Comparative Education Bulletin - Faculty of Education - The ...

as the ‘actual’ form and focus of knowledge within a discipline, and the
phenomenology of that knowledge [as] the ideas and understandings
that practitioners have about their discipline (and others). Becher
& Trowler argue that disciplinary phenomenology (or academic
culture) and disciplinary epistemology are inseparably intertwined
and mutually infused. They conceive of an academic discipline as
the result of a mutually dependent interplay of the structural force of
the epistemological character of disciplines that conditions culture, and
the capacity of individuals and groups as agents of autonomous action,
including interpretive acts (2001, p.23). These authors offer a taxonomical
framework of academic knowledge into four major disciplinary
groupings: ‘hard-pure’ pure sciences, ‘soft-pure’ humanities and
pure social sciences, ‘hard-applied’ technologies, and ‘soft-applied’
applied social science. Each disciplinary grouping displays distinctive
epistemological and sociological features. I summarize this dyad of
epistemological and sociological features in Table 1, juxtaposing them
with the disciplinary features earlier identified by Hirst, Mucklow and
Heckhausen, so as to compare common elements and to identify the
necessary and the contingent features of disciplinary knowledge.
The matrix in Table 1 shows overlaps in the conceptualization
of the nature of academic disciplines. The common epistemological
features that structure knowledge into a given discipline are six: (a)
common object, point of view, truth-criteria, conceptual structure and
theoretical integration, methods and skills, and products of knowledge.
Common sociological features which group knowledge into one
discipline are institutional framework (e.g. departments, research
units, etc.), though most authors concur that sociological/institutional
divisions do not always dovetail with the epistemological criteria,
and that the sociological lags behind the epistemological. The authors
also converge in pointing out the social dimension of the disciplines
as being a historically contingent process where forces transcending
the discipline interact with its inner logic and with its human agents.
Thus, the constitutive nature of academic disciplines embraces an
epistemological dimension and a socio-historical dimension. The first
is concerned with intellectual substance and truth claims, and the
latter with the incarnation of that intellectual substance into social and
political institutions. The intellectual or epistemological dimension
tends to display permanent, universal and necessary characteristics,
while the sociological component of disciplines – given its human
and cultural component – tends to exhibit changing, particular and
contingent characteristics. I explore further the issue of the sociohistorical
contingencies of the disciplines in the next section, but before
doing so, I discuss the concept of the academic field, distinguishing it
from the academic discipline.
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