Soziologische Klassiker - Upload server

Smelser, Neil
degree to which they are tight or loose in this regard. But the unease I was referring to is that when
you want to relax some of those givens, if you want to take the propensity to consume as an inner
dynamic rather than assumption, then you've got to move outside, you lose some of that theoretical
specificity that the simplifying assumptions give you, but at the same time you become closer in
touch with reality. The problem is to spread out, but at the same time maintain discipline. That's the
real tension with interdisciplinary work, I've always discovered, and in a way you have to make up
your own discipline -- discipline, small D -- because it's not supplied in any automatic way when
thinking about two approaches at the same time. There's a synthesis that has to go on.
I might say that this interest in interdisciplinary [study] started early. The Social Relations department
was an interdisciplinary department ...
This is at Harvard?
At Harvard when I was an undergraduate and graduate student. I studied philosophy, politics, and
economics at Oxford; my doctoral dissertation was an historical study informed by sociological
frameworks, and of course, going into psychoanalysis was yet another extension into the special part
of the world of psychology. So, this has kind of been in my blood and I suppose that the statement I
made about interdisciplinarity in that essay was probably a kind of biographical statement.
I know you've thought a lot about the history of the intellectual communities, and so on, and you've
run the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, California (not at Stanford
University). What are the kinds of environments that are conducive in making possible the most
rewarding outcomes from interdisciplinary work?
I can tell you first an environment that's not very conducive, and that's the university itself. Its
structural division into departments, the building of departments around disciplines, the building
of careers within disciplines, all conspire toward a narrowing and more specialized line of inquiry,
and most people in the various fields tend to go that route, then to make their careers out of more
specialized work, and they continue to do it within the confines of the specialization that they chose
in the first place or that they've been working in. And the atmosphere of the university with the
department in particular is to reward that career line.
It seems to me that aside from any personal predilections one might have toward thinking more
broadly or more comprehensively, I would have to say that someplace like the Center is extremely
conducive, because you bring people in there -- it has no organization. There are no departments, no
age levels, no seniority levels, no nothing. Everybody is equal, everybody is in there doing their own
work, but everybody is systematically exposed, not in a compulsory but in an unstructured way, to
everybody else. Things begin to spark, and we have had so many testimonies in the reports and the
follow-ups of the scholars who went to the Center of contacts they made, friends they established,
intellectual influences on them outside their own field, which changed their work sometimes in minor
but sometimes in major ways. I think to introduce people into an unstructured situation of that sort
probably leads to a kind of encouragement of destructuring their own thinking. I realize this is a
kind of biographical statement, and I could probably think of other kinds of settings. The Society of
Fellows was a similar experience because people came from everywhere and you necessarily, just
through personal interaction, got exposed to their viewpoints.
946