined in 2009 by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim who compared and contrasted sociotechnical imaginaries of nuclear energy in the USA with those of South Korea over the second half of the 20th century. Jasanoff and Kim analyzed the discourse of government representatives, national policies, and civil society organizations, looked at the technological and infrastructural developments, and social protests, and conducted interviews with experts. They concluded that in South Korea nuclear energy

2090-516: A scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate." (Foucault, 1975/1979, p. 223) Communities of academic disciplines can be found outside 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

2200-548: A separate example of legacy thinking. Starting with dial-up , the internet has always been viewed as a private luxury good. Internet today is a vital part of modern-day society members. They use it in and out of life every day. Corporations are able to mislabel and greatly overcharge for their internet resources. Since the American public is so dependent upon the internet there is little for them to do. Legacy thinking has kept this pattern on track despite growing movements arguing that

2310-412: A series of choices and interactions. These interactions have consequences that change the perception that different groups of people have on these constructs. Some examples of social construction include class, race, money, and citizenship. The following also alludes to the notion that not everything is set, a circumstance or result could potentially be one way or the other. According to the article "What

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2420-435: A single disciplinary perspective (for example, women's studies or medieval studies ). More rarely, and at a more advanced level, interdisciplinarity may itself become the focus of study, in a critique of institutionalized disciplines' ways of segmenting knowledge. In contrast, studies of interdisciplinarity raise to self-consciousness questions about how interdisciplinarity works, the nature and history of disciplinarity, and

2530-489: A social need was first recognized for a more efficient and rapid means of transportation. Consequently, the velocipede was first developed, which was able to reach higher translational velocities than the smaller non-geared bicycles of the day, by replacing the front wheel with a larger radius wheel. One notable trade-off was a certain decreased stability leading to a greater risk of falling. This trade-off resulted in many riders getting into accidents by losing balance while riding

2640-412: A society (or an individual within society) should function. Because of different types of interactions across different cultures, each culture will have a different modernity. The pace of innovation is the speed at which technological innovation or advancement is occurring, with the most apparent instances being too slow or too rapid. Both these rates of innovation are extreme and therefore have effects on

2750-661: A specific academic discipline, are classified as generalists . While academic disciplines in and of themselves are more or less focused practices, scholarly approaches such as multidisciplinarity/interdisciplinarity , transdisciplinarity , and cross-disciplinarity 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, specified concepts, or methodology. Some researchers believe that academic disciplines may, in

2860-419: A spectrum of artifacts, techniques, organizations, and systems." Winner expands on this idea by saying "in the late twentieth-century technology and society, technology and culture, technology and politics are by no means separate." Deliberative democracy is a reform of representative or direct democracies which mandates discussion and debate of popular topics which affect society. Deliberative democracy

2970-433: A strong interest in engineering ethics . A decisive moment in the development of STS was the mid-1980s addition of technology studies to the range of interests reflected in science. During that decade, two works appeared en seriatim that signaled what Steve Woolgar was to call the "turn to technology". In a seminal 1984 article, Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker showed how the sociology of technology could proceed along

3080-418: A transdisciplinary team is more holistic and seeks to relate all disciplines into a coherent whole. 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 . Bibliometrics can be used to map several issues in relation to disciplines, for example,

3190-445: 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. Multidisciplinary approaches also encourage people to help shape

3300-426: Is Social Construction?" by Laura Flores, "Social construction work is critical of the status quo. Social constructionists about X tend to hold that: Very often they go further, and urge that: In the past, there have been viewpoints that were widely regarded as fact until being called to question due to the introduction of new knowledge. Such viewpoints include the past concept of a correlation between intelligence and

3410-424: Is a social process." Social factors and technology are intertwined so that they are dependent upon each other. This includes the aspect that social, political, and economic factors are inherent in technology and that social structure influences what technologies are pursued. In other words, "technoscientific phenomena combined inextricably with social/political/economic/psychological phenomena, so 'technology' includes

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3520-834: Is a tool for making decisions. Deliberative democracy can be traced back all the way to Aristotle's writings . More recently, the term was coined by Joseph Bessette in his 1980 work Deliberative Democracy: The Majority Principle in Republican Government , where he uses the idea in opposition to the elitist interpretations of the United States Constitution with emphasis on public discussion. Deliberative democracy can lead to more legitimate, credible, and trustworthy outcomes. Deliberative democracy allows for "a wider range of public knowledge", and it has been argued that this can lead to "more socially intelligent and robust" science. One major shortcoming of deliberative democracy

3630-594: Is given back to the various disciplines involved. Therefore, both disciplinarians and interdisciplinarians may be seen in complementary relation to one another. Because most participants in interdisciplinary ventures were trained in traditional disciplines, they must learn to appreciate differences of perspectives and methods. For example, a discipline that places more emphasis on quantitative rigor may produce practitioners who are more scientific in their training than others; in turn, colleagues in "softer" disciplines who may associate quantitative approaches with difficulty grasp

3740-402: Is ineffective at analyzing similar but unique modern societies such as those found in the diverse cultures of the developing world. Problems can be summarized into two elements: inward failure to analyze the growth potentials of a given society, and outward failure to model different cultures and social structures and predict their growth potentials. Previously, modernity carried a connotation of

3850-405: Is learned in his own special line." "It is the custom among those who are called 'practical' men to condemn any man capable of a wide survey as a visionary: no man is thought worthy of a voice in politics unless he ignores or does not know nine-tenths of the most important relevant facts." Academic discipline An academic discipline or academic field is a subdivision of knowledge that

3960-427: 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

4070-421: Is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his specialty; but neither is he ignorant, because he is 'a scientist,' and 'knows' very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who

4180-607: Is seen as a remedy to the harmful effects of excessive specialization and isolation in information silos . On some views, however, interdisciplinarity is entirely indebted to those who specialize in one field of study—that is, without specialists, interdisciplinarians would have no information and no leading experts to consult. Others place the focus of interdisciplinarity on the need to transcend disciplines, viewing excessive specialization as problematic both epistemologically and politically. When interdisciplinary collaboration or research results in new solutions to problems, much information

4290-541: Is sometimes called 'field philosophy'. Perhaps the most common complaint regarding interdisciplinary programs, by supporters and detractors alike, is the lack of synthesis—that is, students are provided with multiple disciplinary perspectives but are not given effective guidance in resolving the conflicts and achieving a coherent view of the subject. Others have argued that the very idea of synthesis or integration of disciplines presupposes questionable politico-epistemic commitments. Critics of interdisciplinary programs feel that

4400-446: Is taught and researched at the college or university level. Disciplines are defined (in part) and recognized by the academic journals in which research is published, and the learned societies and academic departments or faculties within colleges and universities to which their practitioners belong. Academic disciplines are conventionally divided into the humanities (including philosophy , language , art and cultural studies ),

4510-509: Is that many models insufficiently ensure critical interaction. According to Ryfe, there are five mechanisms that stand out as critical to the successful design of deliberative democracy: Recently, there has been a movement towards greater transparency in the fields of policy and technology. Jasanoff comes to the conclusion that there is no longer a question of if there needs to be increased public participation in making decisions about science and technology, but now there need to be ways to make

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4620-457: Is what we call the sociotechnical systems. In socio-technical systems, there are two principles to internalize, that is joint optimization and complementarity. Joint optimization puts an emphasis on developing both systems in parallel and it is only in the interaction of both systems that the success of an organization arises. The principle of complementarity means that both systems have to be optimized. If you focus on one system and have bias over

4730-408: The scientific disciplines (such as physics , chemistry , and biology ), the formal sciences like mathematics and computer science ; the social sciences are sometimes considered a fourth category. 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

4840-460: The "distance" between them, the novelty of any particular combination, and their extent of integration. Interdisciplinary knowledge and research are important because: "The modern mind divides, specializes, thinks in categories: the Greek instinct was the opposite, to take the widest view, to see things as an organic whole [...]. The Olympic games were designed to test the arete of the whole man, not

4950-410: The 1960s or 1970s—in viewing science and technology as socially embedded enterprises. The key disciplinary components of STS took shape independently, beginning in the 1960s, and developed in isolation from each other well into the 1980s, although Ludwik Fleck 's (1935) monograph Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact anticipated many of STS's key themes. In the 1970s Elting E. Morison founded

5060-737: The Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (founded in 1979), two international organizations, the International Network of Inter- and Transdisciplinarity (founded in 2010) and the Philosophy of/as Interdisciplinarity Network (founded in 2009). The US's research institute devoted to the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity, the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity at the University of North Texas,

5170-791: The Boyer Commission to Carnegie's President Vartan Gregorian to Alan I. Leshner , CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science have advocated for interdisciplinary rather than disciplinary approaches to problem-solving in the 21st century. This has been echoed by federal funding agencies, particularly the National Institutes of Health under the direction of Elias Zerhouni , who has advocated that grant proposals be framed more as interdisciplinary collaborative projects than single-researcher, single-discipline ones. At

5280-559: The Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University , and George Mason University 's New Century College , have been cut back. Stuart Henry has seen this trend as part of the hegemony of the disciplines in their attempt to recolonize the experimental knowledge production of otherwise marginalized fields of inquiry. This is due to threat perceptions seemingly based on the ascendancy of interdisciplinary studies against traditional academia. There are many examples of when

5390-701: The STS program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which served as a model. By 2011, 111 STS research centers and academic programs were counted worldwide. During the 1970s and 1980s, universities in the US, UK, and Europe began drawing these various components together in new, interdisciplinary programs. For example, in the 1970s, Cornell University developed a new program that united science studies and policy-oriented scholars with historians and philosophers of science and technology. Each of these programs developed unique identities due to variations in

5500-598: The United States, three programs in India, and eleven programs in the UK. STS programs can be found in Canada , Germany, Israel , Malaysia , and Taiwan . Some examples of institutions offering STS programs are Stanford University , University College London , Harvard University , the University of Oxford , Mines ParisTech , Bar-Ilan University , and York University . In Europe

5610-428: The ability to drive technology for the betterment of society by blinding people to innovations that do not fit into their accepted model of how society works. By accepting ideas without questioning them, people often see all solutions that contradict these accepted ideas as impossible or impractical. Legacy thinking tends to advantage the wealthy, who have the means to project their ideas on the public. It may be used by

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5720-476: The adaptability needed in an increasingly interconnected world. For example, the subject of land use may appear differently when examined by different disciplines, for instance, biology , chemistry , economics , geography , and politics . Although "interdisciplinary" and "interdisciplinarity" are frequently viewed as twentieth century terms, the concept has historical antecedents, most notably Greek philosophy . Julie Thompson Klein attests that "the roots of

5830-500: The ambition is simply unrealistic, given the knowledge and intellectual maturity of all but the exceptional undergraduate; some defenders concede the difficulty, but insist that cultivating interdisciplinarity as a habit of mind, even at that level, is both possible and essential to the education of informed and engaged citizens and leaders capable of analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information from multiple sources in order to render reasoned decisions. While much has been written on

5940-418: The arts and social sciences. Communities of academic disciplines would contribute at varying levels of importance during different stages of development. These categories explain how the different academic disciplines interact with one another. Multidisciplinary (or pluridisciplinary) knowledge is associated with more than one existing academic discipline or profession. A multidisciplinary community or project

6050-552: 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 provide evidence of the successful endeavour of multidisciplinary innovation and facilitation of the paradigm shift. 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,

6160-426: The bicycle or being thrown over the handlebars. The first "social construction" or progress of the velocipede caused the need for a newer "social construction" to be recognized and developed into a safer bicycle design. Consequently, the velocipede was then developed into what is now commonly known as the " bicycle " to fit within society's newer "social construction," the newer standards of higher vehicle safety. Thus

6270-557: The broader dimensions of a problem and lower rigor in theoretical and qualitative argumentation. An interdisciplinary program may not succeed if its members remain stuck in their disciplines (and in disciplinary attitudes). Those who lack experience in interdisciplinary collaborations may also not fully appreciate the intellectual contribution of colleagues from those disciplines. From the disciplinary perspective, however, much interdisciplinary work may be seen as "soft", lacking in rigor, or ideologically motivated; these beliefs place barriers in

6380-479: The career paths of those who choose interdisciplinary work. For example, interdisciplinary grant applications are often refereed by peer reviewers drawn from established disciplines ; interdisciplinary researchers may experience difficulty getting funding for their research. In addition, untenured researchers know that, when they seek promotion and tenure , it is likely that some of the evaluators will lack commitment to interdisciplinarity. They may fear that making

6490-515: The commons in an STS context. The movement for net neutrality argues that the Internet should not be a resource that is dominated by one particular group, specifically those with more money to spend on Internet access. A counterexample to the tragedy of the commons is offered by Andrew Kahrl. Privatization can be a way to deal with the tragedy of the commons. However, Kahrl suggests that the privatization of beaches on Long Island , in an attempt to combat

6600-442: The components that were drawn together, as well as their location within the various universities. For example, the University of Virginia's STS program united scholars drawn from a variety of fields (with particular strength in the history of technology); however, the program's teaching responsibilities—it is located within an engineering school and teaches ethics to undergraduate engineering students—means that all of its faculty share

6710-483: The concept of the tragedy of the commons still applies to science, technology, and society. In a contemporary setting, the Internet acts as an example of the tragedy of the commons through the exploitation of digital resources and private information. Data and internet passwords can be stolen much more easily than physical documents. Virtual spying is almost free compared to the costs of physical spying. Additionally, net neutrality can be seen as an example of tragedy of

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6820-576: The concepts lie in a number of ideas that resonate through modern discourse—the ideas of a unified science, general knowledge, synthesis and the integration of knowledge", while Giles Gunn says that Greek historians and dramatists took elements from other realms of knowledge (such as medicine or philosophy ) to further understand their own material. The building of Roman roads required men who understood surveying , material science , logistics and several other disciplines. Any broadminded humanist project involves interdisciplinarity, and history shows

6930-694: The current physical sciences. Prior to the twentieth century, few opportunities existed for science as an occupation outside the educational system. Higher education provided the institutional structure for scientific investigation, as well as economic support for research and teaching. Soon, the volume of scientific information rapidly increased and researchers realized the importance of concentrating on smaller, narrower fields of scientific activity. Because of this narrowing, scientific specializations emerged. As these specializations developed, modern scientific disciplines in universities also improved their sophistication. Eventually, academia's identified disciplines became

7040-399: The current state of being modern, and its evolution through European colonialism. The process of becoming "modern" is believed to occur in a linear, pre-determined way, and is seen by Philip Brey as a way to interpret and evaluate social and cultural formations. This thought ties in with modernization theory , the thought that societies progress from "pre-modern" to "modern" societies. Within

7150-428: The development of new technologies to address climate change. Social technical systems are an interplay between technologies and humans, this is clearly expressed in the sociotechnical systems theory . To expound on this interplay, humans fulfill and define tasks, then humans in companies use IT and IT supports people, and finally, IT processes tasks and new IT generates new tasks. This IT redefines work practices. This

7260-404: The disciplines, it becomes difficult to account for a given scholar or teacher's salary and time. During periods of budgetary contraction, the natural tendency to serve the primary constituency (i.e., students majoring in the traditional discipline) makes resources scarce for teaching and research comparatively far from the center of the discipline as traditionally understood. For these same reasons,

7370-433: The early twentieth 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 Africana studies . Many academic disciplines designed as preparation for careers and professions, such as nursing , hospitality management , and corrections , also emerged in

7480-561: The field of science and technology, there are two main lenses with which to view modernity. The first is as a way for society to quantify what it wants to move towards. In effect, we can discuss the notion of "alternative modernity" (as described by Andrew Feenberg) and which of these we would like to move towards. Alternatively, modernity can be used to analyze the differences in interactions between cultures and individuals. From this perspective, alternative modernities exist simultaneously, based on differing cultural and societal expectations of how

7590-446: The flow of ideas within and among disciplines (Lindholm-Romantschuk, 1998) or the existence of specific national traditions within disciplines. Scholarly impact and influence of one discipline on another may be understood by analyzing the flow of citations. The Bibliometrics approach is described as straightforward because it is based on simple counting. The method is also objective but the quantitative method may not be compatible with

7700-563: The foundations for scholars of specific specialized interests and expertise. An 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 eighteenth-century France , and that this fact reveals essential aspects they continue to have in common: "The disciplines characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along

7810-423: The future of knowledge in post-industrial society . Researchers at the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity have made the distinction between philosophy 'of' and 'as' interdisciplinarity, the former identifying a new, discrete area within philosophy that raises epistemological and metaphysical questions about the status of interdisciplinary thinking, with the latter pointing toward a philosophical practice that

7920-549: The future, be replaced by what is known as Mode 2 or "post-academic science", which involves the acquisition of cross-disciplinary knowledge through the collaboration of specialists from various academic disciplines. It is also known as a field of study , field of inquiry , research field and branch of knowledge . The different terms are used in different countries and fields. The University of Paris in 1231 consisted of four faculties : Theology , Medicine , Canon Law and Arts . Educational institutions originally used

8030-413: The goals of connecting and integrating several academic schools of thought, professions, or technologies—along with their specific perspectives—in the pursuit of a common task. The epidemiology of HIV/AIDS or global warming requires understanding of diverse disciplines to solve complex problems. Interdisciplinary may be applied where the subject is felt to have been neglected or even misrepresented in

8140-583: 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

8250-558: The internet should be considered a utility. Legacy thinking prevents progress because it was widely accepted by others before us through advertising that the internet is a luxury and not a utility. Due to pressure from grassroots movements the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has redefined the requirements for broadband and internet in general as a utility. Now AT&T and other major internet providers are lobbying against this action and are in large able to delay

8360-404: The introduction of new interdisciplinary programs is often resisted because it is perceived as a competition for diminishing funds. Due to these and other barriers, interdisciplinary research areas are strongly motivated to become disciplines themselves. If they succeed, they can establish their own research funding programs and make their own tenure and promotion decisions. In so doing, they lower

8470-402: The nature of a human's ethnicity or race (X may not be at all as it is). An example of the evolution and interaction of various social constructions within science and technology can be found in the development of both the high-wheel bicycle, or velocipede , and then of the bicycle . The velocipede was widely used in the latter half of the 19th century. In the latter half of the 19th century,

8580-501: The onset of this movement due to legacy thinking's grip on American culture and politics. For example, those who cannot overcome the barrier of legacy thinking may not consider the privatization of clean drinking water as an issue. This is partial because access to water has become such a given fact of the matter to them. For a person living in such circumstances, it may be widely accepted to not concern themselves with drinking water because they have not needed to be concerned with it in

8690-458: The organizations affiliated with them by providing specialized new ideas, research, and findings. Nations at various developmental stages will find the need for different academic disciplines during different times of growth. A newly developing nation will likely prioritize government, political matters and engineering over those of the humanities, arts and social sciences. On the other hand, a well-developed nation may be capable of investing more in

8800-433: The other it will likely lead to the failure of the organization or jeopardize the success of a system. Although the above socio-technical system theory is focused on an organization, it is undoubtedly imperative to correlate this theory and its principles to society today and in science and technology studies. According to Barley and Bailey, there is a  tendency for AI designers and scholars of design studies to privilege

8910-419: The overuse of Long Island beaches, made the residents of Long Island more susceptible to flood damage from Hurricane Sandy . The privatization of these beaches took away from the protection offered by the natural landscape. Tidal lands that offer natural protection were drained and developed. This attempt to combat the tragedy of the commons by privatization was counter-productive. Privatization actually destroyed

9020-442: The past two decades can be divided into "professional", "organizational", and "cultural" obstacles. An initial distinction should be made between interdisciplinary studies, which can be found spread across the academy today, and the study of interdisciplinarity, which involves a much smaller group of researchers. The former is instantiated in thousands of research centers across the US and the world. The latter has one US organization,

9130-439: The past. Additionally, a person living within an area that does not need to worry about their water supply or the sanitation of their water supply is less likely to be concerned with the privatization of water. This notion can be examined through the thought experiment of " veil of ignorance ". Legacy thinking causes people to be particularly ignorant about the implications behind the "you get what you pay for" mentality applied to

9240-422: The people that get to use this technology. "No innovation without representation" is a democratic ideal of ensuring that everyone involved gets a chance to be represented fairly in technological developments. Legacy thinking is defined as an inherited method of thinking imposed from an external source without objection by the individual because it is already widely accepted by society. Legacy thinking can impair

9350-482: The philosophy and promise of interdisciplinarity in academic programs and professional practice, social scientists are increasingly interrogating academic discourses on interdisciplinarity, as well as how interdisciplinarity actually works—and does not—in practice. Some have shown, for example, that some interdisciplinary enterprises that aim to serve society can produce deleterious outcomes for which no one can be held to account. Since 1998, there has been an ascendancy in

9460-524: The political science field (emphasizing the policy analysis aspect). 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. In the twentieth century, the natural science disciplines included: physics , chemistry , biology , geology , and astronomy . The social science disciplines included: economics , politics , sociology , and psychology . Prior to

9570-566: The popularity of the modern geared bicycle design came as a response to the first social construction, the original need for greater speed, which had caused the high-wheel bicycle to be designed in the first place. The popularity of the modern geared bicycle design ultimately ended the widespread use of the velocipede itself, as eventually it was found to best accomplish the social needs/social constructions of both greater speed and of greater safety. With methodology from ANT, feminist STS theorists built upon SCOT's theory of co-construction to explore

9680-448: The problem at hand, including the case of the team-taught course where students are required to understand a given subject in terms of multiple traditional disciplines. Interdisciplinary education fosters cognitive flexibility and prepares students to tackle complex, real-world problems by integrating knowledge from multiple fields. This approach emphasizes active learning, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills, equipping students with

9790-411: The process." In 1968, Garrett Hardin popularised the phrase "tragedy of the commons." It is an economic theory where rational people act against the best interest of the group by consuming a common resource. Since then, the tragedy of the commons has been used to symbolize the degradation of the environment whenever many individuals use a common resource. Although Garrett Hardin was not an STS scholar,

9900-779: The public does not exercise the power ensured to them by the Constitution to the fullest extent. This can become a barrier to political progress as corporations who have the capital to spend have the potential to wield great influence over policy. Legacy thinking, however, keeps the population from acting to change this, despite polls from Harris Interactive that report over 80% of Americans to feel that big business holds too much power in government. Therefore, Americans are beginning to try to steer away from this line of thought, rejecting legacy thinking, and demanding less corporate, and more public, participation in political decision-making. Additionally, an examination of net neutrality functions as

10010-496: The public good of natural protection from the landscape. Alternative modernity is a conceptual tool conventionally used to represent the state of present western society. Modernity represents the political and social structures of society, the sum of interpersonal discourse, and ultimately a snapshot of society's direction at a point in time. Unfortunately, conventional modernity is incapable of modeling alternative directions for further growth within our society. Also, this concept

10120-464: The relationship between gender and technology, proposing one cannot exist separately from the other. This approach suggests the material and social are not separate, reality being produced through interactions and studied through representations of those realities. Building on Steve Woolgar 's boundary work on user configuration, feminist critiques shifted the focus away from users of technology and science towards whether technology and science represent

10230-538: The research process. Sociotechnical imaginaries are what certain communities, societies, and nations envision as achievable through the combination of scientific innovation and social changes. These visions can be based on what is possible to achieve for a certain society, and can also show what a certain state or nation desires. STIs are often bound with ideologies and ambitions of those who create and circulate them. Sociotechnical imaginaries can be created by states and policymakers, smaller groups within society, or can be

10340-678: The risk of entry. Examples of former interdisciplinary research areas that have become disciplines, many of them named for their parent disciplines, include neuroscience , cybernetics , biochemistry and biomedical engineering . These new fields are occasionally referred to as "interdisciplines". On the other hand, even though interdisciplinary activities are now a focus of attention for institutions promoting learning and teaching, as well as organizational and social entities concerned with education, they are practically facing complex barriers, serious challenges and criticism. The most important obstacles and challenges faced by interdisciplinary activities in

10450-471: The same time, many thriving longstanding bachelor's in interdisciplinary studies programs in existence for 30 or more years, have been closed down, in spite of healthy enrollment. Examples include Arizona International (formerly part of the University of Arizona ), the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University , and the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University ; others such as

10560-470: The search or creation of new knowledge, operations, or artistic expressions. Interdisciplinary education merges components of two or more disciplines in a single program of instruction. Interdisciplinary theory takes interdisciplinary knowledge, research, or education as its main objects of study. In turn, interdisciplinary richness of any two instances of knowledge, research, or education can be ranked by weighing four variables: number of disciplines involved,

10670-652: The social analysis of technology throughout most of the twentieth century. As a result, many social scientists with interests in technology have joined science, technology and society programs, which are typically staffed by scholars drawn from numerous disciplines. They may also arise from new research developments, such as nanotechnology , which cannot be addressed without combining the approaches of two or more disciplines. Examples include quantum information processing , an amalgamation of quantum physics and computer science , and bioinformatics , combining molecular biology with computer science. Sustainable development as

10780-463: The technical over the social, focusing more on taking "humans out of the loop" paradigm than the "augmented intelligence" paradigm. Recent work on artificial intelligence considers large sociotechnical systems, such as social networks and online marketplaces , as agents whose behavior can be purposeful and adaptive. The behavior of recommender systems can therefore be analyzed in the language and framework of sociotechnical systems, leading also to

10890-717: The term "discipline" to catalog and archive the new and expanding body of information produced by the scholarly 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-nineteenth century secularization of universities, when the traditional curricula 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

11000-648: The theoretical and methodological lines established by the sociology of scientific knowledge. This was the intellectual foundation of the field they called the social construction of technology. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman primed the pump by publishing a collection of articles attesting to the influence of society on technological design ( Social Shaping of Technology , 1985). Social science research continued to interrogate STS research from this point onward as researchers moved from post-modern to post-structural frameworks of thought, Bijker and Pinch contributing to SCOT knowledge and Wajcman providing boundary work through

11110-463: The traditional disciplinary structure of research institutions, for example, women's studies or ethnic area studies. Interdisciplinarity can likewise be applied to complex subjects that can only be understood by combining the perspectives of two or more fields. The adjective interdisciplinary is most often used in educational circles when researchers from two or more disciplines pool their approaches and modify them so that they are better suited to

11220-439: The traditional discipline makes the tenure decisions, new interdisciplinary faculty will be hesitant to commit themselves fully to interdisciplinary work. Other barriers include the generally disciplinary orientation of most scholarly journals, leading to the perception, if not the fact, that interdisciplinary research is hard to publish. In addition, since traditional budgetary practices at most universities channel resources through

11330-424: 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 Aristotle—instead of "scientists". Natural history referred to what we now call life sciences and natural philosophy referred to

11440-446: The universities. Finally, interdisciplinary scientific fields of study such as biochemistry and geophysics gained prominence as their contribution to knowledge became widely recognized. Some new disciplines, such as public administration , can be found in more than one disciplinary setting; some public administration programs are associated with business schools (thus emphasizing the public management aspect), while others are linked to

11550-471: The value of interdisciplinary research and teaching and a growth in the number of bachelor's degrees awarded at U.S. universities classified as multi- or interdisciplinary studies. The number of interdisciplinary bachelor's degrees awarded annually rose from 7,000 in 1973 to 30,000 a year by 2005 according to data from the National Center of Educational Statistics (NECS). In addition, educational leaders from

11660-403: The voices of those with opposing viewpoints, concerns due to uncertainties, and questions about assumptions made by other participants. It should take its time and ensure that those participating understand the topics on which they debate. Independent managers of debates should also have a substantial grasp of the concepts discussed, but must "[remain] independent and impartial as to the outcomes of

11770-439: The wealthy as a vehicle to drive technology in their favor rather than for the greater good. Examining the role of citizen participation and representation in politics provides an excellent example of legacy thinking in society. The belief that one can spend money freely to gain influence has been popularized, leading to public acceptance of corporate lobbying . As a result, a self-established role in politics has been cemented where

11880-549: Was due to the passage from an era shaped by mechanization , which brought sequentiality, to the era shaped by the instant speed of electricity, which brought simultaneity. An article in the Social Science Journal attempts to provide a simple, common-sense, definition of interdisciplinarity, bypassing the difficulties of defining that concept and obviating the need for such related concepts as transdisciplinarity , pluridisciplinarity, and multidisciplinary: To begin with,

11990-483: Was founded in 2008 but is closed as of 1 September 2014, the result of administrative decisions at the University of North Texas. An interdisciplinary study is an academic program or process seeking to synthesize broad perspectives , knowledge, skills, interconnections, and epistemology in an educational setting. Interdisciplinary programs may be founded in order to facilitate the study of subjects which have some coherence, but which cannot be adequately understood from

12100-482: Was imagined mostly as the means of national development, while in the US the dominant sociotechnical imaginary framed nuclear energy as risky and in need of containment. The concept has been applied to several objects of study including biomedical research, nanotechnology development and energy systems and climate change. Within energy systems, research has focused on nuclear energy, fossil fuels, renewables as well as broader topics of energy transitions, and

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