Interdisciplinary Research and Disciplinary Toleration: A Reply to Kitty Locker

When Professor Locker tells us that we need to choose a variety of sometimes competing goals--when she writes that we "need to say 'both/and' not 'either/or'"--I understand her to call for a kind of ecumenical disciplinary attitude regarding research in business communication, an attitude that tolerates and even embraces a broad range of research methodologies. Because this ecumenical attitude embodies the best sentiments of our liberal humanist tradition, I suspect that most of us support wholeheartedly Professor Lockers call for scholarly toleration. If I am right in this assessment, then the primary issue raised in Professor Lockers address does not concern the obvious fact that some kinds of research are privileged while other kinds are discounted. Rather, the primary issue, it seems to me, concerns our motivations for privileging some kinds of research over other kinds. Stated a bit differently, Professor Locker challenges us to ponder our motivations when we privilege specialized research--generally quantitative research associated with the social sciences--over interdisciplinary research that generally favors qualitative and historical methodologies associated with the humanities. In her address, Professor Locker suggests that our current preference for specialized research is motivated predominantly by epistemological issues. For the most part, Professor Locker describes research in business communication as an epistemological matter, and when she discusses the difficulties associated with interdisciplinary research, she mentions almost exclusively epistemological concerns. She tells us, for example, that we tend to avoid interdisciplinary research because "we are more likely to make conceptual and methodological mistakes" since "we will disagree about what kind of data is relevant" when we employ interdisciplinary research. According to Professor Locker, these epistemological problems occur primarily because researchers frequently inhabit different discourse communities. Early in her address, Professor Locker observes that "When we work in different paradigms, we will disagree about what kind of data is relevant, what kind of analysis is convincing, and indeed what research questions are important." Kenneth Burke employs the term "circumference" (1945, pp. 59-124) to describe this phenomenon. By this term, he means that our discourse is always circumscribed by our motivations and beliefs, so we interpret the world and communicate with others by establishing a circumference within which understanding occurs. In a sense, rationality itself depends on our ability to circumscribe or to frame our utterances in ways that others can comprehend. Of course, once we frame our discourse, our utterances naturally take on the character of the frame, as Professor Locker points out. Consequently, when people change frames, they tend to comprehend the world differently. Professor Locker tells us that "insights from other fields can enable us to see what we know in new ways, reframing it so that it becomes something more than and perhaps other than its original state." Certainly, Professor Locker is correct to stress the epistemological complexities inherent in interdisciplinary research and to suggest that these complexities often motivate us to avoid inter-disciplinary research. However, I want to suggest that another and perhaps more powerful motivation exists for the avoidance of inter-disciplinary research, a motivation that conflicts with the ecumenical disciplinary attitude that Professor Locker rightfully champions. When we endorse the communitarian epistemological position and accept the claim that knowledge is shaped or socially constructed within discourse communities, we become dominated by the scenes in which we live. In the scene/agent ratio, to employ Burke's terms once again, the agent's motives are always conditioned by the context or scene in which the agent acts, and Professor Locker clearly places a great deal of emphasis on context or what she calls "discourse communities. …