What Catalyzes Research Universities to Commit to Interdisciplinary Research?

Sondra N. Barringer (), Erin Leahey and Karina Salazar
Additional contact information
Sondra N. Barringer: Southern Methodist University
Erin Leahey: University of Arizona
Karina Salazar: University of Arizona

Research in Higher Education, 2020, vol. 61, issue 6, No 1, 679-705

Abstract: Abstract For decades, science policy has been promoting interdisciplinary research (IDR), but universities have not responded uniformly. To explain this variation, we integrate insights from the organizational literature, especially research on microfoundations, and highlight the role of both administrators and faculty. We collect and, with the help of machine learning, code vast amounts of textual data from 156 universities nationwide to measure universities’ structural commitment to IDR as well as key explanatory variables, including top-down administrative support for, and bottom-up faculty engagement with, IDR. We integrate these measures with extant data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, Higher Education R&D Expenditures Survey, NIH, NSF, and IPEDS to analyze how internal university dynamics influence the degree to which a university commits to IDR. Our results reveal that the level of structural commitment to IDR differs at universities with and without medical schools, as do the precursors to this commitment. At universities with medical schools, we find that bottom-up engagement is positively associated with structural commitment to IDR, and that status moderates the relationship between top-down administrative support and structural commitment to IDR. For universities with low levels of supportive administrative discourse status significantly impacted their structural commitment to IDR. At universities without medical schools, top-down support and bottom-up engagement are interrelated and mutually reinforcing such that universities with high levels of both administrative support and interdisciplinary research grants have higher levels of structural commitment to IDR. We discuss the implications of these findings for university administrators, policy makers, and researchers.

Keywords: Research universities; Interdisciplinarity; Organizational commitments; Machine learning; Microfoundations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11162-020-09603-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:reihed:v:61:y:2020:i:6:d:10.1007_s11162-020-09603-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/11162

DOI: 10.1007/s11162-020-09603-x

Access Statistics for this article

Research in Higher Education is currently edited by Robert K. Toutkoushian

More articles in Research in Higher Education from Springer, Association for Institutional Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().