Content provided in partnership with
Specialization, territoriality, and jurisdiction: librarianship and the political economy of knowledge - Navigating Among the Disciplines: The Library and Interdisciplinary Inquiry
Library Trends, Fall, 1996 by Michael F. Winter
INTRODUCTION
The general orientation of this article is the idea that human activity is, roughly speaking, ecological-a process that involves interaction between social groups and environments. Because current use of the term "ecology" strongly connotes the, physical world, it is useful to point out that it is descended from an ancient Greek word (oikeos) meaning "household" in the broad sense of a human settlement and thus a complex interweaving of fields of social action. The verbal forms suggest inhabiting, settling, governing, controlling, managing, and similar activities, and are applied to organizations and states as well as to smaller social units like families and other kin groups. While not excluding, and indeed including, a part of the physical world, this notion thus focuses on the social environment. This article emphasizes that part of the social environment where the production and distribution of formal knowledge occurs. Its domain, shared with the principal domain of the other articles in this issue of Library Trends, is the organization of formal knowledge.
- Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »
INTEGRATION, SPECIALIZATION, AND THE GROWTH OF KNOWLEDGE
Recent work on interdisciplinarity has made much progress in trying to understand the often overwhelming complexity of contemporary knowledge growth (Klein, 1990; Dogan & Pahre, 1990; Easton & Schelling, 1991, even though the advances seem more striking in understanding theoretical work than problem@ or policy-oriented research (Easton, 1991, pp. 14 ff.). By undertaking the difficult work of describing, classifying, and organizationally mapping patterns of contact among disciplines, this work provides a kind of ethnography of knowledge production, which in turn provides a number of essential starting points for model building and theory construction.
Julie Thompson Klein's (1990) ambitious and synoptic overview of this very complex set of problems provides some hope that some of the better-known disadvantages of specialization may yet be overcome. And indeed one of the abiding themes in the literature on interdisciplinarity is the hope of integration which haunts it (Easton, 1991, pp. 16-18). If many natural scientists have either abandoned that hope or never entertained it in the first place, librarians and humanist scholars keep it alive@ social scientists, depending on their situation, fall somewhere in between. The common hope of controlling the literary output of the many fields of learning is reflected in the early modem quest for a universal bibliography (Chartier, 1991), in the first efforts at modern knowledge classification developed by Francis Bacon (1606) in The Advancement of Learning and later applied to book collecting by eighteenth-century figures like Thomas Jefferson (Gilreath & Wilson, 1989), and underlies the application of these schemes to book and library classification in more recent times.
In the United States, this hope of unity was pursued with some energy and enthusiasm at least through the first half of the twentieth century. Perhaps it was energized by the reform-oriented progressivism that permeated American life between 1880 and 1920 (Wiebe, 1967). The post-world War II period, on the other hand, has not been as kind to the movement. In the 1920s and the 1930s, American thinkers like John Dewey, George Herbert Mead (from the pragmatist tradition), and others like Otto Neurath (from the positivist side) developed "universal" and systematic, theoretical schemes intended for a variety of disciplinary contexts (Fuller, 1988, pp. 6-7). This integrative impulse was also evident, famously, in the utopian projects of pedagogical visionaries like Alexander Meiklejohn and Robert Hutchins, who urged the abandonment of narrow specialization and the adoption of broader and more ecumenical views in higher education (Winter, 1991).
Somewhat later, Talcott Parsons, though nominally a sociologist, began intellectual life as a political economist, co-founded a multidisciplinary program of social relations, and developed a broad conceptual framework for the explanation of social action across the disciplines embracing sociology, social psychology, anthropology, economics, and political science. And throughout the 1950s, there were ambitious efforts at integration from behaviorism, Marxism, systems theory, semiotics, structuralism, and other quarters @for an overview of the "integrative process," see Klein, 1990, pp. 188-89). As Easton (1991) has pointed out, at different times, teamwork, general theory, and general methodology-and, he might have added, bibliography, classification, and the study of organizing information for retrieval-have been enlisted in the cause of integration and synthesis (pp. 16-20).
SPECIALIZED ADVANCE, TERRITORIAL IMPULSE, AND
INTELLECTUAL COLONIALISM
But it is specialization, not integration, that seems to prevail, at least for the present, the energies of many able scholars seem devoted to what Easton (1991) has called, in a very apt phrase, the Cartesian impulse to endlessly decompose subjects into ever finer analytical domains (p. 12). This may be more true for the industrialized West than for other parts of the world. Easton (1991), for example, argues that scholarly work in China is not nearly as specialized as research in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe (pp. 8-9). And some European exceptions should be noted, as the protests against specialization in papers by scholars as diverse in political orientation as Helmut Schelsky (1987, pp.119-37) and Theodor W. Adorno (1987, pp. 232-47) indicate. Whether this is because the logic of inquiry itself in some way mandates an increasing spiral of specialization, or because all scholarship seeks to emulate natural science models, or again because ours is an age of radical pluralism and differentiation, are questions of some interest and difficulty. In any case, "the magnitude of achieving synthesis has been under-estimated" (Klein, 1990, p.116).
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: News
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »