54
coherence. Suppose also that there is a growing number of academics attracted to A
and they now devote to it a great deal of time; they debate with agreements and
disagreements; they ripple out on and related to A to the wider community, which
perhaps unwittingly make them known as “people doing research on A” by scien-
tists in different disciplines and departments; members themselves believe they
have a group identity (that of doing A) and that they have something to say about A,
hence contributing to society.
If A, as above-described, could be recognized as a field, there is no reason why to
deny it to both “higher education” and “Asian higher education research.” Of course,
the issue is open to refutations, but, anyway, this is precisely how science makes
advances as suggested by Karl Popper ( 1963 ). I shall elaborate a few possible
refutations.
Ambiguity argument is commonly used by skeptics in philosophy, and it is a com-
mon refutation. Can the size of a community of experts determine a field? Suppose
that the total number of “people doing research on A” equals five in the whole world.
If so, is A a field? How about if the total number of experts is 50 or 500?
Consider a second refutation. Bourdieu’s concept of field is a social space where
the interplay between structure and agency takes place over the pursuit of desirable
resources ( 1969 ). This could, sometimes, not be applicable to A or other comparable
research areas. For example, suppose that A is the Scarlet Letter “A” for adultery
and A is merely a handful of experts in this novel by Hawthorne. There is no resource
whatsoever for these bohemian scholars to compete for neither state nor institu-
tional funding. This is not that far-fetched; in fact, most university-based research in
humanities and the arts are conducted by helping themselves. In this case, there is
no field at all in Bourdieu’s sense of an arena, where people compete for resources,
power, and ideology as Daniel Katz observed ( 1965 ).
A final refutation is a fundamental goal of science called reduction or inter-
theoretic reduction by which experts merge disciplines and fields with the principle
of Ockham’s razor. Thus, chemistry may eventually be absorbed by physics (parti-
cle physics to be precise), and, closer to our field, the psychology of education is a
potential candidate to be incorporated into neuroscience (see the elimination of
classic psychology suggested by Churchland 1981 ). From medicine to law, there is
a scarcity of holistic synthesis, while an exorbitant amount of specialisms tends to
further fragment into sub-specialisms. So, wouldn’t it be salutary that both “higher
education” and “Asian higher education research” are merged into, say, education
studies or sociology? A relatively recent response of higher education institutions to
this problem, but rarely successful, is the advocacy and rise of interdisciplinary and
multidisciplinary divisions, departments, and research centers.
From the “threefold principle” mentioned earlier, “higher education” and, in a
lesser degree, “Asian higher education research” clearly have a structure/agency and
discourse. “Higher education” has an international network of societies devoted to
it and a sizable number of scholars who consider themselves doing “higher educa-
tion.” Furthermore, it has a score of highly reputed academic journals almost at the
same level of curriculum studies. An indicator of the rise of higher education as a
sizable field of study is the international journal rankings. Higher education journals
J. Park