Academic disciplinary segregation versus business collaboration as an imperative to value creation

In academic terms collaboration is the same as the practice of interdisciplinary research. However, this is still not mainstream as collaboration isn't mainstream, yet, in business. That being the case, business through utility maximisation (profit) has had to find new ways of working, especially where collaboration across supply chains has become a business imperative to generate value. Roberta Frank (1988, cited in Klein, 1996, p. 8) places the origin of the term interdisciplinarity within the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), when the term was used as a form of 'bureaucratic shorthand' for research involving two or more professional societies. However, the first citation in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary and a Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary refers to a December 1937 issue of the Journal of Educational Sociology along with a notice for Post-Doctoral Fellowships for the SSRC.

Over recent years there has been greater levels of debate and indeed research on the subject of interdisciplinary working from an academic and pedagogic standpoint. Looking at the literature from mid- 1990s to present date the coproduction of research as an interdisciplinary activity and the very way in which it is achieved has itself been the subject of research itself ³.

The academic structure of disciplines has been described in many different ways and even the formation of disciplines has its origin in two aspects: Firstly, our desire as human beings to separate, classify and organise matters in ?neat?codified ways; and secondly the need of science to take full advantage of accumulated knowledge ¹ such that the advancement of disciplinary education (referenced in a USA context) followed not only a commitment to science, but was also a result of the belief that citizens had to be educated in specialised fields in order to participate in the economic life of the country. Therefore, in defining interdisciplinary I have used the Mansilla & Gardener (2005) ² definition: (In this study) we defined 'interdisciplinary work' as work that integrates knowledge and modes of thinking from two or more disciplines. Such work embraces the goal of advancing understanding (e.g., explain phenomena, craft solutions, raise new questions) in ways that would have not been possible through single disciplinary means.

Turning to the business environment the use of the term interdisciplinary is certainly utilised, particularly in the area of property development/Construction, Engineering and similar fields requiring the need to utilise a collective of specialist skills and expertise to create a new asset through Temporary Multi Organisations (TMOs) ?. However, the more common and widely used term of collaboration is gaining in momentum and popularity. Further, with the introduction of ISO 44001 for collaboration the need to work more effectively across business is a critical success factor.

Potentially of greater importance is the emergence and realisation that a new breed of boundary-spanners, who I term 'pracademics', has emerged. Practitioners in this context have higher cognitive frames and bring experience into corporate and/or complex organisations often where change and transformation is required, using skills and competencies gained through parallel business wide challenges allied to change and transformation. This can be from the disciplines of Engineering, Finance and Procurement typically, given the overarching role in these areas. It is these pracademics who I truly believe have the skills and competencies to function in the business environment having also gained the skills and competencies of a proficient researcher too; the ability to harness what academic research has produced and effectively make sense of this new information in a business context, and to translate it into a form that can be accessed by the business to create value; either through innovation, improvement, development or other means, is critical. The emergence of the pracademic, and hence a definition of their role, is a necessary one as a boundary- spanner that seeks to promulgate interdisciplinary research within the pursuit of recent or ongoing academic research, whilst at the same time having developed a cognitive frame (hyperbolic or paradoxical) as a recognised practitioner in the field of their profession. The pracademic will also be the osmotic layer that sits between academia and business and filters out the concepts, theories, ideas and innovation that acts as a catalyst for businesses to create value and competitive advantage.

The boundary- spanner will by nature be an interdisciplinary advocate who will disrupt the neat order of singular discipline research and collaboration. The advantages for those who embrace this new order and approach, and thus become effective collaborators, will deliver 'first mover advantage' and accordingly reap the rewards. Equally, we must recognise that innovation is enabled by a systematic process to drive the delivery of ideas through incremental innovation to truly innovative delivery and everything in between. Hence, the discipline derived from well- constructed methodology as taught at doctoral researcher level is a competency in itself. A competency that is not commonly part of the normal business curriculum. Thereby, reinforcing the collaborative nature of the approach as a means to achieving effective interdisciplinary activity.

The harsh reality is that interdisciplinary research and further still, academic and business interdisciplinary collaboration are hard to achieve and is not growing at the rate as we need in order to meet economic or societal demand. A good example is the delivery of cost effective public transportation (introduction of all electric drive buses), where environmental requirements are rightly more stringent in cities, but still need to deliver a whole life cost solution that fits the public purse. This example is drawn from personal experience of fusing the disciplines of procurement, supply chain, engineering, fleet management, finance and environmental management as essential collaborators to make this a reality across a portfolio of 15 countries in the EU.

Therefore, in order to be enable interdisciplinary and/or collaborative teams or enterprises we need to consider how we drive the right behaviours to elicit the right outcomes. This will be both at the academic and business level to augment. Some of the recent discussions in an academic context have centred around how and where funding is allocated; metrics to foster interdisciplinary supervision of research at doctoral level; creation of roles to act as boundary- spanners to reduce the barriers to access academic research; academic journals dedicated to methodology for interdisciplinary method, processes and techniques and grant funding to accelerate the move to interdisciplinary research as the norm. From a business perspective there has been recognition that investing in academic research will not be short term and will require longer term commitments to resources and funding.

In the midst of this I have even read a recent paper that calls for creating a discipline for interdisciplinarity. This seems perhaps logical, but in practice may just put up another hurdle to accelerating the present and urgent need for collaborative practice. The need for using this as a mechanism to inform such an approach, including proof of concept from earlier research too. A dichotomy currently exists between the objectives and governance of academia and those of business are not aligned by their very nature, but need to find a common ground.

Some practical cognitive hurdles for the academic and the practitioner exist in not just the objectives, governance and methodology but at a very fundamental level of lexicon. As a current PhD researcher and long-time practitioner, I will illustrate them with real world examples in table 1 below;

ACADEMIC DESCRIPTIVE LEXICON	REAL WORLD DESCRIPTIVE LEXICON
Temporary Multi-Organisations	New project team
Behavioural Operations	Behavioural Economics
Randomised Control Trials (RCT's)	Baseline and sample groups
Socially constructed norms	Driven or constructed by society
Posit the approach	Hypothetical or conceptual approach

In relative terms the debate has only just begun, but the gap between academia and business is widening at a far greater rate due to economic and societal changes. Further, we need to understand the place and position of all the many professional bodies and what role they may have to play in this.

In this debate I have to declare my own support for interdisciplinarity and its use on a much wider scale. In developing the research for this narrative, I came across a paper by Nissani ?, which far more eloquently summarised why we should support the collaboration across academia and across academia with business. I have reproduced the ten points as set out in the original paper by Nissani below;

1. Creativity often requires interdisciplinary knowledge.

2. Immigrants often make important contributions to their new field.

3. Disciplinarians often commit errors which can be best detected by people familiar with two or more disciplines.

4. Some worthwhile topics of research fall in the interstices between the traditional disciplines.

5. Many intellectual, social and practical problems require interdisciplinary approaches.

6. Interdisciplinary knowledge and research serve to remind us of the unity- of knowledge ideal.

7. Interdisciplinarians enjoy greater flexibility in their research.

8. More so than narrow disciplinarians, Interdisciplinarians often treat themselves to the intellectual equivalent of travelling in new lands.

9. Interdisciplinarians may help breach communication gaps in the modern academy, thereby helping to mobilise its enormous intellectual resources in the cause of greater social rationality and justice.

10. By bridging fragmented disciplines, Interdisciplinarians might play a role in defense of academic freedom. (p. 201)

The debate will no doubt continue and so it should. However, the recognition by academics, publishers, business and pracademics such as myself are too few and the exigency to accelerate the need for interdisciplinarity is an urgent one.

A far more comprehensive read is available in the following article:

Interdisciplinarity: A literature review by Angelique Chettiparamb, Published by: The Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning Group, Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, School of Humanities, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ.ISBN: 978- 1- 905788- 36- 1, November 2007

¹ Aram, J. D. (2004) Concepts of Interdisciplinarity: Configurations of Knowledge and Action. Human Relations. 57 (4), 379- 412.

² Mansilla, V.B. and Gardner, H., ?Assessing interdisciplinary work at the frontier. An empirical exploration of ?symptoms of quality?Rethinking Interdisciplinarity, 2005 & Mansilla, V. B, Gardener, H: Assessing Student Work at Disciplinary Crossroads, Change, January-February 2005

³ Advancing interdisciplinary research: Insights from the JIBSspecial issue: Joseph LC Cheng, Julian Birkinshaw, Donald R Lessard and David C Thomas, Journal of International Business Studies, Vol. 45, No. 6, Special Issue: Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in International Business: Integrative Knowledge and Transformative Theories, August 2014), pp. 643- 648, Palgrave Macmillan Journals

Cherns, A. B. & Bryant, D. T. (1984) 'Studying the Client's Role in Construction Management', Construction Management & Economics, 2, 177- 84 & Awuzie, B. and McDermott, P. (2015), "A conceptual model for evaluating infrastructure- based temporary multi- organisations", Built Environment Project and Asset Management, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp. 103- 120.

Symbiot Practices in Boundary Spanning: Bridging the Cognitive and Political Divides in Interdisciplinary Research, Kaplan, Sarah; Milde, Jonathan; Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. Academy of Management Journal. Aug 2017, Vol. 60 Issue 4, p1387- 1414. & Organisations, March, J; Simon, H, 1958, pub Wiley (New York).

Cognitive Frames in Corporate Sustainability: Managerial Sensemaking with Paradoxical and Business Case Frames, Tobias Hahn Kedge, Lutz Preuss, Jonathan Pinkse, Frank Figge, Academy of Management Review 2014, Vol. 39, No. 4, 463? 487 & In the name of the practical: Unearthing the hegemony of pragmatics in the discourse of environmental management. Journal of Management Studies, 42: 845? 867.Prasad, P., & Elmes, M. 2005. & Classifying managerial responses to multiple organizational identities. Academy of Management Review, 25: 18 ? 42, Pratt, M. G., & Foreman, P. O. 2000.

Bammer G (2013) Disciplining interdisciplinarity: Integration and implementation sciences for researching complex real- world problems. ANU Press, Canberra, http://press.anu.edu.au & Bammer G (2016) What constitutes appropriate peer review for interdisciplinary research? Palgrave Communications 2, 16017 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms 

Klein, J. T. and Newell, W. H. (1998) Advancing Interdisciplinary Studies. In Newell, W.H. (ed.) Interdisciplinarity: Essays from the Literature. New York: The College Boards, pp.393- 415.

Nissani, M. (1997) Ten Cheers for Interdisciplinarity: The Case for Interdisciplinary Knowledge and Research. The Social Science Journal. 34 (2), 201- 216.