This Societal Dimensions of Engineering, Science, and Technology Program Dissertation Improvement Grant will enable a dissertation student to conduct case studies at four major research institutions in order to move closer to completing his Ph.D. dissertation. The dissertation focuses on interdisciplinarity in university-based research. Fostering interdisciplinarity has become a laudable goal for federal agencies and research-intensive universities alike. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has supported interdisciplinarity for a number of years, through center programs and other initiatives (Brint, forthcoming; Hackett, 2000; Lattuca, 2001). In the early 2000s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) made an explicit commitment to interdisciplinarity in the "NIH Roadmap" (National Institutes of Health, 2003). At about the same time, strategic plans of research universities have increasingly emphasized interdisciplinary scholarship (Feller, 2002, forthcoming). Universities, however, ground their basic organizational frameworks in the nexus between disciplines and academic departments (Blau, 1994; Clark, 1983, 1987, 1993, 1995; Geiger, 1986; Veysey, 1965). Both external sponsorship and university leadership commitment to fostering interdisciplinarity therefore suggest the need to induce change in the way scientists work. Whether universities choose to respond to calls for interdisciplinarity is partly a matter of institutional strategy, local culture, and organizational climates (Brint, forthcoming; Feller, 2002, forthcoming). Presently, little is known about which institutions are more likely to organize for interdisciplinary efforts and what organizational strategies they have employed. Previous studies of interdisciplinarity have focused on individual faculty members as the unit of analysis (Klein, 1990; Lattuca, 2001), on the work patterns or effectiveness of interdisciplinary research centers (Ailes, Roessner, & Coward, 2000; Newell, Saxberg, & Birnbaum, 1975; Rhoten, 2003), or purported paradigmatic shifts in the production of knowledge (Gibbons et al., 1994; Weingart & Stehr, 2000). Scattered findings on institutions that support interdisciplinarity (Brint, forthcoming; Feller, 2002, forthcoming) do not allow for understanding of general patterns of organizational change and adaptation. Is there a relationship between a university's official commitment to interdisciplinarity and the amount of sponsored interdisciplinary research it carries out? What are some of the organizational strategies that universities have employed to foster interdisciplinary science? This study will address these questions through a content analysis of universities' strategic plans and an analysis of the distribution of NSF interdisciplinary research grants. The content analysis will reveal the nature and extent of official institutional commitments to interdisciplinarity, and the analysis of NSF-funded projects will provide an objective measure of universities' boundary-spanning work. Together, these analyses will serve as an index of institutional emphasis on interdisciplinary or disciplinary-specialization strategies. To provide an in-depth understanding of organizational commitments and arrangements for interdisciplinary science, the researcher will also conduct case studies of selected universities that are making institutional commitments to interdisciplinary strategies. The case studies will be central to the proposed investigation, revealing potentially new structures that are altering the usual settings for faculty work. In its totality, the study will elucidate how the university system and selected institutions have reacted to sponsorship to interdisciplinarity, in what seems to be a salient trend for future research funding in the U.S. and internationally (Weingart & Stehr, 2000). Findings will be useful for higher education scholars and administrators dedicated to the study and the management of research-intensive universities, informing both practice and theory-building on adaptations of traditional academic structures to promote interdisciplinary modes of research. If the current support for interdisciplinary science is sustained - or perhaps increased - in the future, the relevance of organizational structures for boundary-spanning work will be heightened for universities that wish to participate effectively in the research economy. Results of the proposed investigation will be disseminated through presentations and publications in the field of higher education administration, and will also be included in a graduate-level course of a leading program in the field.
