Specialization, territoriality, and jurisdiction: librarianship and the political economy of knowledge - Navigating Among the Disciplines: The Library and Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Perhaps for this reason, the models following the development of specialization are particularly useful, if only because it is now the dominant pattern of research. Intriguing examples are the organic models, which compare intellectual fields to biological organisms and species produced by a kind of hybridization, process (Dogan & Pahre, 1990). Much of the appeal of this model is derived from its comparison of intellectual movements to processes found in the study of the ecology and evolution of plant and animal species. Reversing the original root relationship between the ecology, of human life and the animal world, it locates a specialized form of human intellectual activity in a larger biological universe.

Another promising family of models uses spatial, regional, and geographic concepts instead of organic ones. For example, Berger (1972) compares disciplinary networks to archipelagoes and islands (Klein, 1990, pp. 40 ff.) Price (1981) compares the established intellectual domains of elite scholarship to continental masses with characteristically dense cosmopolitan centers of privilege; the newer emerging fields, like their counterparts in frontier societies far from the fronts of tradition, are thinly populated intellectual outposts where intellectual fortunes can be made overnight and many languish in obscurity. Garfield and Small (1985), seeking to map the "geography of science" use citation data to plot proximity, level of activity, and possibly the influence between and among groups of researchers staking out intellectual territories.

There is no inherent opposition between the two approaches, and they might be combined to form a third that integrates the two types; after all, organism and environment mutually imply one another. It is not possible to do this here, but it is useful to suggest that what the organic and the spatial approaches have in common is the pursuit of acquisitive specialized advance; they are territorial, competitive, and expansionist. In both cases, the underlying idea is to make and reinforce implicit jurisdictional claims analogous to the territorial claims that both human and animal populations make to ecological niches. They share, in other words, a general pattern of exploiting available resources to produce new life forms and new settlements, and thus to create, occupy, populate, and colonize new intellectual regions. This is probably especially true in the newer fields, which lack older jurisdictional foundations. But it is particularly true in any field that has a comparative dimension (for an especially clear example profiling comparative literature, see Loriggio, 1995).

In looking at the intellectual response to disciplinary growth, Klein, in this is issue of Library Trends, sees a rhetorical duality: there are, on the one hand, "metaphors of place-turf, territory, boundary, domain"-but also metaphors of connection-network, web, system, field, overlap, interconnection, and interpenetration." It may be useful to mention this here because, although my own argument obviously places a strong emphasis on the first of these and suggests that specialization works against integration in any systematic way, it does give rise to its own characteristic style of connection. Thus if integration seems substantially eclipsed by the movement of territorial advance, there is still a kind of mutual inter-dependence that provides some sense of interdisciplinary unity (to explore this in any detail is not possible here; we should point out, however, that the general idea is based on Durkheim's idea that mechanisms of social cohesion depend on the complexity, differentiation, and specialization of function found at different stages of social evolution). Advanced industrial society shows a high level of differentiation and thus a correspondingly low level of common culture, but there are durable social bonds formed by the fact that specialized roles promote a kind of integration through interdependence (see Kopytoff, 1988, pp. 12-13).