The "Discipline" of Post-academic Science: Reconstructing the Paradigmatic Foundations of a Virtual Research Institute

This paper asks whether post-academic science, alternatively referred to as Mode 2 or Triple Helix, can be given disciplinary foundations in spite of its often-displayed organisational diversity, relevance orientation and transdisciplinarity. It answers the question in the affirmative, after having first reviewed and criticised a number of traditional concepts of disciplinarity and disciplinary emergence, established a new basis for conducting a paradigm analysis of fragmented, soft and user oriented fields of inquiry, and finally reviewed a case institute where this type of research has been sustained for over 10 years in a virtual setting (geographically distributed without a ‘home base’). The argument of the paper is that the concept of post-academic disciplinarity may be reconstructed as the guiding principles of hybrid research collective's historical and institutional context, where a ‘hard core’ of reflexive communicative inclusiveness pertains vis-à-vis certain issues, instrumentalities and practitioner constellations.