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很多职业需要综合学
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很多职业需要综合学
武夷山
《未来学家》杂志2009年5／6月合刊发表Bruce L. Tow和David A. Gillian合写的文章，Synthesis：An Interdisciplinary Discipline（综合学：一门交叉学科）。文章说：
在许多职业中都出现了综合学的身影，如系统工程师、工业工程师、作业研究人员、中介人员、“把门人”，等等。
例如，美国Georgia-Pacific公司拟招聘一位Operation Maintenance Gatekeeper（运维把门人），充任此职者需要懂技术，会经营，善于沟通，能够在本单位的不同层次上进行沟通协调。
原文的开头部分如下（http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-198715393.html）：
Synthesis: an interdisciplinary discipline: as the professional world becomes more and more specialized, it's time for today's--and tomorrow's--leaders to embrace a multidisciplinary approach to problem solving.
May 1, 2009 |
Tow, Bruce L.; Gilliam, David A. | Copyright
We are either the beneficiaries or the victims (depending on your point of view) of a data explosion. The amount of recorded data is growing at a staggering rate, and the knowledge required to process that data is becoming more complex.
As a result, individuals and groups have become increasingly specialized in various fields. Recently, the term "subspecialist" has become part of our language. For example, the physicist specialty has almost entirely split into subspecialties such as "astrophysicist" and "plasma physicist," whose practitioners typically make little or no attempt to keep up with advances in the other subspecialties.
This trend toward greater degrees of specialization has been a natural, necessary, and generally healthy reaction to the world's growing complexity. After all, any individual or group has only a limited amount of intellectual capacity--and time--to apply to a task.
Though it solves some problems, specialization unfortunately also has major drawbacks. For example:
* Specialization has not been a planned or coordinated process, and as a result, there are significant knowledge gaps between specialties. As subspecialization proceeds, the number of gaps grows at a rapid and increasing rate because you have now to deal with the gaps between subspecialties. Consider the significant amount of knowledge available to a chemistry student, and then consider the slightly more limited world of biochemistry and the even-more limited amount of knowledge in the realm of space biochemistry.
* Specialists create unique vocabularies to allow them to communicate more effectively among themselves, but this trend further restricts their ability to communicate with others outside their specialty.
More and more problems require specialists from multiple fields to tackle them. However, it is increasingly difficult to achieve effective communication between specialists. Whenever resolution of a particular problem requires coordination between differing specialists or lies in a gap between two or more specialties, a serious challenge is posed: The individuals involved are effective only as specialists; they require a narrow focus and a specialized language to perform their jobs effectively.
The ideal solution to this problem would take advantage of the strengths inherent in specialization while finessing the pitfalls. Ideally, when faced with a multidisciplinary problem, there would be someone who could:
* Identify which combination of specialties is likely to solve the problem and organize a team.
* Motivate the individuals to work as a group toward a solution to the problem.
* Achieve effective communication (directly and indirectly) between specialists.
If enough people try this approach, and train others to do so, it will become a recognized discipline: Synthesis.
A Theoretical Basis for Synthesis
In the 1970s, SRI International (then called Stanford Research) asked some of its brightest researchers to …
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