TY - JOUR
T1 - What Catalyzes Research Universities to Commit to Interdisciplinary Research?
AU - Barringer, Sondra N.
AU - Leahey, Erin
AU - Salazar, Karina
N1 - Funding Information:
Science and research policy has certainly contributed to this resurgence. Because of its ostensible capacity to spur innovation and secure research funding (Geiger & Sá ; Rhoten & Parker ), interdisciplinary research (IDR) has become a cornerstone of science and research policy in the United States. The pursuit of IDR also aligns well with the recent desire to address “grand challenges” like protecting human health and solving the climate crisis, which “will not be solved by one discipline alone” (National Science Foundation ; Popowitz & Dorgelo ). The National Academy of Sciences published Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research in 2005 and the National Research Council published Convergence in 2014 to foster cross-cutting and potentially innovative research (National Academies of Science ; National Research Council ). Major federal funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have taken explicit steps to support IDR (Hackett ; Jacobs & Frickel ; Louvel ; Turner, Benessaiah, Warren, & Iwaniec ), often by funding research centers (Bozeman & Boardman ; Hackett ; Harris ; Sá ). Private foundations and state governments are similarly engaged. For example, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funds interdisciplinary teams to advance health and well-being (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ), and state and local governments are leveraging on university research and innovation to foster economic development (Geiger & Sá ; Holley & Harris ; Owen-Smith ). Clearly, IDR has been fostered by multiple funders and stakeholders.
Funding Information:
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation, Science of Science and. Innovation Policy Directorate under grants SMA-1461989 and SMA-1461846. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science. Acknowledgements
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer Nature B.V.
PY - 2020/9/1
Y1 - 2020/9/1
N2 - For decades, science policy has been promoting interdisciplinary research (IDR), but universities have not responded uniformly. To explain this variation, we integrate insights from the organizational literature, especially research on microfoundations, and highlight the role of both administrators and faculty. We collect and, with the help of machine learning, code vast amounts of textual data from 156 universities nationwide to measure universities’ structural commitment to IDR as well as key explanatory variables, including top-down administrative support for, and bottom-up faculty engagement with, IDR. We integrate these measures with extant data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, Higher Education R&D Expenditures Survey, NIH, NSF, and IPEDS to analyze how internal university dynamics influence the degree to which a university commits to IDR. Our results reveal that the level of structural commitment to IDR differs at universities with and without medical schools, as do the precursors to this commitment. At universities with medical schools, we find that bottom-up engagement is positively associated with structural commitment to IDR, and that status moderates the relationship between top-down administrative support and structural commitment to IDR. For universities with low levels of supportive administrative discourse status significantly impacted their structural commitment to IDR. At universities without medical schools, top-down support and bottom-up engagement are interrelated and mutually reinforcing such that universities with high levels of both administrative support and interdisciplinary research grants have higher levels of structural commitment to IDR. We discuss the implications of these findings for university administrators, policy makers, and researchers.
AB - For decades, science policy has been promoting interdisciplinary research (IDR), but universities have not responded uniformly. To explain this variation, we integrate insights from the organizational literature, especially research on microfoundations, and highlight the role of both administrators and faculty. We collect and, with the help of machine learning, code vast amounts of textual data from 156 universities nationwide to measure universities’ structural commitment to IDR as well as key explanatory variables, including top-down administrative support for, and bottom-up faculty engagement with, IDR. We integrate these measures with extant data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, Higher Education R&D Expenditures Survey, NIH, NSF, and IPEDS to analyze how internal university dynamics influence the degree to which a university commits to IDR. Our results reveal that the level of structural commitment to IDR differs at universities with and without medical schools, as do the precursors to this commitment. At universities with medical schools, we find that bottom-up engagement is positively associated with structural commitment to IDR, and that status moderates the relationship between top-down administrative support and structural commitment to IDR. For universities with low levels of supportive administrative discourse status significantly impacted their structural commitment to IDR. At universities without medical schools, top-down support and bottom-up engagement are interrelated and mutually reinforcing such that universities with high levels of both administrative support and interdisciplinary research grants have higher levels of structural commitment to IDR. We discuss the implications of these findings for university administrators, policy makers, and researchers.
KW - Interdisciplinarity
KW - Machine learning
KW - Microfoundations
KW - Organizational commitments
KW - Research universities
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U2 - 10.1007/s11162-020-09603-x
DO - 10.1007/s11162-020-09603-x
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85086451600
SN - 0361-0365
VL - 61
SP - 679
EP - 705
JO - Research in Higher Education
JF - Research in Higher Education
IS - 6
ER -