Interdisciplinarity Future: Demand, Opportunities, and Barriers

In the foresight project, one of the main themes that requires answers is the future of the university as an organization based on individual disciplines. What are the roles of disciplinary and interdisciplinary research in the future and how are they related in each other within a university? In this post, I take a brief look on the issue. I discuss, first, some needs and demands that suggest strategic direction towards interdisciplinarity, and, second, the obstacles and barriers that a university might face on the path toward the new way of thinking about disciplinarity.

Reasons why interdisciplinarity could be central in the future:

1. The complexity of societal issues like climate change and public health crises requires integrating insights and methodologies across fields to create phenomenon-based approaches.
2. Rapid societal and technological changes demand graduates equipped with diverse competencies and knowledge.
3. The Delphi study revealed a strong desirability among respondents towards interdisciplinary and problem-focused approaches, indicating a growing consensus on their importance within the university community.
4. AI may enable interdisciplinary research by integrating models developed by different disciplines despite differences in their methods and approaches.

Obstacles to interdisciplinarity:

1. Deep-rooted traditions and incentive structures that reward specialization, such as funding, tenure, and promotion criteria.
2. In interdisciplinary structures, certain disciplines may tend to become more central and others peripheral in knowledge production.
3. The challenges in communication and coordination across disciplinary boundaries due to differences in epistemologies, methodologies, and cultures.
4. Respondents in the Delphi study emphasized the importance of disciplinary expertise, believing that deep understanding in specific field is requisite for research that in interdisciplinary and oriented toward societal demands.

In conclusion, we can say that the development of dynamics between disciplines and their interdisciplinary connections is likely to be shaped by several partly overlapping and partly interconnected drivers, such as the complexity of grand challenges, rapid technological advancements, the growing recognition on the importance of interdisciplinary approaches within the university community, and the adoption of phenomenon-based approaches in research. However, this development will also be influenced by the persistence of deep-rooted traditions and incentive structures that reward specialization, the ongoing value placed on curiosity-driven research, the challenges in communication and coordination across disciplinary boundaries, and the importance of disciplinary expertise emphasized by some respondents in the Delphi study.

To cope with these drivers and barriers, universities need to find ways to balance the values and norms of disciplinary communities with the need for greater interdisciplinary collaboration and integration. This seems to be the way to address the challenges facing society in our times while maintaining the existing inertia of knowledge production in order to be able to address challenges we may not even see yet.

Whether this will require measures like novel incentives, support structures, or even radical reconfiguration of infrastructure or organization structure, are strategic question for the future.