History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Ismael Rafols and Martin Mayer
SPRU, University of Sussex
Cross-disciplinary practices and the role of instrumentalities in a specialty of bionanotechnology
The various discourses claiming radical changes in the STI systems during the last decades (Gibbons et al., 1994; Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 1996) have signalled the increase of cross-disciplinary practices in research as one of the key hallmarks of the new modes of knowledge production. However, whereas research fields regarded as emerging through technological convergence, such as nanotechnology, have been hailed as examples of the new research dynamics, there has been somewhat contradictory empirical evidence concerning their degree of cross-disciplinarity (Meyer and Persson, 1998; Schummer, 2004).
In this exploratory study we aim to shed some light into the extent and relevance of cross-disciplinary practices in Molecular motors, one of the specialties of bionanoscience. In order to do so, we have carried five case studies triangulating data from interviews, published sources and bibliometrics, looking into various disciplinary dimensions of research (affiliation, background, references) and focusing on the role played by the development and migration of instrumentation, materials and techniques (research-technologies or instrumentalities), which have been signalled as central in the new modes of research (Shinn, 2002).
We have found that there is a consistent high degree of cross-disciplinarity in those research dimensions of a cognitive nature (in this case, references and instrumentalities), but a much narrower and erratic degree in those dimensions more associated with social constructs (affiliation and researchers’ background). There seems to be no clear difference in the degree of cross-disciplinarity engaged by projects funded in institutional or funding frameworks embracing the new modes of knowledge production, in comparison to those projects under more the traditional research settings. This result suggests that cross-disciplinary practices in this specialty are more cognitive-driven (i.e. of an intrinsic or ‘organic’ nature) than policy-driven –in according with previous results in similar fields (Fujigaki, 2002).
The other main finding is that research groups engage in a striking variety of knowledge-sourcing strategies in order to acquire know-how in crucial instrumentalities, including collaboration between groups, but also in-house learning and recruitment of researchers from the same and other disciplines. We suggest that that a trade-off in research costs between cross-disciplinarity and integration may explain the diversity of strategies encountered–and in particular why some groups seek cognitive diversity without crossing the social boundaries between disciplines, a behaviournot to be expected from the normative innovation discourses (Martin, Allwood and Hemlin, 2004).
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006