Bammer's Disciplining Interdisciplinarity

Bammer, Gabriele,Disciplining Interdisciplinarity: Integration and Implementation Sciences for Researching Complex Real-World Problems ANU E Press 2013

Bammer's book is rooted in the same observation as this website: that there is much useful advice in the literature, but it is dispersed broadly. Interdisciplinary scholars thus often re-invent the wheel. Moreover, we have not subjected this advice to the careful empirical testing it deserves. Some scholars may thus be giving advice that is exaggerated in importance or even completely misleading. "As a consequence there is no substantial, well-established, internationally accepted methodology. There are no standard procedures for deciding, for example, which disciplines to include, what each discipline will contribute or how the different findings will be melded together. In the absence of comprehensive guidance, newcomers to this type of research still largely rely on intuition to invent for themselves a way to deal with the challenges of interdisciplinary partnership."

Her book is intended as a first step in drawing together diverse insights and identifying areas in which we need to know more about which strategies work in which contexts. She hopes that her book will encourage evaluation of diverse methodologies. Yet her focus is on outlining what needs to be done rather than summarizing the literature. Bammer hopes for a big-science (human genome project like) approach to pull together and evaluate ideas from the vast but diverse literature. This website hopes that much can be accomplished along the same lines through this more modest format. We thus start with gathering existing advice, and hope to build on that base, encouraging testing of these ideas and the addition of others.

Notably the strategy pursued in this website resembles the "leap in" strategy referenced by Bammer in chapter 34, and pursued in a previous book on dialogue methods (often cited on this website): identify what one can and then seek more plus evaluation through online interaction. Bammer warns that it is difficult to stimulate online conversation. But if only a fraction of those scholars who have applied some of the advice represented in these pages will share their experiences, then we can achieve much in terms of the comparative case studies that both Bammer and we would see as critical to identifying which strategies work where.