Finding playmates

Seth Finkelstein comments on Ed Felten’s blog that perhaps one reason why we don’t see much mixing of people from legal and technical backgrounds at conferences is that neither lawyers nor technologists get points within their own communities for attending conferences with experts from other fields. I can’t tell if Seth agrees with this point or is merely raising it, but it’s worth considering either way. My reaction to the above approach is that it seems short-sighted to assume that you cannot gain something valuable – something that could eventually score you points in your own community – from attending a conference that isn’t solely made up of people from your own field.

At conferences, we have the opportunity to meet new people, hear new ideas, be exposed to new arguments. These all have the potential to shape our work and thereby improve the contributions we can make. Maybe this all sounds too optimistic or idealistic. Nonetheless, I have rarely been to a conference where I did not hear at least one thought that made me see something in a new light or did not meet at least one person whose acquaintance or eventual friendship made my attendance worthwhile. Meeting new people with different perspectives is more likely to happen when the meeting is for people from more than one discipline so that would seem to favor attending such events.

This got me thinking about collaborations among people in various disciplines. I have noticed that interdisciplinary collaboration is less common for people in some fields than in others. I think sociologists, political scientists, communication scholars and demographers find themselves on research teams with people from other fields. In contrast, it seems less common among economists (yes, I do know exceptions to this) and from the post on Ed’s blog and my own limited experience it also seems like legal scholars may not engage in much cross-disciplinary collaboration either [see update below]. Why is that?

It is interesting that this would come up on Ed’s blog of all places. Ed Felten has done a great job of communicating with the legal community while being a top-notch technologist. Of course I have no idea how all this played out in his tenure review (and I guess if I recall, he may have done most of it post-tenure), but I doubt at this point he gets no benefit from speaking across disciplinary boundaries. In fact, his blog is so insightful precisely because he considers more than the technical aspects of technologies putting much weight on the legal implications as well.

Perhaps the dividing line is between junior and senior status, not so much field of study. Maybe it is too risky to cross disciplinary boundaries before tenure. But post-tenure one would hope one could either “get points within one’s own community” for communicating with those whose work relates to one’s interests or one would be less concerned about this issue.

Of course, there are some areas of work that are less prone to collaboration, period, regardless of whether that collaboration is interdisciplinary or not. But overall, would people agree that scholars in some fields tend to collaborate less than others or are my observations incorrect? Is it more a question of seniority (which then doesn’t quite justify the overarching concerns stemming from the need to gain points in one’s own community noted above)? Can anyone point to studies on this? I am just curious.

Update
1. Sorry, the links were broken, I’ve fixed them.
2. My comment about legal scholars not collaborating was silly (probably tainted by the post about lawyers and technologists). As Tom T points out in the comments, legal scholars and economists do collaborate quite a bit. In fact, they even have it institutionalized to the point of having an organization: the American Law and Economics Association. I don’t know why I didn’t remember that especially since I knew that their annual meeting is being held at my univ in a few weeks. There’s also the Law and Society Association.

The question remains: is there any pattern to who collaborates and who does not, and if yes, what explains it? Is it perhaps more related to the type of research interests one has and less to one’s disciplinary affiliation? And what implications does that have for “gaining points in one’s community” as per the issue raised by Seth?