The Inner World of Research by Stefan Svallfors Neil Betteridge

Author:Stefan Svallfors, Neil Betteridge [Stefan Svallfors, Neil Betteridge]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781839981579
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: 2021-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Being Each Other’s Margin

And what should they know of England who only England know?20 And they who only know their own knowledge do not really know what they know. We need help to be able to occupy and hold a position on the margin. Help from our foes as much as from our friends. In this section I will be concentrating on the friends; the foes will have to wait until the next.

In the previous chapter, I placed the research team in the centre, being the level at which new knowledge is actually created. It might seem strange to go from stressing the importance of cooperation and celebrating the team’s mini collective to touting the value of marginality. But in the research team’s essential diversity as a perquisite for discovery and insight lies a kind of marginality. A marginality in relation to each other. Being each other’s margin.

For this to work, the individual members of your team need to be sufficiently different. Too different, and no contact can be established and you remain mutually excluded; too similar, and you are all ensconced in the middle of the intellectual space. No distance is established, no one learns from anyone else. With Goldilocks diversity, you can be each other’s margin; a relational marginality then emerges that is necessary for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts.

American historian and sociologist Rogers Hollingsworth argues that creativity requires above all the ability to accommodate cognitive complexity; that is to say, the capacity not only to hold more than one thought in the head at the same time but also to simultaneously consider different aspects of a problem and at that precise moment take in multiple relevant sources of information. This ability, says Hollingsworth, is augmented by team diversity – but only up to a point. Too different, and we stop bringing anything of value to the collective table.21

There are different ways of creating marginality in the research team. One is to build it with participants from different scientific disciplines who are at just the right cognitive distance from each other. What this just right cognitive distance is varies with the problem or the field one is to attack. Often, but not always, this means that one should work with adjacent disciplines to one’s own. This does not, however, have to be the case. I have seen sociologists in fruitful collaboration with physicists and computer scientists, and seen them fail with economists and lawyers. A rule of thumb is that if you recognise everything that the other is doing, your cognitive distance is too short, and if what the other is doing appears baffling or meaningless, it is too great. If you understand the substance of what is being done but have never seen it before, then the distance is optimal.

An interesting question – which I have borrowed from my good friend and former collaboration partner Staffan Kumlin – is whether multidisciplinary-ness is best as input or output; in other words, is

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