Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity

Abstract

This chapter analyses findings from our research interviews with physicists and historians that pertain to interdisciplinarity. In epistemic terms they see interdisciplinary directions as something that develops organically both within disciplines and between them. They believe that strong interdisciplinary work requires strong disciplinary ‘insider’ identity, and that this has implications for the balance of specialist and interdisciplinary subjects and majors at undergraduate level. Both historians and physicists expressed resentment of ‘top-down’ institutional and funding incentives to do interdisciplinary research, but they were also critical of disincentives to do such work as a result of the mechanisms used by national competitive funding schemes and in research assessments. Physicists mainly talked about interdisciplinary research and teaching as an outcome of the growth of knowledge in science. Historians mainly saw the recent developments as an outcome of university efforts to save money. Historians were less uniform than physicists in the ways they spoke about interdisciplinary developments, including whether publication achievement was reduced or enhanced by engaging in such work.