Feature Articles

Becoming Interdisciplinary: A Publisher's Perspective
by Karen Christensen, CEO of Berkshire Publishing Group

We all want to be interdisciplinary. But interdisciplinarity is difficult to achieve, whether in the academy, the publishing house, or the library. A publisher reflects on the challenges and suggests ways we might bridge the two (and more) cultures.

Who doesn't want to be interdisciplinary today? Books and grant proposals claim to be interdisciplinary, and academic departments fly the interdisciplinary banner. The word suggests a broad perspective and collegiality. For teachers in secondary schools, the concept means richer subject areas and perhaps a greater likelihood of engaging students.

But are we really becoming more interdisciplinary, at a fundamental level, or are interdisciplinary studies a temporary trend; merely a reaction to the latest educational fad? For many, interdisciplinary efforts should span broad divides such as the one between science and the arts, but although people pay lip service to the notion of interdisciplinarity and collaborative work, university departments are judged by the number of students they attract and the grants they get-which means they're in competition with one another. It's hard to cooperate with one's rivals; encouraging one's best and brightest to engage in interdisciplinary research and teach classes in other departments is not, from a pragmatic perspective, in the interests of the organization-sadly. What about interdisciplinarity in college and university libraries? Librarians generally relish interdisciplinary thinking and publications but struggle with the practicalities involved in managing them and making them readily accessible to students. We publishers, too, face practical difficulties in developing-and marketing-interdisciplinary projects. Because Berkshire Publishing began with the goal of creating global and interdisciplinary resources for libraries, we've explored the questions and issues involved in interdisciplinarity from our inception. The questions aren't new. The best-known discussion is perhaps the one started by scientist and author C. P. Snow. In a 1959 lecture titled "The Two Cultures," Snow discussed the differences between scientific and artistic cultures and what those differences meant for education and society. The topic has inspired hundreds of articles, books, and (in more recent times) websites. The discussion is of particular importance today as developments in science and technology have increasing impact on every aspect of life and on the well-being of our planet. (It's not possible to talk sensibly about climate change without drawing on the work of ecologists, economists, historians, engineers--and ethicists, too.) Interdisciplinary publishing has been Berkshire's focus because our partnership is interdisciplinary. I studied literature and have been writing about environmental issues and community for the last 10 years. I also have a great interest in science generally and in emerging technologies. David Levinson, Berkshire's president and editor-in-chief, on the other hand, is a cultural anthropologist who has done much work in cross-cultural psychology and criminology. So when we started building a pool of people to act as consultants and advisers for our reference products, we already had several fields covered-and we've consciously expanded our network ever since: we collect engineers, physical and life scientists, historians, and so on, the way some people collect Toby jugs or Hummel figurines.

David has edited many major interdisciplinary reference works, including Berkshire's Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment and the Encyclopedia of Marriage and the Family. In the latter, he tells the story of an editorial meeting with a lawyer and a psychiatrist who argued over the entry on dependency. For the lawyer, dependency was economic, while for the psychiatrist it was emotional-the same word had different meanings depending on whether it was being used in law or psychiatry. This kind of difference in usage has led us to talk to several academic librarians about creating a glossary that would help students-and scholars, too-to move more comfortably between fields.

Given Berkshire's goal of interdisciplinarity, it makes sense that we decided to focus on encyclopedias. Take the situation in the field of leadership studies. When we created the Encyclopedia of Leadership (2004) for Sage Publications, it was a fast-growing interdisciplinary field that needed an encyclopedia. James MacGregor Burns, the eminent presidential historian, put it this way in the introduction to the Encyclopedia of Leadership:

The creation of an encyclopedia is a true sign of the coming of age of a new and significant field of study. The publication during the eighteenth century of France's celebrated Encyclopédie not only reflected the rise of the Enlightenment but testified to the remarkable progress of the West in a wide array of fields-and stimulated further progress. Two centuries later, at perhaps a less imposing level, this encyclopedia not only captures the vast accumulation of ideas and data on its subject-leadership-but will surely influence future work on the theory and practice of leadership.¹

Leadership scholars work in such fields as political science, psychology, and education. It's worth noting that these established fields, too, were once emerging, interdisciplinary fields.

In creating a multidisciplinary encyclopedia, the first difficulty we face is recruiting and managing a group of contributors from the relevant disciplines. Even when these scholars quickly recognize the value of a major interdisciplinary publication in their field, as they did with Berkshire's Encyclopedia of Community, for example, they often do not know one another and have different perspectives on what matters most.

It's also much harder to provide guidelines for article writing, to review and edit articles, and to finalize content when you're creating an interdisciplinary work than when you stay within an established field with clear boundaries. We are pleased when reviewers appreciate this, as with Booklist's complimentary remark about our Encyclopedia of World History: "A masterful title that weaves together the social, scientific, anthropological, and geographical influences on world history, this set will be the benchmark against which future history encyclopedias are compared."

It's precisely because Interdisciplinary fields do not have established boundaries that publishing a major reference work in the field can be so helpful: doing so puts the field on the map and defines it for those both inside and out. We're currently doing this in two complex fields, future studies (with our projected four-volume Berkshire Encyclopedia of the 21st Century, which covers topics as diverse as technology, religion, and cybersocial planning) and sustainability (with the eight-volume Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability, which brings together environment studies, economics, and ethics).

Sarah Pritchard, incoming university librarian at Northwestern, summed up the role of publishing in interdisciplinary studies nicely at a panel we organized at the Charleston Conference in 2004: "Publishing companies may play a unique role in legitimizing a field and moving it more to the center, with dedicated journals, monograph series, bibliographies, and textbooks. By the time there are large formal reference indexes and databases, we're home free!"

Once an interdisciplinary work is published, we face new difficulties because existing systems for categorizing publications, both at the Library of Congress and in distributor and library databases, often do not allow for even the simplest interdisciplinary tagging. For example, the Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction is both computer science and social science; that's the nature of this new but well-established field. This work needed to be tagged as human and computer, but in almost every case we could choose only one. We chose computer--but that means that people in psychology, sociology, and philosophy may never find it.

Finally, with interdisciplinary works, it's more difficult to identify who it is who can make a purchase decision. We know that we're creating publications that a considerable community of scholars, students, and professionals want, and reviewers are always enthusiastic about the interdisciplinary coverage, but it's hard within the library to know just who is responsible for buying a book or encyclopedia in an interdisciplinary field.

Sarah Pritchard explained:

In libraries we need to allocate the materials budget, we need to arrange the collections physically, we need to assign subject responsibility to various librarians--we want an easy way to deal with all this. . . . First is the debate over a separate versus an integrated approach. In the academy, this plays out at the departmental level, and in the library it comes down to decisions in budgeting and physical arrangement. There are advantages and disadvantages to each, and in fact one gets complaints either way. . . . Handling the budget is especially problematic. A new field usually starts off at a disadvantage because it just gets allocated a small amount of money that then grows incrementally, slowly. Meanwhile the people selecting for the large traditional areas may think they no longer need to worry about that new area, so they stop buying! And yet there is often quickly too much for the small new budget, and the person monitoring that field needs to go around and nag and cadge funds across the range of other relevant categories. On the other hand, if there is no separate [budget] line, there are indeed some titles that never seem quite to fit, so they fall between the conceptual cracks, and nobody buys them.

But the benefits of interdisciplinarity are so great that it's worth the effort to support it, whether in the classroom, the publishing house, or the library. One thing that might help all of us would be visual maps of disciplines that might show us what's going on at the edges and in the interstices. More active discussion between scholars, librarians, publishers, and aggregators about these developments that affect all of us would also be helpful. Those discussions reveal new opportunities-for instance, in electronic reference right now there exists enormous opportunity for bridging many gaps through well-conceived and designed multiproject databases.

Students respond enthusiastically to well-presented and fresh interdisciplinary efforts. In a world of multitasking and social media, the combining of ideas from different fields doesn't seem like a novelty to them. And society will benefit, too, because interdisciplinary efforts are urgently required to solve the challenges of the twenty-first century. © Karen Christensen 2006

Karen Christensen is CEO of Berkshire Publishing Group, which she cofounded in 1998, and publisher of Berkshire's new Guanxi: The China Letter. Her career began in London, where she worked at Blackwell Science and then for Faber & Faber, as assistant on the T. S. Eliot letters-as interdisciplinary a start as one could hope for! Read her memoir, "Dear Mrs. Eliot," published in the Guardian's literary review last year: at http://www.berkshirepublishing.com/blog/archives/2005/01/looking_for_the.html

Links
Full text from the Charleston Conference panel: http://www.berkshirepublishing.com/assets/pdf/InterdisciplinaryScholarship(Charleston2004).pdf