The General Enters the Library: A Note on Disciplines and Complexity

Low carbon energy and international development: from research impact to policymaking

“…This literature advocates symmetry between the knowledge of 'scientific' experts from Northern countries and the homegrown empirical knowledge of local people. Critical development studies interrogate how the 'social slot' gets left to pick up the user interface at the 'end of the pipe', in contrast to commonplace notions of interdisciplinarity, in which knowledge is imagined to be capable of selectively recombining knowledge from different component domains of natural and social science (Wellberry, 2009). In contrast to piecing different parts of the jigsaw together with compatible data sets, the different framings of problems and perspectives offered by considering all actors in a social field as plausible innovation stakeholders has opened up development policy and intervention paradigms, revealing the differential benefits to broad categories of people and options available for innovation, for instance by foregrounding questions about gender and energy (Winter, Matinga, Ulsrud, & Standal, 2017).…”

A Disciplinary Matter: Critical Sociology, Academic Governance and Interdisciplinarity

“…It can also be argued that Sayer's opposition of constructivist to a-disciplinary problem-solving approaches (to which we shall return) may be too simple and that, for all its pragmatism, the call for problem-solving cannot in fact bypass questions of epistemology. Wellbery usefully notes that the problem-solving variant of interdisciplinarity still involves an epistemological issue, one that arguably receives insufficient attention: that is, the object of study is constituted as a theoretical object within each participating discipline, but also exists as an object within informal natural language (Wellbery, 2009). This double constitution can lead to uncertainties that sometimes characterize the practice of interdisciplinarity.…”

“…2 This is an oversimplification: for indications of why, see Durkheim (2005) and Cooper et al (2009). 3 Wellbery (2009) notes that discourses and disciplines are not co-extensive in the way they are sometimes taken to be, for instance in Foucault; see also Krishnan (2009). 4 The author's experience on a recent interdisciplinary project bears this point out: 'values' for example, has general intelligibility but different connotations in sociology and social psychology.…”

“…One response to, and symptom of, this heterogeneity is to distinguish between and construct typologies of the different forms that it can take. Luhmann, for example, distinguishes three forms: occasional interdisciplinarity, summarized by Wellbery as ‘enrichment through contingent encounter’ (Wellbery, 2009: 988), problem-oriented interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity, referring to theories that cannot be said to have a specific disciplinary home since they were intended from the outset to have wide applicability (2009: 987–8). Klein (2010) reviews some key taxonomies to date, elaborates a relatively complex model based on the ‘core vocabulary’ of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (2010: 15), and sets out sub-categories based on forms and degrees of exchange and integration.…”

“… 3 Wellbery (2009) notes that discourses and disciplines are not co-extensive in the way they are sometimes taken to be, for instance in Foucault; see also Krishnan (2009). …”