1 - Introduction

Summary

Like much of today's economy, modern-day academia is, for many good reasons, driven by specialisation. Structured into a strikingly standardised set of disciplinary labels and departmental units internationally, this specialisation affords individual scholars the ability to become leading experts in their particular fields, driving forward ideas and understandings within their specific disciplines and subdisciplines. That progress is evident in the escalation in the volume of specialist sub-disciplinary academic journals and published journal articles.

The intellectual contributions that have flowed in terms of new ideas, theories, methods and empirical understandings have been considerable. So too have been the wider social, economic, cultural and technological gains from this intellectual specialisation. The instrumentalisation (both attempted and actual) of higher education by national governments towards these wider non-academic (and especially economic) objectives in recent years continues to be a source of debate (Jazeel, 2010; Phillips, 2010; Pain et al., 2011; Williams, 2012), with academics rightly determined both to retain their intellectual freedom and to maximise the value and benefits of their expertise in the wider world. And the contributions of academia's intellectual specialisation are considerable. Within the UK, for instance, the recent evaluations of ‘impact’ within the university system's Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise testifies to a vibrant array of significant benefits to the UK's wider social, cultural, economic and political world generated through and from its higher education research expertise (REF, 2014). The upcoming update in REF2021 looks set to show a similarly rich set of research contributions to life beyond the academy and, indeed, will represent a notably larger weighting for UK universities in the measurement of their overall research quality within this assessment exercise. Indeed, it has recently been claimed by a US scholar that academic research has been key to 40% of top inventions since the 1950s (Times Higher Education, 2017).

Therefore, although in many ways highly productive, the risk of this linked structural and intellectual specialisation within modern academia is the inevitable tendency to look inwards within one's own disciplinary and, narrower still, sub-disciplinary boundaries rather than connecting to the wider range of distinct yet often fertile related agenda and ideas beyond those intellectual walls.