In an interview with Nikola Danaylov from a couple of years ago, Noam Chomsky made an important observation (starting at around the 17:30 mark) that has stuck with me. He pointed out that science learns about how organisms like worms and insects work through some pretty invasive procedures, or through experiments that we wouldn’t easily subject humans to. Our moral sense simply gets in the way, at least most of the time. There are some familiar exceptions, like the sorts of experiments that were carried out in Nazi concentration camps, and even some that hit closer to home, like the Milgram experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment, though I suppose moral censure here is less universal. The point is that we are constrained in our research practices by what we are willing, morally, to do to our research subjects.

Every now and then we find some smaller examples in the social sciences that are worth considering even if they don’t approach the full-scale evil of a concentration camp. Consider the case of a business school professor who sent over two-hundred letters to restaurants in which he claimed to have been food-poisoned after eating there. Not only had he not been poisoned, he hadn’t even visited the restaurants. He just wanted to study how they responded to the complaint. What he had not considered is that the possibility that one’s kitchen is not up to standard is a very distressing one for a self-respecting chef. Such charges are taken very seriously, and cause a great deal of trouble for the accused restaurant (investigations, meetings, suspicions about who’s to blame). While the researcher was not intentionally trying to cause trouble, there was something cruel about the experiment. It was sort of callous.

It may, of course, have given the researcher insight into the problem he wanted to study. A less invasive method would have involved sending questionnaires to the restaurants about how  they would, hypothetically, respond to such a letter. Or setting up interviews or focus groups that probe the issue. From a scientific point of view (and depending on the question) the fake letter may have been the most effective (it was probably also the least costly), but it should have been ruled out by a moral sense, a sense of decency, an ethical consideration.

It’s important to recognize this ethical limit to our knowledge of society, which must be seen as an important part of the epistemology of the social sciences. After all, the radical alternative to a scientific, dispassionate interest in people, which therefore risks cruelty, is that of the romantic poets, who “suffer” personally for whatever knowledge about human beings they acquire. The limit of their knowledge is set not by the cruelties and humiliations they are willing to inflict on others, but on those they expose themselves to. Science is understandably favored by many over this “school of hard knocks” for learning how the world works. We just have to make sure science itself doesn’t become what’s knocking people around.

Doing research in the space between disciplines is hard work. But this does not seem to discourage very many people, especially PhD students, from making the attempt. A great many dissertations combine theories and mix methods, probably on the assumption that pluralism is a good thing, and that a single perspective is too limited. When I talk to students about this issue I always try to push back a little on that assumption. Adopting multiple points of view is not a good thing in and of itself. Researchers should always ask themselves what a proposed additional point of view will make possible. Why is the approach of an established, unitary, well-defined discipline not enough?

Here it is important also to distinguish between kinds of interdisciplinarity. Some scholars take great pride in working (and some pains to work) outside any established area. They bring two or more theories together that have never been combined before. Or they apply a novel mix of methods. Or they test a theory using a method no one has tried before. Or they interpret a particular kind of data with a theory that is normally applied to another kind of data set. This is very difficult to pull off, in part because the novelty of it precludes the existence of good “exemplars” (in the Kuhnian sense of completed work). Also, there is no clear audience to consider, no well-defined readership.

That’s why I always recommend doing interdisciplinary work within an established, as it were, inter-discipline. Don’t try to invent a new combination of hitherto uncombined approaches, especially if you’re a PhD student. Instead, look for an interesting community of prospective peers that are already combining some of the approaches you are interested in. Learn from them, not just the details of the individual theories, but the means by which they can be combined. From a social, rhetorical point of view, this is not very different from working in a classical discipline. There is a standard to work to, and there is a body of received knowledge to learn. It takes discipline.

If you try to define your own unique interdisciplinary position, the only people you can turn to for guidance are in the disciplines you are moving between. All too often, you find them too tolerant to learn anything from. Your understanding of their theories and methods may be merely adequate, and they may not comment too much on it but then turn around and speak enthusiastically about the use you are making of the other discipline, though they don’t know enough about it to criticize you. The same thing might then happen with members of the other discipline. What you lose is critical feedback. You come to work in an environment where you’ve given no one the authority to tell you that you’re wrong. This can be exciting in the short term, but is not very satisfying in the long run.

We sometimes forget that academic disciplines are just that–disciplines. The organization theorist Karl Weick has said that his own approach, what he calls organizational sensemaking, is less a “theory” than a kind of “disciplined imagination”. This echoes earlier attempts by philosophers like Michel Foucault and Thomas Kuhn to shift our focus from scientific theories, our understanding of which they felt (in 1960s) had been dominated by logical positivists, to “discursive formations” and “disciplinary matrices”. The basic idea is that scholarship is always shaped by social forces and that scholarly competence requires us to subject ourselves to discipline.

Indeed, Foucauldians will be sensitive to the pun implicit in the idea of an “academic subject”. In ordinary speech, it denotes an area of study, a topic of inquiry, like management accounting or renaissance poetry. But “the academic subject” can also be the center of a particular kind of experience, and a particular way of talking–what Foucault sometimes calls a “point of subjectivity” and sometimes calls an “enunciative modality”. It is what we also sometimes call “the self”, though philosophers differ about how much “personality” subjectivity requires. My self-as-scholar may be very different from my self-as-father; that is, scholarship and fatherhood may involve wholly different forms of subjectivity even in the life of the same person. The question is, Who am I when I am a scholar? (When I’m writing, for example.) How did I become him?

Jonathan Mayhew has emphasized the importance of “self-fashioning” in scholarship, retooling Stephen Greenblatt’s concept for the purpose. In my view, the aim is to become more articulate. And this, of course, requires “discipline” in the sense of resolute, orderly practice. It also requires a sort of “discipleship”, i.e., the resolve to follow a master, a teacher. We subject ourselves to discipline, it almost subjugates us. This is what produces the particular kind of articulate subjectivity we’re after as scholars.

Colloquium: Thursday, February 5, 14:00 to 16:00  in room A 2.35 (inside the CBS Library at Solbjerg Plads)

As a scholar you have to have a good sense of the state your field. The value of your contribution will always be relative to what is already known by your peers, and your awareness of their work is part of your qualifications as a scholar. This is why literature reviews are such an important part of scholarship. They tell you what your peers are thinking and, while you don’t have to agree with them on every point, as a member of the community your work will build on theirs.

All scholars will usually carry our a review of the literature several times during the course of their careers. Sometimes they will do this in order to publish a so-called “review article”, which is an important community service. Ideally, it will save others the trouble of reviewing the same literature themselves, at least for a while. At other times, a scholar will carry our a mini-review of a particular corner of the literature, mainly to see what’s new, or because they moving into an area that had previously been peripheral to their interests. At the start of the career, as part of one’s PhD research, one will normally do a thorough search of several literatures, trying to find a place that feels like “home”. This process is formative; it shapes a scholars sense of self along with a sense of the community. It helps to define the “I” by identifying the “we”.

Our first “Craft Thursday” this year will be devoted the art of reviewing the literature. We will show you a number of tricks for searching bodies of literature that may be relevant to you, and identifying the key texts and central authors in your tradition. We will also talk about how to find already published literature reviews.

Liv Bjerge Laursen will guide us through the library’s databases “live”. So do please bring your own question and problems for us to work through.

If you want to develop your mastery of some particular skill you will have give yourself time to practice. This also goes for writing. That’s why I’ve long recommended that scholars periodically commit themselves to eight weeks of deliberate writing, whether their aim is to get their writing process under control or simply to improve their style. During the 8-week period, you should write for at least half an hour and at most three hours every day, five days a week. (Yes, do please take the weekends off.) That means you will be writing between 20 and 120 hours over the eight-week period.

I offer weekly coaching to support this process, but normally only recommend it if you’re committing at least 40 hours to the Challenge. After all, you’ll be meeting with me (in a group of up to ten people) one hour every week, which would be almost a third of the time your committing to this discipline if you’re only actually writing for another two and half hours any given week. It’s okay to try this by yourself at a lower intensity for a while and then join the group when you’re ready to make a bigger commitment.

The trick, in any case, is to  appreciate your finitude. During the 8 weeks you’ll have, say, 40 hours of writing to do. I suggest you divide them into 27-minute paragraphs, which means you can write 80 paragraphs. And that means that you’ll be making 80 claims and providing support for them; making a claim and providing support for it is what a paragraph does. That’s 80 opportunities to improve yourself in that art. My Challenge to you is very simply to give yourself those 80 opportunities.

I suggest dividing your semester into two 8-week periods of this kind, with a one-week break in middle. For each of those 8-week periods, decide how many hours you’ll commit to the challenge. Then keep your commitment. For 32 weeks out of the year, you’ll now be producing careful, deliberate paragraphs. And this will keep your prose in shape.