Bibliometrics; Conceptual innovation; Disciplinarity; Epistemology; Knowledge; Organizational communication; Scientific communication; Semantic network analysis; Social network analysis; Social science research methods; Sociology of knowledge; Sociology of science
The completion of my dissertation also marks important junctures for two distinct lines in my intellectual development. I will discuss each in turn.
The first juncture lies upon a theoretical road, and reflects my efforts to come to terms with a fundamental problem in the sociologies of knowledge and of science: the mechanism through which individuals come to hold their beliefs.
The line of research leading me into this problem is seen in White (1997), White (1999a), and White (2001a), each of which examines the structure of some more-or-less conflictual intellectual community (commentators supporting or condemning a scholarly hoax, the faculty of an interdisciplinary communication and information science school, and researchers investigating the biological origins of homosexuality, respectively). Each of these studies suggested that a powerful conditioning effect on discourse could be ascribed to the paradigmatic or disciplinary allegiances held by actors. White (2001b) formulates the theoretical framework that emerges from these studies and from my reading in the sociologies of knowledge and of science. My dissertation makes the additional observation that an important function of disciplines is a decathectic one, holding apart the adherents of one discipline, field, or specialty from those of others.
The next step for my own work is to investigate questions of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in order to further develop a communication theory of knowledge. The pragmatic value of such a theory may be in its ability to inform efforts to build problem-oriented, interdisciplinary, or cross- professional teams, since a prominent feature of social and policy problems is their intractability to single-specialty solutions.
The other juncture rests upon a methodological path, and represents the culmination of attempts to develop an analytic method that competently attends to heterogeneous networks of social actors and content-bearing messages. The line of development thus bearing fruit is traced out in White (1999b) and White (1999c), which represent early efforts on my part to apply bibliometric and semantic network analysis techniques to scientific communication data; my dissertation marks the maturity of this approach.
Ultimately, however, the analytic procedures developed in my dissertation can be fruitfully employed to examine any set of data wherein utterances (i.e., textual data) are associated with the identities of specific social actors. Transcripts produced by Internet discussion groups and similar online communities are especially amenable to this kind of analysis. For example, Aakhus, White, Bagley, and Cockett (2001) uses the method developed in my dissertation to examine the participation of undergraduate interns in an online forum for discussing workplace-related problems and issues. The value of this method lies in its ability to augment narrower but more in- depth qualitative analyses with contextual information about the structures of roles and positions and the patterns of interaction within a community of discourse.
The effect of these two junctures is to situate my work at the margins of the disciplinary contexts of organizational communication, scientific communication, and the sociology of knowledge. I hope to contribute to each of these fields by proceeding along several different albeit related avenues of investigation. These include (a) the investigation of problems of disciplinarity and professional allegiance as factors affecting the management of experts in organizations, (b) the examination of online discussion or decision-making groups as discursive communities, and (c) the investigation of sites of scientific controversy in order to better understand the operation of the decathectic function of disciplines.
Aakhus, M., White, W.J., Bagley, S., & Cockett, L.S. (2001, November). Reflecting on communication at work and in professional life: Assessing the discourse of an online learning community. Paper to be presented to the National Communication Association at its annual meeting, November 1-4, 2001, Atlanta GA.
White, W.J. (1997, February). A practical joker of genius: The Sokal affair and the flight from reason. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Communication Association, Baltimore MD.
White, W.J. (1999). Academic topographies: A network analysis of interdisciplinarity among communication faculty. Human Communication Research, 25, 604-617.
White, W.J. (1999, February). The diffusion of scientific ideas across disciplinary boundaries: A citation analytic study of fractals in the social sciences. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Network for Social Network Analysis, Charleston SC.
White, W.J. (1999, November). A semantic network analysis of chaos theory concepts in psychology. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association, Chicago IL.
White, W.J. (2001, May). After the gay brain: Homosexuality research as a site of paradigm contestation. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Washington DC.
White, W.J. (2001). A communication model of conceptual innovation in science. Communication Theory, 11(3), 290-314.