Pasteur's Quadrant and Chaos of Disciplines

Reviewed by William G. Tierney

Pasteur's Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation

Donald E. Stokes. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997.

Chaos of Disciplines

Andrew Abbott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Some texts create a media frenzy the moment they hit the streets and others are slow starters but gradually build a following. Academic books, of course, are rarely blockbusters, and they generally die a quiet death. Donald Stokes's Pasteur's Quadrant, however, has created a following since it was first published in 1997, and in each of the last five years its sales have increased. As with any catchy but challenging idea, readers frequently use its key concept to suit their purposes. I have heard Pasteur's quadrant used to defend and to attack research universities; it has also been employed as a reason to rethink tenure, to maintain tenure, to increase or to decrease funding from the federal government, to depoliticize research, to protect academic freedom, to redefine academic freedom, and to alter the faculty reward structure toward one form of research and away from another. In a limited way, Stokes's book has as its intellectual precursor Thomas Kuhn's 1962 work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, from which the word "paradigm" eventually found its way into the everyday lexicon, albeit bastardized to mean, as Humpty Dumpty once said, "What I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

Donald Stokes was professor and dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University; he died in 1997 during the final stages of the book's preparation. Stokes's concern was to understand science and technology in the post-World War II period, and in Pasteur's Quadrant he suggested abandoning the dichotomy between applied research and basic research that had dominated scientific research since it was put forward in a 1945 report by Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, to President Franklin Roosevelt. Bush had argued that basic research was a public good that needed federal support because it would not receive adequate levels of funding in the marketplace.

Instead, Stokes argued that scientific research should be conceptualized as falling into quadrants. One quadrant contains scientists who conduct pure basic research and have little interest in the potential uses of the research findings for the real world. He cited physicist Niels Bohr, a scholar-scientist struggling to develop a model of the atom, as an example of a researcher who fit within this quadrant. Thomas Edison, who conducted pure applied research in order to be able to market electric lighting and who had little interest in the scientific aspects of his work, fits within another quadrant, which contains scientists whose focus is on the application of research. A third quadrant contains work that is neither overtly theoretical nor applied. It might contain taxonomic or classificatory work, which is worthwhile but not driven by the desire either to advance knowledge or to develop practical solutions.

The final quadrant, named for the "use-inspired basic science" of Louis Pasteur, Stokes labeled "Pasteur's quadrant." A discussion of it accounts for the bulk of the thin book. Although research in this quadrant has potential real-world utility, its investigators never lose sight of the desire to advance scientific understanding. Stokes suggested that this quadrant is where the bulk of federal funding should be placed.

The book raised many useful points in a patient, understated manner. The author considered how viewing research as existing on a continuum reaching from basic to applied assumes that progress builds only in one direction, when breakthroughs in technologies actually can reverse that direction. For example, while theoretical advances can lead to technological advances, a technological breakthrough can also lead to an increased understanding of a particular theory. Stokes further suggested rethinking the long-held Enlightenment idea that an understanding achieved by pure research will ultimately improve the human condition. Technology, Stokes maintained, has been not only beneficial to humankind, but also, at times, harmful.

The tone of the book was thoughtful and humble and the author would certainly have agreed that others have put forward similar suggestions, albeit perhaps not in such a systematic and concise manner. For those who are not versed in the history of federal funding of science, the book is useful as a primer. More important, and perhaps the reason why the book has become so much discussed, Pasteur's Quadrant had significant implications not simply for how science gets funded by the federal government, but also for how one conceives of research in the academy, and consequently, for what one believes should be the work of the faculty. In this light, the book should be read not only by those who are in the sciences, but by those in the social sciences, humanities, and professions as well.

Stokes outlined the inevitable tensions that exist when the government provides funding for science that the Congress or a federal agency deems important. How is the scientist to maintain objectivity and, by inference, academic freedom, when the government seeks answers to specific questions? Until recently, the funding of basic research by agencies such as the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health was unlikely to be controversial because the research did not have immediate practical implications. When a scientist suggests, however, the importance of stem-cell research and places his or her work solidly within Pasteur's quadrant, problems arise in the highly charged atmosphere that currently exists in Washington.

Stokes argued that rather than focusing on basic research, federal agencies ought to fund work similar to that which had been done by Pasteur and his confreres. The author cautioned against the government simply funding short-term applied projects that would have a quick payoff but might jeopardize not simply the long-term viability of scientific research, but the health and well-being of the nation as well. Indeed, throughout the book one senses the author's strong belief that the federal government and those who do science must be in a symbiotic relationship if the country is to prosper. He maintained that the crisis of World War II created an obvious dynamic wherein individuals from disparate research and policy arenas worked together toward a united end. Although the urgency of a country at war, such as that which existed in the 1940s, may no longer exist, Stokes's elegant argument was that the importance of that relationship is no less critical today than a half century ago.

What might be curious, then, is that Stokes did not place much emphasis on where that science is to be done (the university), by whom (the faculty), or what his suggestions imply. Basic research, for example, most often has been attempted by individuals working within specific disciplines that have their own regulations for reward and sanction; academics working in the pure sciences at research universities are more likely to be rewarded for theoretical work than for work with policy-related consequences. To be sure, there are always outliers and examples of talented individuals who attempt what Pasteur did, but, especially since World War II, the reward structure has not swung toward that line of work. What are the implications for peer review for "use-inspired research?" How would a university be structured if the faculty subscribed to the notion of working within Pasteur's quadrant? What kind of work would be rewarded? What does research within Pasteur's quadrant suggest for those academics who are not in the sciences? These questions arise from the book and force the reader to think about what the university of the twenty-first century might look like if it were to move toward the ideas presented here.

Enter Andrew Abbott, a thoughtful and erudite University of Chicago sociologist, who penned Chaos of Disciplines to consider the evolution and development of the social sciences. The similarities of Stokes's and Abbott's books are not immediately apparent. Stokes looked at the hard sciences, whereas Abbott concerns himself with the social sciences. Stokes concentrated on public policy and Abbott never mentions it. Stokes considered scientists doing research, absent place, and Abbott focuses on social scientists within research universities, pretty much absent the external world.

Their similarities, too, might be interpreted as a weakness. Both authors, Abbott more than Stokes, seem to ignore willfully the fact that research takes place outside of the rarefied atmospheres of the Universities of Chicago and Princetons of the world. The not-so-implicit assumption is that knowledge production takes place by way of scientists doing work in their labs or on their word processors, and those who labor in less prestigious institutions are doing something else. The transformation of higher education as an industry, whether viewed positively or negatively, is largely overlooked by both authors. The scientists they seem to imagine as typical—full-time, tenured faculty members who spend a substantial amount of time doing research—are in fact increasingly rare.

However, like Stokes, Abbott is circumspect in his goals. He tries to think through the patterns of disciplines and argues that we ought not to think of them as a continual march toward greater knowledge. Instead, he sees disciplines as repeating patterns again and again. Disciplines are self-encapsulated, he argues; new schools of thought are reconfigurations of existing concepts. He uses his first four chapters to outline his ideas about these distinctions and then brings up much-debated topics in the social sciences to advance his argument about repeating processes. Provocatively, Abbott suggests that whether the discipline is history, sociology, or literature, the nature of knowledge production will follow a similar pattern: instead of a linear progression, it is circular.

Chapter five, on the context of disciplines, and the remaining chapters, have the greatest resonance with Stokes's work. Abbott traces the intellectual structures of the university and points out how these structures—departments, majors, and schools—have come into being. Such structures are neither benign nor isolated. Individuals need advanced degrees to move from one institution to another, individuals evaluate one another's work, and the demands of the market for certain courses determine whether someone will be marketable for a tenure-track position.

In previous work and in Chaos of Disciplines, Abbott points out that what he suggests sheds light on the seemingly incessant demand for interdisciplinarity. Every decade, calls go forth for great integration of the disciplines. The author usefully observes that academics seem to have historical amnesia when they make such calls. Since World War II, and as early as the mid-1920s, the Social Science Research Council was calling for a way to eliminate barriers between the social sciences. Why, then, has not more interdisciplinarity occurred? Relatedly, although he does not refer to Stokes's work, Abbott presumably would argue that a call for greater integration of theory and practice is fine and good, but is unlikely to happen. Abbott suggests that two factors prevent problem-driven interdisciplinary research. First, the stability of the academic labor market prevents it with its need for faculty to teach in discipline-defined departments. Second, "there are far more research problems than there are disciplines. . . . A university organized around problems of investigation would be hopelessly balkanized." He goes on to comment that disciplines are sustained by a theoretical or methodological coherence. If Abbott were to follow that line of thinking further, would he argue that the university itself also exists by way of similar axes, and that without them it would be little more than an organizational Babel?

Although Abbott suggests that the natural and social sciences are different, one wonders what the prognosis is for Stokes's suggestions if Abbott's ideas ring true. Universities are conglomerations of competing conceptions of knowledge, to be sure, but the manner in which they analyze, regulate, and produce knowledge is quite similar. Tenure, academic freedom, self-governance, and the like are held by professors of biochemistry and history not because they are biochemists and historians but because they are professors. Thus, when Abbott says that "the overall structure . . . seems virtually unbreakable," I wonder about the possibilities of the reforms that Stokes suggests. One possibility is that the work Stokes says should be done will no longer take place within the structures that Abbott analyzes. Yet neither author suggests the end of the academy as it is currently configured. Of course, one or the other author might be wrong in his analysis. Time, as always, will likely resolve the conundrum, but for now, each text is extremely useful in helping readers think through the more pressing problems that confront the academic and the university in the early twenty-first century.

William Tierney is Academe's book review editor and director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis at the University of Southern California.

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