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...race, class, age, ability, nationality, and sexual orientation. They practiced pedagogies that valued personal growth, reciprocity in relationships, and exchange of knowledge. The resulting "knowledge explosion" challenged disciplinary boundaries and critiqued masculine biases embedded in the academy. Even with shrinking funds for higher education, 300 hundred WS units opened during the 1970s, demonstrating the strong influence the women's movement had on the academy (Stark & Lattuca, 1997). This work continues today in over 700 colleges and universities across the country (National Women's Studies Association [NWSA], 1995). Thus, WS serves as an essential location for understanding institutional structures, curriculum, and faculty development (Garcia & Ratcliff, 1997; Klein & Newell, 1997; Simpson, 1989).
Despite 30 years in the academy, most WS and other interdisciplinary studies units (such as cultural, environmental, racial/ethnic, and sexuality studies) that cross disciplinary boundaries to foster integrative thinking remain in marginalized positions as programs rather than departments. Disciplinary departments hold the power associated with intellectual and administrative authority over curricular, hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions. Most programs lack this power and therefore depend on departments to hire and promote faculty trained and willing to do interdisciplinary work. Interdisciplinary program curricula require multiple departmental approvals and offerings of cross-listed courses for stability. In addition, because departments typically have more resources than programs, they control opportunities for faculty professional development.
Furthermore, individual WS faculty members make scholarly decisions in the context of a patriarchal system. Power imbalances in colleges and universities favor males. For example, tenured male faculty members outnumber women, and on average men at the professor rank earn more than women do (National Center for Education Statistics, 2001, 2002b). Much of the curriculum is male-centered. Within this environment, those who already hold power are positioned to retain their influence over institutional and departmental rewards, resources, and decision-making. Nevertheless, there are increasing numbers of WS graduate programs across the country, and more talented interdisciplinary feminist scholars will be seeking opportunities to associate with WS and to teach WS courses. They are likely to expect the freedom to work within and beyond departmental boundaries, so retaining them in the academy may depend on flourishing WS programs.
Messer-Davidow (1991) described how the structural positioning of WS creates a paradox for WS faculty. They have their tenure home in disciplinary departments, yet critique potentially unjust departmental organization of knowledge and assignment of power and resources. In the same moment that WS scholars are commissioned to pursue feminist inquiry, they may be faced with the decision to constrain that pursuit in response to institutional and collegial priorities. Moreover, institutional norms and social and cultural identities create power and authority imbalances between faculty and students in their classrooms that must be negotiated (Ellsworth, 1989; hooks, 1994; Ropers-Huilman, 1998). To secure tenure and promotion, WS scholars may divert or postpone scholarly efforts that reflect feminist values to engage in work they believe will be less risky. In effect, while WS scholars value social change, they--rather than their institutions--are being transformed. Therefore, these scholars' decisions about how to teach, what to study, where to disseminate their work, and the nature of their service activities could place WS interdisciplinary and transformational ideals in jeopardy (Allen, 1997; Allen & Kitch, 1998; Goodstein, 1997; Goodstein & Burghardt, 1999; Scully, 1996).
The purpose of our qualitative study was to explore this paradox and to improve understanding of the complex interactions of factors that affect feminist work in the academy. We interviewed 20 WS faculty at four comprehensive universities, focusing on how individual values (feminist beliefs and scholarly identity), peer values (intellectual and friendship communities), and institutional values (reward systems and resource allocation) influenced their decisions about pursuing feminist teaching, research, and service.
Despite the fact that 531 comprehensive institutions educate one quarter of the U.S. student population and employ one quarter of the nation's professoriate, they are rarely sites for higher education research on WS or other interdisciplinary studies (Carnegie, 1994; Snyder, Hoffman, & Geddes, 1997). Prior studies about the location of WS in higher education institutions have been concerned primarily with feminist knowledge production and therefore with research university environments (Allen, 1997; Allen & Kitch, 1998; Goodstein, 1997; Goodstein & Burghardt, 1999; Scully, 1996). Our study, however, looked at WS faculty in comprehensive universities where teaching, research, and service are shaped in contexts that prioritize undergraduate teaching and possess limited research resources.
Our academic positions cross the hierarchy of these two institutional types. This hierarchy awards the voices of research university faculty more access and credibility than faculty at other colleges and universities. We are determined to show the importance of faculty contributions to WS at both types of institutions. In addition, Messer-Davidow's paradox resonated with our own experiences as women and feminist scholars. Thus, we wanted to understand further how our female feminist colleagues negotiate decisions about scholarly work when institutional and colleagues' values may conflict with their feminist beliefs. Women then became the focus of this work, since by virtue of their sex at least, our male feminist colleagues would be perceived with less bias in the patriarchal power hierarchy of the academy.
Our study also focused on the newest generation of feminist scholars. Previous studies about WS faculty focused on the scholars who founded the field in the 1960s and early 1970s and on the second generation of the late 1970s and 1980s (Astin & Leland, 1991; Gumport, 1987). We investigated the experiences of the next generation of women who entered four public comprehensive universities as WS faculty in the 1990s. The perspectives of the new WS generation are important because those faculty represent the future of the field and because similarities to and differences from their predecessors may unite or divide WS communities. The participants were located in disciplinary departments and taught interdisciplinary WS or cross-listed disciplinary courses. We wanted to know how decisions made from these locations about their teaching, research, and service were helping or hindering WS to thrive as a center for feminist work on their campuses.
Two groups, Interdisciplinary Scholars (IDS) and Disciplinary Scholars (DS), emerged from our analyses. The groups were distinguished by their scholarly identities and degree of commitment to social activism and the WS programs at their universities. IDS identified themselves primarily as interdisciplinary thinkers and were very active with their WS programs. Personal feminist values had strong influences on their scholarly decisions. Most DS were influenced more by their perceptions of their departments' priorities for tenure rewards and professional development than IDS were. DS defined themselves according to traditional disciplines and were moderately involved with their WS programs. To determine the extent of their women- and gender-focused scholarship, compared to other forms of scholarship they produced, we quantified entries from participants' curriculum vitae. We found that IDS produced a greater proportion of scholarship visibly focused on women and gender relative to their other forms of academic work than did DS.
In the sections that follow, we describe theories about the influence of values, organizational structure, and power on decision making that provided the foundation for the study, and we define the concepts that form the study's framework. Our discussion of methods explains the reasons for our decisions about study design and data analysis. We then compare the IDS and DS groups, but not to suggest that the contributions of one group are more important than those of the other are. Rather, understanding scholars' differing responses to their environments increases awareness of some factors that influence how feminist work is chosen, performed, and evaluated. Finally, we explore what the results of the study suggest about the future of WS and other interdisciplinary work in comprehensive institutions.
This study informs work in other interdisciplinary programs by providing evidence for how power embedded in institutional structures and communicated through values creates challenges for individual scholarly decision making. The findings offer insight into how faculty perceive this power and how they negotiate conflicting values when deciding what scholarly work to pursue in their interdisciplinary field or how to foster social change in the academy.
Theoretical Foundations and Conceptual Framework
The conceptual framework for this study is depicted in Figure 1. Constructed from theories that consider the power of values and organizational structure in shaping academic careers, it posits that WS faculty members' decisions about producing feminist scholarship are shaped by their academic backgrounds, personal values, and perceptions of informal and formal organizational values. This process is mediated by their dual roles as members of disciplinary departments and teachers in WS programs within the context of gendered institutions.
Values influence decision making because they are the enduring beliefs that make a specific action by an individual personally and socially preferable to alternative actions (Rokeach, 1968). Values become standards for comparing oneself with others and for making moral judgments about oneself and others. These standards become guidelines for decision making. In value-setting and maintenance processes, individuals and groups acquire power to energize or constrain each other's actions (Rokeach, 1968).
Organizations harness this power by socially organizing human behavior (Blau & Scott, 1962). Desired regularities in behavior emerge from the social conditioning that results from establishment of formal and informal social relationships in an organization. Institutions of higher education are organizations with formal and informal social structures that unify administrators, faculty, and staff for the purpose of fulfilling the tripartite mission of teaching, research, and service. According to traditional rational theory, formal organizational structures are those "in which the social positions and the relationships among them have been explicitly specified and are defined independently of the personal characteristics and relations of the participants occupying these positions" and so are determined to be "neutral" and "objective" (Scott, 1998, p.19).
A university exercises formal control over faculty through structures such as departments and programs and by providing incentives such as human and material resources, tenure, and promotion so faculty will produce work that supports the institutional mission. Authority is assigned to people who set standards and evaluate outcomes through a hierarchal arrangement. As individuals recognize this authority as necessary and routine, they legitimize the exercise of power at upper levels of the hierarchy. Thus, institutional mission and faculty scholarly decision making become "important focal points for the exercise of power" (Pfeffer, 1981).
For example, all organizations are dependent on resources to varying degrees, and resources are rarely available without limit. Individuals and groups compete in an exercise of...
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