book: academic tribes and territories

Becher, Tony, and Paul R. Trowler. Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: The Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press, 1996.
This book discusses how academics perceive themselves and disciplines. It also explores how the academic cultures and nature of disciplines are interconnected. The text covers areas from disciplines, overlaps and speciality, community, communication, career paths, wider context, and implications for practice. This book will be useful to my project if I choose to focus on interdisciplinary issues.

books: Knowledge: It’s Creation, Distribution, and Economic Significance

I was excited to check out this book, the title is really impressive and seems closely tied to my subject.  However, when I found it I found three volumes.  The first is Knoweldge and Knowledge Production.  The second is The Branches of Learning.  The thirds is The Economics of Information and Human Capital.  All look facinating.  The set is huge and dense, and published in the 1980s. I’d be interested in what Machlup would have to say about the impact of electronic information in the context of his research.

All-in-all, for the scope of this project, these will serve more as reference resources than texts I spend time with and reflect on.  Nevertheless, they’ll serve as good resources.