Idea Sea

Organizing Scientific Research in Multi-Dimensions: an Institutional Approach Pursuing both Holism and Specialization of Disciplines

Jianxi Luo
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
December, 2008
luo@mit.edu

Abstract

This article proposes an executable institutional approach to advance sciences by organically and multi-dimensionally facilitating inter-disciplinary cooperation. The idea originated from my observations and experience as a doctoral student at MIT’s cutting-edge Engineering Systems Division. The approach builds a new type of organizational unit within the original organization. Such a unit hosts a new discipline that is fundamentally holistic, and generally meaningful and complementary to most of the traditional disciplines. The essence of this institutional approach is the creation and integration of a new dimension of holistic scientific disciplines to the initial dimension of specialized traditional disciplines. The new dimension is valuable not just in advancing scientific research in specialized traditional disciplines by intensifying interactions, but also in nurturing the emergence and evolution of new kinds of sciences. This is a system approach to organically integrate holism and reductionism, and to harmonize generalization and specialization in scientific pursuits, in order to tackle the multi-dimensional natures of the critical but complex contemporary challenges to humankind. The specific designs of such an institutional approach implemented by MIT are discussed in this paper. However, an institution should implement this approach according to its own unique situations and needs in order for the creation and integration of a meaningful second dimension.

Specialization vs. Generalization and Reductionism vs. Holism

Over its own history of evolution, science and knowledge have been divided into disciplines and sub disciplines. Mainly driven by reductionism, scientists and engineers often tend to specialize themselves in order to go deeper in their chosen disciplines. In fact, specializations driven by reductionism have contributed largely to the major historical advancements of sciences and technologies, which led us to today.

A closely connected group of topics and knowledge pieces which attracted extensive research attention in certain period of time would become an established discipline and receive a name or paradigm for it later. This has been evidenced in most of the contemporary universities. Reductionism has led universities to advance sciences rapidly since 19^th century. Since then, many of the world’s historical and prestigious universities had built rigid disciplines, often operationalized by the departmental structures. The department structures have the advantages and the disadvantages. The key advantage comes from specialization, and a key disadvantage comes from competition between departments for resources and their resistance to cooperation [1]. The specialization and reductionism may also incur boundaries of interactions that further lead to unnecessary ignorance and insufficient fundamental innovation.

Nowadays, scientists and practitioners have been confronted with new challenges and new questions that are more difficult and complex than ever. We need new approaches to advance the sciences, including physical sciences and social sciences, in order to solve such complex problems as global warming, mass destructive weapon diffusion, outer space exploration, etc, and achieve grant goals. In particular, we realize the complexity of such challenges largely comes from their multidimensionality.

Considering the multi-dimensional nature of the major challenges to humankind, the future advances of sciences and our society will depend increasingly on holistic system approaches. Albert Einstein once said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” [2]. Not only this word, but also his way to establish the relativity theory has hinted that, generalization from the incentive for holism is fundamentally necessary and important for liberating the potential of specialized scientific explorations. The system approach that we need must consider all the necessary issues involved for the original question or pursuit. Often, one sub-issue by itself is already complex enough to be noted as a system when needed. By putting the angle of view at a relatively higher level, a system approach requires the new boundary of exploration should encapsulate not only the subsystem for this sub-issue but also the others involved at the original level.

However, generalization with holism is not free of cost. When a researcher generalizes the initial problem for a grant answer, he/she has to broaden the traditional intellectual search boundary, at the risk of distracting his/her attentions and failing to reach enough depth in each discipline that he/she surveys. Therefore, the approach to be advocated here is not one for generalization or inclusion of traditional disciplines, but one that pursues the benefits from organically integrating specialization and generalization (via inter-discipline cooperation) at a low cost, in order to optimize the value of inter-disciplinary interactions for significant scientific progress. In the next section, I will discuss the case of a new type of organizational unit that is aimed to advance specialized disciplines and nurture new kinds of sciences of great significance.

Case of MIT’s Engineering Systems Division

MIT’s Engineering Systems Division (ESD), founded in 1998, is a bold educational and research initiative and “department-like” academic unit that spans most traditional departments within the School of Engineering, as well as MIT’s School of Science, School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and Sloan School of Management. The ESD faculty and researchers hold either dual or joint appointments within ESD and one of the traditional units, such as department of physics, department of mechanical engineering, department of economics, etc, in order to fuse the departmental boundaries to some degree, to promote interactions among all the departments, and to enable ESD faculty to pursue activities that benefit both their original department and the Division [3, 4].

ESD@MIT focuses on developing methodologies to deal with the complexity, uncertainty, and the large scale of systems, which often have not only physical science dimensions, but also social science dimensions, and then understanding, designing and managing them holistically. For such goals, the Engineering Systems (ES) researches emphasize non-traditional system properties, named “ilities” [5, 6], including flexibility, sustainability, adaptability, agility, reliability, scalability, recyclability, quality, as well as robustness, security, safety, instead of such traditional design goals as function, performance, and cost. The underlying motivation for such emphasis is that, when the systems are large, dynamic and complex, the system performances are often unpredictable, and then the traditional design goals become unrealistic. For a complex system, more appropriate design goals should be such “ilities” in order to tackle its unpredictable emergent behaviors.

The need for Engineering Systems was visioned by the administration and faculties of MIT in the 1990s as a result of the confluence of a few factors, especially the growing complexity of engineering systems that are being designed, manufactured or operated, such as the aerospace and aeronautic projects, energy, environment and transportation systems, etc [3, 7].

Create the Second Dimension of Disciplines in a Research Organization

From my point of view (which could be different from that of its founders), I interpret ESD@MIT as an institutional innovation that has created a second dimension relative to the original dimension of traditional disciplines, and a new discipline on its own dimension, in the institute. Particularly, I find that, two designs of this organizational unit have distinguished ES from the traditional disciplines, such as economics and mechanical engineering, and distinguished ESD from traditional organizational units, such as a department or an interdisciplinary center: 1) the focuses on “ilities”; 2) dual appointments of the ESD faculty members.

ESD is similar to a traditional department in terms of administrations because it also appoints and promotes faculty, admits students, implements educational programs, and grants degrees. But it is not a new department in parallel with the other traditional departments. Instead, it opens a new dimension of research and education on the basis of the established traditional disciplines. This is evidenced by its focuses, the “ilities”, which are not replacements or new divisions of traditional research goals, but general complements for most of traditional ones. The interrelationships between ESD and the other departments are shown in Figure 1. It can be viewed as a horizontal unit that interacts with the vertical departments [3]. ESD has “porous boundaries” to facilitate inter-department interactions.

ESD is also not an inter-disciplinary research center. An interdisciplinary research center does not have such privileges as appointing and promoting faculty, admitting students, implementing educational degree programs. An interdisciplinary study does not add an appointment subscript to a participating professor’s title. Under the mechanism of dual or joint appointments, a typical title for an ESD professor should be like: Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Systems, Professor of Urban Planning and Engineering Systems, etc.

Engineering Systems (ES) is also intellectually distinguished from other multi-disciplinary approaches to engineering sciences and social sciences, such as Operations Research and Systems Engineering. In fact, it is expected to evolve and be established as a solid field of study. It will be a special field organically interacting and complementing with any of the other traditional fields, instead of separating from them. ES is not a calling for a multi-disciplinary work, but an emerging new discipline on a new dimension.

The creation of a new department or an interdisciplinary center would replace or separate the time and attention of the researchers from the traditional disciplines. Comparatively, the ESD setup embeds a second dimension for the shared interests and pursuits of the existing academic units and disciplines. The new disciplines on the second dimension should be characteristically different from those on the original dimension in order not to overlap and compete. The disciplines on a single dimension are parallel and separate, while the disciplines on different dimensions are not comparable but complementary because they are defined by different criteria.

In general, the use of “division” in its name appropriately captures its similarities with a “department” and dissimilarities with either a department or an interdisciplinary research center. The “division”, with its innovative organizational designs, has been the experimental place for MIT to create a second dimension of research and education on the basis of traditional disciplines. In another world, by running ESD, MIT has turned itself into a two-dimensional university.

Value of the Second Dimension

The second dimension in a research institution needs not only to add extra values to the disciplines on the traditional dimension, but also to create new values on the second dimension itself. Its general value should be holistic on the multi-dimensional space of sciences and academia.

First, the second dimension provides supports to the development of the disciplines on the first dimension respectively. Formally setting up an organizational unit on the second dimension makes cooperation among the organization units on the first dimension more common, natural, effective and efficient. Since it does not compete but complement with any traditional existing units, specialization is still well maintained in the overall organization. With the interactions intensified naturally and collective work facilitated by the new internal structure, the participating researchers will find his/her individual values in research on both dimensions which are complementary to each other.

Second, the organizational unit created on the new dimension provides a comfortable common home for researches from multiple traditional disciplines to collectively develop their shared general interests into a coherent agenda. On the second dimension, a set of newly-defined disciplines are also expected to emerge, develop and evolve into new kinds of sciences, which provide new potential to advance our scientific knowledge, methodologies, and abilities to understand and improve the world.

In particular, compared to an inter-disciplinary setting, such a design for organic integration can limit the cost of distractions for a researcher to navigate broadly/holistically, meanwhile help him/her dig deeply in his/her own specialization using new holistic theories and methodologies. The holism will essentially benefit one’s specialized work with huge potential returns in terms of creativity and fundamental advancements. Via appropriate organizational designs, the pursuits and returns on both dimensions become inseparable and holistic.

In general, such an institutional approach, which essentially creates a second dimension in a research organization, is expected to foster advancements in specialized traditional disciplines, via working in holistic modes of thought. It is also expected to generate new integrative methods and theories that can encompass the diverse issues associated with the most complex and critical problems of the contemporary world.

Conclusions

The institutional approach introduced in this article is understood as an effort to create and add a meaningful new dimension into scientific researches. Through appropriate organizational designs, the institutional mechanism may facilitate more organic exchanges and collaborations among researchers from traditional disciplines for advancements in their specializations. Meanwhile, the synergy and synthesis achieved via comfortably working together will in turn foster the emergence of new fields of studies or new kinds of sciences on the new dimension. This is essentially a system approach that aims to organically integrate holism and reductionism, and to harmonize generalization and specialization simultaneously in scientific pursuits.

Using the case of ESD@MIT in this article is not to suggest other institutions should follow MIT to create a similar organizational unit or discipline. Instead, it is to inspire the other universities, institutes, and general research organizations to design their specific multiple dimensions according to their unique situations and needs. The MIT case is biased toward engineering sciences. However, obviously this institutional approach is a general one applicable to any fields of sciences that seek to advance through the facilitation of similar mechanisms analyzed in this article.

However, creating an appropriate second dimension within an organization by adding a new operating unit is not easy. First, the second dimension, in particular, its intellectual agenda, must be clearly identified and designed according to the history, culture, mission, the existing organizational characteristics, and the nature of work of the organization. This requires a lot of cooperative and interdisciplinary pre-work.

Moreover, in practice, the creation of the second dimension may encounter huge resistance from the traditional and specialized researchers who might not be able to recognize and appreciate the value of doing so. The significance and necessity for such an institutional approach become obvious only if it is addressed to the major pressing challenges or the significant new problems of the world, which the traditional specialized and simple inter-disciplinary approaches are incapable to solve.

Bibliography

[1] Joel Moses. The Anatomy of Large Scale Systems. Working Paper Series ESD-WP-2003-01.25, Engineering Systems Division, MIT
[2] Website: http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/11
[3] Daniel Roos. Engineering Systems at MIT: The Development of the Engineering Systems Division. Engineering Systems Symposium, 2004
[4] Website: http://esd.mit.edu/
[5] Thomas P. Hughes. The Systems Approach: From Edison to MITRE. Paper presented to the MITRE Corporation, McLean, Virginia, 19 May, 2005.
[6] ESD Terms and Definitions (Version 12). http://esd.mit.edu/WPS/esd-wp-2002-01.pdf
[7] Joel Moses. Foundational Issues in Engineering Systems: a Framing Paper. Engineering Systems Symposium, 2004