This post shall be a reading of Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny, Schwartzman, Scott and Trow’s ‘The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies’. About ‘Mode 2’ science it offers a perspective on transdisciplinarity.

If I were to describe the main varieties of transdisciplinarity; I would suggest there is Nicolescu’s metaphysical essays and treatises (e.g. Nicolescu 2012; 2014), complex systems and complex thought (Morin, 2008) and finally ‘Mode 2’ Science as described in the book I am reviewing (Nowotny, Scwartzman, et. al, 1994). I believe these versions of transdisciplinarity are not contradictory (especially as Nicolescu accounts for contradictions with his ‘included middle’), yet their aims are quite different. Nicolescu looks at how we ought to think about reality, whereas ‘Mode 2’ looks at how society actually is. Complexity theory does both. Thus, I found ‘Mode 2’ science to be much more grounded in the sense that it is a examination of knowledge production in the contemporary climate, rather than looking at how we need to/should change.

As an account of knowledge, it offers an epistemology that suggests knowing can be found outside the academy. It can be found in ‘non-university institutes, research centres, government agencies, industrial laboratories, think-tanks, consultancies’. This partly due the massification of university education according to the authors and knowledge-producers going into roles outside universities. Yet, I would go further, that knowledge can be generated outside of institutions and beyond university-educated individuals. Consider survivor research (Faulkener, 2017; Russo, 2012) and Mad Studies (LeFrançois, Reaume and Menzies, 2013), these suggest mental health patients are ‘experts by experience’. They can offer insights into their own situation what others can not. Of course, certain sciences like sociology and psychology engage with individuals outside academia, yet these inevitably come with frameworks that guide the researcher and may affect the knowledge collected. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up for debate.

One aspect I found interesting is the author’s focus on knowledge produced within the humanities- they argue the sciences are not the only site of society-relevant knowledge. As the authors write ‘Multi-site production of culture has been routine rather than exceptional, although the focus of extra-academic production has switched from the Victorian gentleman-scholar’s study, through the publishing house, to the television studio or advertising agency.’ In other words, cultural production is no longer found as a gentleman’s activities rather it is distributed through society. This may be true for the arts, but what about the humanities? I would argue we can learn from history when it comes to the way we conceptualise the contexts from which knowledge emerges from, especially through thinkers like Boethius and Cassiodorus (both from Late Antique Italy). For them, there was no boundaries between subjects when it came to the Liberal Arts. Masi (1974) describes Boethius’ idea of disciplinarity. Mathematics is necessary for the study of music, whereas one needs to understand geometry in order to be an astronomer. Number theory is also seen as a pivotal to understand theology and philosophy, particularly because it helps understand God’s relationship to the cosmos. Also consider Cassiodorus’ Instituones and its integrated-disciplinary guide to understanding the world (Jackson, 1966). Transdisciplinarity has been practiced for a long-time, we can improve our theory of it by reading past ‘generalists’. Finally, we also need to consider the contexts in which social knowledge can be produced within the humanities, such as public history, social fiction in literature and experimental philosophy (Andow, 2016; Moss, 2017).

‘Mode 2’ science is also characterised ‘through the repeated configuration of human resources in flexible, essentially transient, forms of organisation. The loop from the context of application through transdisciplinarity, heterogeneity, organisational diversity is closed by new adaptive and contextual forms of quality control.’ This, much like I mentioned when talking about Edgar Morin, reminds me of an agile approach to project management. Agile is a technique and work philosophy that aims to be adaptive and iterative to engage with emerging complex problems (Fernandez and Fernandez, 2008). The emphasis on quality control reminds me of the ‘feedback cycle’ in Agile in which new iterations are released frequently, in order to gain feedback that in turn develops the project (Dybå, Dingsøyr and Moe, 2014).

Another factor to consider is the development of technologies that should facilitate ‘Mode 2’ science. As the authors argue, technology is allowing the world to become more globalised. This may be through increased communication or improved access to resources for universities that might not have a large library. In the former, there are Skype, Zoom, e-mail and online whiteboards like Miro. The increase in resources (and consequentially knowledge) can be found on sources like the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Academia.edu and ResearchGate. Many of these are twenty first century inventions, so the authors likely underestimated the extent to which technology and globalisation are linked.

Finally, I want to touch on the economics of transdisicplinarity and knowledge. One aspect of ‘Mode 2 Science’ relates to where funding is acquired from, for example government, industry and consultancy groups are all now sources of funding. This means transdisciplinary research can function outside the university (something highlighted by its epistemic distribution as well). Furthermore, ‘increasingly there is less and less return on the traditional resources: land, labour and (money) capital. The main producers of wealth have become information and knowledge.’ This is a suggestion we live in a ‘knowledge economy.’ Knowledge is indeed becoming more critical such as seen through the growth of the quaternary sector, but the production of goods inevitably relies on primary and secondary production. However, the truth is these always relied on knowledge (i.e mastery of technical and practical skills), so we have always had a ‘knowledge economy’, in the sense that knowledge can emerge from outside university-educated professions (as discussed above).

This post has highlighted the areas of The New Production of Knowledge I find most interesting. As mentioned, ‘Mode 2’ Science offers a form of transdisciplinarity that is compatible with yet differs from Nicolescu and Morin. The issues highlighted here cannot be ignored, they can and should affect how we conceptualise knowledge and transdisciplinarity, whether this is a good or a bad thing is likely to be debated.

Bibliography

Andow, James. 2016. “Qualitative Tools and Experimental Philosophy.” Philosophical Psychology 29 no. 8. 1128-1141.

Dybå, Tore, Torgeir Dingsøyr, and Nils Brede Moe. 2014. “Agile project management.” In Software project management in a changing world, edited by Günther Ruhe, Claes Wohlin , 277-300. Berlin: Springer

Faulkner, Alison. 2017. “Survivor research and Mad Studies: the role and value of experiential knowledge in mental health research.” Disability & Society 32, no. 4: 500-520.

Fernandez, Daniel J., and John D. Fernandez. 2008. “Agile project management—agilism versus traditional approaches.” Journal of Computer Information Systems 49, no. 2: 10-17.

Gibbons, Michael, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott, and Martin Trow. 1994. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. Newbury Park: SAGE.

Jackson, Sidney L. 1966. “Cassiodorus’ Institutes and Christian Book Selection.” The Journal of Library History 1, no. 2 : 89–100.

LeFrançois, B. A., Menzies, R., & Reaume, G. Eds. 2013. Mad matters: A critical reader in Canadian mad studies. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.

Masi, Michael. 1974. “Boethius and the Iconography of the Liberal Arts.” Latomus 33, no. 1: 57–75.

Morin, Edgar. 2008. On Complexity. Translated by Robin Poster. New York: Hampton Press.

Moss, David. 2017. “Experimental philosophy, folk metaethics and qualitative methods.” Teorema: Revista Internacional de Filosofia. 185-203.

Nicolescu, Basarab. 2012. “Transdisciplinarity: the hidden third, between the subject and the object.” Human and Social Studies 01: 13-28.

Nicolescu, Basarab. 2014. “Methodology of Transdisciplinarity.” World Futures 70, no. 3-4: 186-199.

Russo, Jasna. 2012. “Survivor-controlled research: A new foundation for thinking about psychiatry and mental health.” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 13, no. 1.