Mike Michael
It goes without saying that interdisciplinary collaboration can be a fraught business. Of course, there are various modes by which different disciplines might more or less happily pattern their methods, practices and concepts in relation to one another (see Barry, Born and Weszkalnys (2008) for an important statement on this). However, there are also cases when the process of collaboration requires delicate negotiation, and even then there is no guarantee of a happy, productive outcome. An example of this is the tension between laboratory scientists and clinicians who both ostensibly share an interest in neuroscience and yet place value in very different forms of knowledge and experimentation, and epistemic culture (Brosnan and Michael 2014).
In my own recent experience of collaboration with designers, what at one level appeared to be an excellent working relationship with common points of intellectual reference, revealed itself to be far more complex. For instance, my accounting of relevant design traditions was seen by my designer colleagues to be lacking accuracy let alone nuance, while in my view their engagement with users was less than it could have been (in terms of its generation of empirical material). Now neither of these critical views is to be seen to be ‘correct’. The point is, rather, that they indicate the tensions that arise because of the value placed in/on divergent priorities: a ‘proper’ history of design that appropriately situates the project, as opposed to a quick sketch that gets us to the point of discussing the social theoretical implications of the project; an unsystematic engagement with the users of the design in order to gather clues as to the design’s role in their everyday lives versus a systematic collection of data so that we can access and analyse the range of users’ relevant views and practices.
Despite these differences in accent and interest, a compromise between social scientists and designers was achieved. But to say this obscures a complex set of features. If we break up compromise into its three component parts, we can note that, etymologically at least, we have ‘mise’ which translates as ‘putting’, ‘pro’ which translates as forward, and ‘com’ which translates as together: in other words, a ‘putting forward together’.
At first glance, this might imply a sort of unproblematic, seamless, integrated ‘co-projection’, but things are a little more complicated. ‘Putting forward together’ does not necessarily connote either integration or seamlessness. Things can be put forward together in parallel, after all. That is to say, compromising might mean acknowledging one’s collaborators’ views and practices but not necessarily valuing them, or valuing them only contingently. How then might we think about this process of valuing disciplinary others? In what follows, it is suggested that we can do this by addressing the affective dimensions of compromise. Here compromise might be understood as a ‘staging of care’ in such a way that participants collaborate in ways that accommodate and value their differences as well as their similarities.
Surprisingly, it turns out that promise is an antonym of threat. Compromising can be reconsidered in this light: it can be said to connote the common overcoming of threat. In the case of my collaboration with the designers, the threat I perceived was one in which their seemingly piecemeal and opportunistic use of data challenged my conceptions of empirical research. What could they usefully say about users’ use of their designs, in particular, such artefacts as biojewellery? (For a fuller discussion of the details of biojewellery and my responses to it, see Michael (2012).) It was only when I came to realize that the usefulness of their designs lay, indeed, in their use (as opposed to the subsequent social scientific commentary on that use) that I came to grasp the limitations of my own assumptions about the value of social science. As a result, there was a shift – not total by any means – toward a re-viewing of a nexus of values running through my attachments to social scientific research. To clarify, these disciplinary (in my case, the sociology end of science and technology studies) attachments were not only to specific theoretical and methodological content. Attachments were also drawn to the ‘ethos’ of doing social scientific research per se.
For instance, there was value placed in the clarity of a research question: a particular problem (in my case a discrete technoscientific controversy on stem cell research, say) is identified and investigated empirically. In contrast, for the designers I was collaborating with, while there were certain design and technical problems to be solved, the ‘research problem’ seemed to emerge through the doing of the research. From my perspective, the political point of my research was to illuminate and champion the value of the framings and knowledges of more or less disempowered groups (as against those of predominant expert institutions). By contrast, while the designers were certainly interested in the ways in which people interacted with their designs, they were as much concerned with displaying those designs and the processes that went into their making.
The designers’ rather different positions on ‘research’ were threatening, not least because they did not initially make sense. In what follows, I discuss how the designers’ practices did gradually begin to make sense to me, and how, in the process, my own sense-making machinery began to change. Stengers’ discussion of cosmopolitics will prove particularly useful in addressing the parameters of this process of change.
In both Bruno Latour’s (e.g. 2004) and Isabelle Stengers’ (e.g. 2005a) discussions of cosmopolitics, a key aim is to fashion a ‘good common world’. However, what this good common world looks like, and how it is composed, are not straightforward. While Latour and Stengers focus on the realm of politics, the various points they raise translate to the processes of interdisciplinary collaboration (which is of course politically charged).
In the foregoing, I have placed emphasis on the practice of research, where practice takes in such dimensions as the clarity of research questions and the enactment of particular constituencies, as well as technical methodological procedures. For Stengers, and for Annemarie Mol too (2002), practices enact realities or ontologies. The different disciplines’ divergent practices – Stengers (2005b) calls this an ecology of practice – yield divergent ontologies. For Mol, this ontological multiplicity lies at the base of what she calls ‘ontological politics’ and can be managed or coordinated in various ways so that sometimes one ontology takes precedence over others, sometimes a composite ontology emerges, and sometimes ontologies simply run in parallel, avoiding conflict because both hold to a promise of future coordination (on the latter, see Brosnan and Michael 2014).
If Mol documents a selection of forms of ontological politics, Stengers explores the potential parameters of cosmopolitics. The aim is definitely not definitively to determine what counts as the best procedures for engendering coordination (and thus the good common world) through which disciplines can work together. For Stengers, this would amount to the application of the parameters developed by another practice or ontology (say that of politics), or, in the present case, another discipline (say, that of studies of interdisciplinarity). Rather, with each new interdisciplinary venture new forms of coordination need to arise through the very processes of coordination in their specificity. As the ethnomethodologists would say, there is no outside to cosmopolitics – if there were, this would simply be another element of the cosmopolitical process. Thus, in finding a compromise among disciplines, one must not attempt to impose that compromise by installing the means that realize it (e.g. particular sorts of workshops, or the co-writing of working papers). These means will import their disciplinary baggage and be as likely to undermine as to mediate collaboration. This certainly seemed to be the case in my collaboration with designers. The compromise that emerged derived as much through more informal means such as a mutual sense of irony and self-deprecation, and a pleasure in beer-fuelled socializing.
For Stengers the danger is that there is too quick a ‘compromise’ – that disparate practices, multiple ontologies and different disciplines move to a ‘common ground’ too easily. To put this another way, we need to ‘compromise over compromise’ – to be circumspect in proceeding lest we miss ‘something more important’ as Stengers (2005a: 1001) puts it. This means paying attention to that which does not make obvious sense within an unfolding collaboration (the ‘idiotic’ in Stengers’ terms). In my case, this initially took the form of acknowledging – rather than denying or deferring – the lack of sense in the designers’ practice (from my social scientific perspective), and a slowing down to rethink my efforts at compromise, that is, at facilitating a putting forward together. Specifically, I was very enthusiastic about co-writing working papers, keeping to a particular timetable, and having regular ‘serious’ team meetings all as a way of enabling collaboration. As things stood, these efforts hardly took root.
For instance, team meetings always struck me as chaotic affairs as colleagues wandered off mid-discussion to get cups of tea, or print something off, or look at something online, or abruptly leave for some other meeting. To say the least I found this frustrating. But let me slow down and ask how does one do compromise under these conditions? First, one could simply dismiss this as an indication of bad, unprofessional habits. Second, one could embrace the designers’ way of conducting meetings as an interesting and intriguing way of negotiation. Both are too quick and easy. The alternative is to ask ‘how is this designerly meeting practice put together?’ (and thus one can ask ‘what sustains my view of good meeting practice?’). In brief, given that the designers occupied the same studio space, a meeting is simply a continuation of their ongoing, routine and dispersed interactions. There is nothing especially special about a meeting (hence its annoyingly dispersed and dissipated character). From my perspective as a sociologist with his own office, among other sociologists with their own offices, a meeting carries far more weight as a discrete and important event. In sum, the com-pro-mise of a meeting needed, itself, to be subject to com-pro-mise – a putting forward together about how to put forward together.
However, this did not happen. It is only in retrospect that I grasped these differences. Where then did the ‘compromise of compromise’ take place? I suspect it was in the pub, drinking, gossiping and joking. Stengers (2005b) remarks that a staging needs to happen in which participants are placed in a position of ‘equality’ to one another, such that both their views about the issue at stake, their views on how to proceed in tackling it collaboratively, and the contingency of these views is made available to all. This is no easy matter – it requires great efforts of reflexivity and overt openness. The suggestion – albeit precarious – is that this proceeds affectively and requires a certain staging (in the present instance, this was provided by the pub). Here we can introduce the notion of care in the sense Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) articulates it. Accordingly, care ‘signifies . .. an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation’ (p. 90); thus to ‘care’ for a thing (in the present case, the object of design and study) is to recognize that it is emergent through both one’s own and others’ practices. As a corollary, one needs to care – with due circumspection – for those others who care for that object, whatever their (disciplinary) background, and despite disagreement in what counts as care, and what precisely one is caring about. Having said that, one also needs to ‘care about care’ – care is not innocent in that it can be used to moralize, or to belittle, or to arrive at too easy a compromise. In the present context, this means that the disparate views on how to derive and process ‘data’ (as discussed above) came to be ‘taken care of’ in the sense that I came gradually and affectively to value the designers’ particular ‘idiosyncratic’ approach to ‘data’ collection and processing. As noted this was partly mediated by socializing in the pub.
Lest this account seem too seamless, it is worth reflecting on some of the limitations of compromising. First, compromising cannot be operationalized as a ‘method’ per se – this is because the idea of what a ‘method’ of compromising ‘is’ is itself is up for grabs: it emerges practically, locally and iteratively. Second, compromising as discussed here can appear to be a process of endless, perhaps indulgent, ‘negotiation’. Of course, it usually isn’t, not least because there are ‘external factors’ (research council deadlines, publication schedules, reputational structures) that mitigate this tendency. Third, and by the same token, external factors can also militate against any compromising at all. Economic constraints and organizational hierarchies, for instance, can mean that there is no compromising, rather a falling into line with a privileged set of practices and goals (my example discussed above might be said to reflect the particularly privileged conditions of an academic setting). Finally, and conversely, forms of compromising can be encouraged to enhance ‘creativity’ and generate novelty in response to market conditions (e.g. Thrift 2005). In this case, compromising is itself subordinated to broader institutional strategies.
Having made all these critical points, compromising hopefully remains a promising device for addressing the complexities of interdisciplinary work. If not quite a method, then it is at least methodological in the sense that it can serve to sensitize research to the variety, situatedness, informality, affectivity and iterativeness of the means by which collaborations across disciplines might be conducted.
Barry, A., Born, G. and Weszkalnys, G. (2008). Logics of interdisciplinarity. Economy and Society, 37(1): 20–49.
Brosnan, C. and Michael, M. (2014). Enacting the ‘neuro’ in practice: translational research, adhesion, and the promise of porosity. Social Studies of Science, 44(5): 680–700.
Latour, B. (2004). Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Michael, M. (2012). ‘What are we busy doing?’ Engaging the idiot. Science, Technology and Human Values, 37(5): 528–554.
Mol, A. (2002). The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2011). Matters of care in technoscience: assembling neglected things. Social Studies of Science, 41(1): 85–106.
Stengers, I. (2005a). The cosmopolitical proposal. In B. Latour and P. Webel (Eds.) Making Things Public (pp. 994–1003). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Stengers, I. (2005b). Introductory notes on an ecology of practices. Cultural Studies Review, 11: 183–196.
Thrift, N. (2005). Knowing Capitalism. London: Sage.