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Restructuring Research Universities to Advance Transdisciplinary Collaboration

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Strategies for Team Science Success

Abstract

Whether the context for knowledge production and innovation is the set of major research universities, system of government agencies and federal laboratories, or the research and development efforts of industry, boundary-spanning and transdisciplinary collaborative engagement is essential in addressing the complex scientific and technological challenges that confront society. Effective transdisciplinary collaboration, however, requires an optimally configured institutional framework as well as an academic culture conducive to innovation. Despite broad consensus regarding the imperative for transdisciplinarity, however, disciplinary acculturation continues to shape successive generations of scientists, scholars, and practitioners while the traditional correlation between disciplines and departments persists as the basis for academic organization. This chapter thus examines aspects of the accommodation of transdisciplinarity within the set of American research universities relevant to the advancement of team science and offers a case study of the restructuring of academic organization undertaken to advance transdisciplinary collaboration at Arizona State University.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The discussion of interdisciplinarity in this chapter contains revised passages from our coauthored book, Designing the New American University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), and various texts we have either coauthored or authored singly on this topic, including our coauthored book chapters “Interdisciplinarity and the Organizational Context of Knowledge in the American Research University,” in The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, second ed., edited by Robert Frodeman, Julie Thompson Klein, and Roberto Carlos Dos Santos Pacheco (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), and “Interdisciplinarity as a Design Problem: Toward Mutual Intelligibility among Academic Disciplines in the American Research University,” in Enhancing Communication and Collaboration in Interdisciplinary Research, edited by Michael O’Rourke et al. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2013).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Office of the President, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Michael M. Crow

  2. School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    William B. Dabars

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  1. Michael M. Crow
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  2. William B. Dabars
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Correspondence to William B. Dabars .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Kara L. Hall

  2. Clinical Monitoring Research Program Directorate, Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research Sponsored by the National Cancer Institute, Frederick, MD, USA

    Amanda L. Vogel

  3. Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Robert T. Croyle

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Crow, M.M., Dabars, W.B. (2019). Restructuring Research Universities to Advance Transdisciplinary Collaboration. In: Hall, K., Vogel, A., Croyle, R. (eds) Strategies for Team Science Success. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20992-6_37

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