Abstract

Academic culture and to some extent our broader intellectual culture have come increasingly to be informed during recent decades by a groundswell of sentiment to implement and practice what is conventionally termed "interdisciplinary" scholarship. An appreciation of the impetus toward interdisciplinarity is perhaps most readily accomplished through an examination of its manifestation in academic culture, and within our own nation, through a consideration of the discourse and rhetoric associated with the concept in our research universities—the elite group of one hundred and fifty public and private institutions charged with the advancement of knowledge through its discovery, preservation, and dissemination, accomplished through teaching, research, and public service. The "interdisciplinary imperative" has generated a vast body of literature and is frequently articulated with a sense of urgency in characteristically exhortatory terms. Yet there is only general consensus regarding what constitutes interdisciplinarity, and its discourse and rhetoric often overlook a more complex web of relationships—most pertinently to its complementarity to disciplinarity itself, as well as to integrally interrelated processes such as specialization. Through a review of recent analysis of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, this dissertation surveys major issues, focusing on an appreciation of the problematics of disciplinarity itself considered in three critical dimensions: epistemological, institutional, and sociocultural. Restricting focus largely to the humanities and social sciences, and especially to the discipline of history, consideration is given to the historical trajectories of disciplinary formation. The dissertation considers broadly whether it is possible to posit a correlation between the advent of postmodernism with the impetus toward the novel recombination of academic disciplines that purports to be interdisciplinarity. The dissertation also explores the interrelations between the disciplines and the institution of the American research university, and the impact of applied research that has assumed increasing significance as a consequence of the longstanding relationship between academia and the federal government. Considered also is the equally defining nexus of interrelations between academia and business and industry that has determined the trajectory for what is termed the "corporatist" university—construed as consistent with the organizational culture and operating practices associated with the modern corporation.