ELINOR OSTROM: A BIOGRAPHY OF INTERDISCIPLINARY LIFE Sara Catherine Clark Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Education, Indiana University April 2019 ProQuest Number:13857029 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ProQuest 13857029 Published by ProQuest LLC ( 2019). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346 ii Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Doctoral Committee _____________________________________ Andrea Walton, Ph.D. _____________________________________ Dionne Danns, Ph.D. _____________________________________ Jason Baird Jackson, Ph.D. _____________________________________ Donald R. Warren, Ph.D. March 26, 2019 iii Copyright © 2019 Sara Catherine Clark iv To my parents For walking with me v Acknowledgements Thankfully, I did not complete this dissertation on my own. With good fortune, I regularly called on those much wiser than me for support. Thank you to my advisor Andrea Walton for her careful guidance, love of words, and patience when life slowed me down. I admire the way Andrea communicates with clarity and her value of teaching. I owe special thanks to Donald R. Warren; I think we met one another at the right time. Thank you, Don, for unlocking the terrain of education’s histories to include the entire landscape. Thank you for thinking with me and for quietly cheering me on when I needed it most. I would also like to thank Dionne Danns for modeling exhaustive research and for teaching me to contextualize primary sources. Dionne, I am a stronger historian because of you. Thank you, Adrea Lawrence, my mentor and friend, for listening to my ideas and for sharing yours. I conducted the bulk of the data collection for this project from 2014 to 2015, allowing me to benefit from collaborations across Indiana University and beyond. Thanks to Jason Baird Jackson and to the Indiana University Mathers Museum of World Cultures staff for welcoming me to interdisciplinary conversations about the Ostroms’ collection of art and artifacts. To Barbara Truesdell and to the Center for Documentary Research and Practice, thank you for facilitating important oral history research. Further, thank you to the team of researchers who assisted with collecting oral histories used in this study including Paulina Guerro, Joseph Stahlman, and Gloria Colom. Thank you to the Ostrom Workshoppers and especially to those who participated in Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop (WOW5) during the summer of 2015. Most of all thank you to my family—Robert, Nora, Ben, Shoshana, William, and soon to be Charles. I am better for knowing each of you. I hope this work reflects the courage, persistence, and joy I find through your love. vi Preface In the biography of Elinor Ostrom contained in the pages that follow, I have attempted to capture the essence of her career. You, careful reader, will note my choice to limit discussion of Ostrom’s scholarly qualifications and accolades. It is not my goal to evaluate her contributions, nor do I believe Ostrom derived motivation by counting her achievements. By typical measures of scholarly success—articles and books published, positions held, and honors awarded— Ostrom’s career was extraordinary. For those yet unfamiliar with the high points of her professional life, I summarize Ostrom’s curriculum vitae briefly here. Ostrom was born August 7, 1933, in Los Angeles, California, and died June 12, 2012, in Bloomington, Indiana. In 2009, she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics, sharing the prize with Oliver E. Williamson. Ostrom holds three degrees in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles, including a Ph.D. completed in 1965. Beginning as Visiting Assistant Professor of Government in 1965, Ostrom remained at Indiana University at Bloomington (IU) for her entire career, including serving as the first female Chair of the Department of Political Science.1 She ended her career as the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science (1991-2012). In 1973, she co-founded IU’s Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis with her husband, Vincent Ostrom; in 1996, she co-founded IU’s Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change; and in 2006, she founded the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University. Ostrom authored or coauthored 16 books and edited 17 collaborative volumes, including Patterns of Metropolitan Policing (1978); Governing the Commons (1990); Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources (1994); Understanding Knowledge as Commons (2007); and Working 1 The Department of Government was later renamed the Department of Political Science. vii Together (2010).2 She served as president of four scholarly associations: the Public Choice Society (1982-84), the Midwest Political Science Association (1984-85), the International Association for the Study of Common Property (1990-91), and the American Political Science Association (1996-97). She regularly received funding from major grant-making institutions for her research including the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, National Science Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, US AID, and US Department of Justice. Prior to receiving the Nobel Prize in 2009, Ostrom was recognized for her academic achievements through membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991), the National Academy of Sciences (2001), the American Philosophical Society (2006), and the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2009). In 1999, she received the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, and in 2008, she received the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science from the University of Rochester. Ostrom traveled extensively after receiving the Nobel, receiving many honorary doctorate degrees and awards for her lifetime achievements. 2 E. Ostrom, Roger B. Parks, and Gordon P. Whitaker, Patterns of Metropolitan Policing (Ballinger Cambridge, MA, 1978); E. Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); E. Ostrom, Roy Gardner, and James Walker, Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources (University of Michigan Press, 1994); Charlotte Hess and E. Ostrom, eds., Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice (MIT Press, 2007); Amy R. Poteete, Marco Janssen, and E. Ostrom, Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). viii Sara Catherine Clark ELINOR OSTROM: A BIOGRAPHY OF INTERDISCIPLINARY LIFE My dissertation is a study of 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) that sheds light on intellectual life and the organization of knowledge in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Using biography, this project uncovers Elinor’s interdisciplinary practice, especially through the influences of her husband and intellectual partner Vincent Ostrom and their interdisciplinary research Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University Bloomington. My analysis focuses on how Elinor, the only woman yet to receive the Economics Nobel, negotiated complex studies of human behavior— from water supply in Southern California to police services throughout the United States to forest governance around the world—by developing a primarily collaborative research approach that integrated methods and insights from the social sciences. Elinor prioritized increasing understanding of these global problems over identifying with a clear disciplinary community. I argue that who Elinor was as a person made it possible for her to develop and give meaning to her interdisciplinary practice. Organized chronologically and structured by significant events, this study examines Elinor’s intellectual life in four parts: her childhood and early adult education, development of the Ostrom Workshop, publication of her most well-known book Governing the Commons (1990), and global expansion of her ideas and research community. Attention to Elinor’s various roles as student, team leader, teacher, mentor, partner, entrepreneur, art collector, field researcher, administrator, and philanthropist contributes a complex, dynamic example of a female intellectual life. Interviews with members of the Ostroms’ academic and personal communities as well as examination of their personal papers and art collection provide primary ix perspective to this study. Ultimately, the blurred boundaries between her personal life and professional career point to four shaping tenets of Elinor’s interdisciplinary practice: hard work, artisanship and contestation, collaboration, and openness to multiple solutions. _____________________________________ Andrea Walton, Ph.D. _____________________________________ Dionne Danns,