Disciplines in their organisational context: Mapping Australian faculty structures to the ASCED and ANZSRC fields of education and research

In this study, we investigated the extent to which the national classifications of disciplines reflect the organisational structures of Australia’s universities. The names of faculty units of ten universities were mapped onto the fields of education set out in the Australian Standard Classification of Education (ASCED) as well as the fields of research in the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC). The results show a fair degree of alignment between the faculty structures and both classification schemes, but also reveal much variation in the degree of alignment amongst the universities sampled. Schools and other second-level units are slightly more aligned to ASCED than to ANZSRC. Several units covering more specific fields are not represented in the current ASCED and ANZSRC classifications, though most non-alignment is due to divergent ways of dividing and compounding broader disciplinary areas. The degree of alignment to the research classification has changed little, overall, since the time of ANZSRC’s predecessor, the Australian Standard Research Classification.