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On 21 Jan 2015, at 10:56, LAND L.R. wrote: > Or perhaps the difference between a discipline and a field is in > reality somewhat akin to how my old tutor used to distinguish a > language from a dialect: 'a language is a dialect with an army and a > navy'. My thoughts were going in a similar direction from Dilly's points: for a full sense of how the field has - or has not - engendered distinctive disciplines in a large field is going to have some political aspects (who *benefits* from the apparent ignorance of an existing discipline's .... existence?) But I don't think this is unique: it reminds me of the way disciplines tear up what they know and start again, and get reinvigorated (or 'degrade' depending on your perspective), eg History encountering 'Women's studies' (for want of a better phrase). Establishing a discipline's credentials is often a matter of persistence more than anything (Moran's book on Interdisciplinarity has a good history of English establishing itself in the Victorian era, with plenty of physics envy going on). That picks up Dilly's other point -- if we look forward rather than back, it's for us to 'choose' whether we are going to emerge as a fairly distinct discipline(s), with all the strict guardianship implied, or remain a largely open and flexible field (and therefore somewhat fuzzy, possibly under-acknowledged). That will depend on lots of small decisions, 'victories' and 'defeats' such as whether we all start being in the REF, which will mean a lot of changes in people's jobs and roles. We *might* lose something important in such victories (such as nuance and useful grey areas about who exactly are our 'students' and audience, who we are answerable to, and so on). We'll have to take Mary Douglas offlist I think, Ray (but we've already started that conversation;)) -- Dr Jason Davies http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgajpd/Academic/