Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

An overemphasis on goals, on output and product, to the detriment of capacity
building was a concern voiced by Stephen Allot. A similar concern one has been
highlighted in the work of Marilyn Strathern (2000) and Michael Power (1999). That
is, the effects of audit regimes that increasingly look to define value in accordance
with product. ‘Knowledge’, under the effects of audit, comes to be reified, the
desirable outcome of resource allocated to research being new knowledge, an
emphasis on product over process, or goal over capacity.
7.1.2 Disciplines as silos
Many kinds of organisation are seen as dividing their knowledge into organisational
silos. Sciences are separated from each other by specialist vocabularies and overly
specialised education. Technology is separated from science. Business is separated
from technology research. Government is separated from both business and
universities. But most commonly, the concern is that even within these sectors, silos
prevent effective working. Government departments act as silos that prevent them
from working together in the public interest. Silos can be any means by which groups
of people organise themselves around common knowledge within that group, and
thereby exclude themselves from knowledge outside the group. They are generally
preserved by assessment regimes - the creation and agreement of any assessment
regime immediately bounds the community that creates it, preventing the transfer of
knowledge elsewhere.
Disciplines were regularly demonised by the expert witnesses and contributors to our
research. Given that our sampling intention was to recruit people with significant
allegiance to interdisciplinarity, this is hardly surprising. However one might have
imagined an attitude of building on the achievements of disciplines. Instead, we heard
about the ways in which disciplines protect their own interests, and are in constant
competition for the upper hand, whether in capturing the minds of impressionable
young people, claiming authority over courses of action, or taking credit for
achievement (those who build stuff, for example, must compete with those who
conceive it, over the relative contribution of conceptualisation and construction). Over
time, it seems that a degree of ‘cognitive rigidity’ creeps into the conceptual
frameworks of a community of practice, as a natural consequence of the dynamics by
which intellectual economies are defined and maintained within an organisation. The
foundational frameworks that rigidify might easily be those that form the core identity
of a group, or the principles upon which an organisation was founded. As such, they
rest upon assumptions that are often unquestioned, and which act normatively over
time to define perceptions and the production of certain kinds of knowledge.
As observed in the writing of Geoffrey Lloyd (2009), academic disciplines are often
constituted around the construction and preservation of a particular kind of elite. This
results in an internal hierarchy within the discipline that is very likely to be
incompatible with any possible hierarchy of relations between disciplines. Much
disciplinary education can be seen as, rather than instilling useful knowledge,
guarding admission within the boundaries of the discipline, and eligibility for
Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 72