Interdisciplinary studies: from utopia to constraint. A case study about interdisciplinary studies between social and natural science for 1970th to nowadays
Résumé
In France, interdisciplinary studies between social science and natural science were very important in the 8Oth, to resolve environmental problems. But only few social scientists attempted the interdisciplinary adventure to try getting across disciplinary borders. We will call them “ utopian pioneers” because they thought that it was possible to invent a new science or to understand the complexity. They constituted an interdisciplinary and knowledge of one another network.
Actually, we assert that interdisciplinary studies are lead under stressed. In National and European calls for project, interdisciplinary is becoming an injunction. The work sharing is built on artificial cutting that are spread in disciplinary “workpackages”. Researchers are required to form “consortiums” involving a large number of laboratories, not necessary linked by a common scientific question. They don’t know one another when the partnership is putting place and the interdisciplinary research is reduced to a single meeting at the beginning of the research (in the best case) or only to a meeting at the end of the work.
Our demonstration will be based upon analysis of researches funded by the Interdisciplinary and Environmental research of the CNRS in the period 1978-2000 compared to researches fund by European programs (for example Horizon 2020 and French Research National Agency for 2005).