Debating Disciplinarity

Transdisciplinarity and Information Systems: IT Governance in the Digitalisation of Healthcare

“…Post [1] argues that questions of disciplinarity seek criteria for validating the "eccentric" angle of vision of a particular "intellectual" community in terms of its methodology, subject matter, curriculum or its shared purpose. Disciplinarity involves the education, certification, hiring, and promotion of university professors.…”

The mathematical turn

“…The humanities have notoriously formed the institutional location for the investigation of the politics of inquiry, rather than of any defined object of knowledge. The “debate on disciplinarity as such”, as Robert Post notes, has primarily been situated in the humanities (Post , p.770). In the postdiscursive university, this function becomes untenable, and the humanities become as irrelevant within the university as they traditionally were without.…”

Whoever pays the piper calls the tune: pressures on academic freedom and the discipline of music in the UK

“…This point is not trivial. As disciplines, the humanities must establish knowledge practices that create a normal science capable of reproduction and replication in university departments throughout the country It follows for Post that research grounded in ‘charismatic authority’ rather than disciplinary standards is not protected from state intrusion, at least on the present terms on which the academy is protected.…”

“…Returning to the core economic issue – ‘Who pays the piper?’ – as Howard Hotson writes, ‘At the heart of the Browne Report and the government's higher education policy is a simple notion allegedly grounded in economics: that the introduction of market forces into the higher education sector will simultaneously drive up standards and drive down prices.’ But, unfortunately: ‘The confidence displayed by ministers in predicting these effects would be more reassuring if it were not at odds with the evidence that precisely the opposite is happening.’ This is one example of the widespread resistance to the idea that the combination of government and student pressures can be characterised as acting in harmony to reshape the disciplines to be more streamlined and ‘competitive’. Even more, if – and this is not to say that we should do this uncritically – we accept that the two most important functions of universities are ‘higher education and the production of knowledge’, then the economic pressures work independently to fracture the coherence of these strands of academic activity at a university level, never mind their effects on a less well defended individual discipline such as musicology . These combined pressures may also have significant knock‐on effects on postgraduate study and thus the future sustainability of disciplines .…”