Given my lame attempt at humor through super heroes in my last post, I'll not be tempted by your brokerage/bondage titulation until I've slept and can be reasonable :)

/Jen's que/Is interdisciplinarity a model of brokerage or bondage?/Jen's que/
Makes me think that there are critical differences between connectors and brokers, although I should read back on Burt to see again how he characterizes brokers. If we take brokers to be people who are proficient at bridging strucutural holes and connectors as people who--from a relatively stable home cluster or discipline--accomplish more selective bridging while also maintaining a highly-connected home cluster, we might find a way to explain the long-tail location of interdisciplinarity. Brokers and connectors might not be the best names for these two roles, but I'm trying to get a hold on the difference between the broker-connector who works nomadically to bridge structural holes and the broker-connector who does similar work while preserving vital connections in one or more dense cluster. With this suggestion, I'm not interested in favoring a stable topogology, fwiw; postmodern mapping should allow us to account for its volatility, its rolling, fluid character. Your questions about "other" knowledge makes me think about Berlin's noetic field and Emig's epistemic court--the head of the power law from the comp/rhet insider's perspective, yes? (Which says something about power laws and positionality, even if it's too early in the day for me to decide just what.)

I have a difficult time connecting Burt's brokers and the nature of disciplinarity within the academy as seamlessly as Jen does. I think the principle stumbling block I have to that is the difference in how the broker is received in each situation.

In corporate situations, the broker is either sought out because of having gained the reputation for putting things together, or is accepted as helpful when offering input without a specific request. The more s/he is able to connect people, the better those people can do their jobs, so the better they like the broker.

But in academic disciplines, the broker isn't usually sought out. How often, for example, does the Political Science professor seek out a contact who can put him/her in touch with an English professor? But let's say the erstwhile graduate student or newbie junior professor want to be helpful, and makes suggestions about how other professors in other departments are working on projects that seem like they would connect to Professor A's work, and sugges that Professor A should contact them (or worse, suggest to the others that they should contact Professor A). Is this person rewarded for this multiple discipline awareness? Do the contact happen? Probably not. What happens in the other idea - though I wouldn't exactly characterize it as bondage - where the one disciplinary specialist becomes aware that his/her knowledge area is no longer exclusive (i.e., safe) and retreats to further specialization or closed stance.

I think the "broker" can be a bridge builder in the right circumstances, with the right amount of trust building and the right amount of networking, but I also think it takes time to do that, and I think it takes finding other folks who aren't afraid of letting their specialty be not-so-special.

Which is, of course, the paradox of the academy. Because to get the coveted PhD you're supposed to "create" new knowlege, or find some new way of seeing the field, or otherwise further the separation/specialization, and the more you have invested in this specialization, the more you need to see it protected and corded off from others. Right?

My own multi- or interdisciplinary knowledges include the academy and the corporate world, and I have learned to value all of it. I have also learned that in any given forum, what I know about the rest of the world won't get me to first base in an academic conversation, and all that I've learned and $2 will still only get me a cup of coffee. I believe that will change someday. I have to, have to believe that Burt's model will eventually work in the academy, too.

I’m in agreement with Derek’s initial thought that there is a difference between bridging knowledges through indisciplinarity and the act of brokering knowledge across disciplines. I think the closest we might come in the academy to Derek’s nomad is the research librarian who “accomplishes more selective bridging while also maintaining a highly-connected home cluster”. Maybe it’s the act of brokering as defined by Burt that is complicating this. As Chris noted in her comments, Burt’s emphasis on the corporate “broker” and the value of recognizing and strategically exploiting structural holes runs a bit against the spirit of the academy. The paradox that she notes is, I think, exemplified by academics like Watts who take principles, theories, and methodologies from one discipline and apply them to another. Are they really creating new knowledge or simply providing another way to look at, understand, and apply existing knowledge?

Ok. I see how interdisciplinarity could not be seen as a means of bridging structural holes, and Chris explained better than I that it is the structure of the academy that by in large prevents the more corporate bridging of knowledges. And I guess that is what I was really trying to get at in all of this -- what structures need to be in place so that structural holes become apparent and then can be bridged.

In my opinion, I think there are people in the academy working toward a system where interdisciplinarity would be doing the kind of work Burt is advocating, but there is a lot of structural apparatus that needs to be dismantled first. So would it be those people who are trying to move knowledge between disciplines that are doing the dismantling, or do we need a firm structure to bridge the (w)holes?

I think one thing we can glean from this analysis is that all networks and clusters are not the same, and motives, perceptions, and the semiotic terrain matter as one moves across holes from cluster to cluster. Sullivan and Porter were certainly in a crunch over this. Mathematical models and network maps can suggest a uniformity among nodes and links which doesn't obtain in reality.

On the other hand, I was thinking of Watts when I came to Mike's comment. Isn't his book on one level a paean to the social capital interdisciplinarity can bring? He seems to feel that the network theorists are riding the wave of each other's contributions. I guess the question is, How does this differ from the academia Chris describes, which I think is much more often the case? What made Watts a successful connector? (In fact, I think of him as a connector because he was inviting participation, rather than as a broker, which suggests to me acting as a catalyst for the transfer of information.)

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