Computer Science Is Cowering

ComputerScience is cowering away from real issues of late. To progress, it needs to focus on the big picture, especially inter-disciplinary approaches that consider the fields of psychology and economics. The low-hanging fruits of study-desk symbol-diddling, looking for the ever-more elusive "magic formula", have been mostly tapped. By playing it safe CS is becoming increasingly irrelevant and wasteful. If it wants to remain relevant, CS needs broaden its horizons and step out of the study den and into the sun with real issues and real people.

ComputerScience per se has no interest, nor did it ever, in "magic formula study-desk symbol-diddling", but that aside... The academic field you're looking for is generically known (especially in the UK, but increasingly elsewhere) simply as Computing, which encompasses pure ComputerScience, SoftwareEngineering, Human-Computer Interface research, Artificial Intelligence, and so on. The interdisciplinary approach you seek is entirely valid; the lack of interdisciplinary work is one that plagues science in general, and is a problem reflective of researchers' personal interests and science funding models than something particular to Computing. The majority of research papers and student dissertations produced where I work (the School of Computing at a UK university) are precisely about the "big picture" and related concerns, including psychology and economics. One of my students, for example, is exploring the psychological issues that affect human choices that lead to avoidable security breaches on wireless networks. Another is looking at the psychological, environmental, and pedagogical factors that influence students to choose Computing as a university subject. Yet another is doing essentially traditional ComputerScience -- exploring the feasibility of applying ExtendedSetTheory to general-purpose programming. And so on.

In other words, ComputerScience is doing what it always did, but whereas the term "Computer Science" used to refer to all computing research, we increasingly call it Computing. "Computer Science" increasingly refers specifically to that research which strictly involves computational mathematics, algorithms, numerical representation, and so forth.