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At the turn of the 20th century, colleges and universities in the US (and in many other places) were convulsed with change, a change induced by the creation of the modern set of academic disciplines. Their emergence at that time fundamentally altered how universities were constructed and how they did their business. It is the model on which the academy of the 21st century operates. The contemporary college and university is a rich amalgam of disciplinary and interdisciplinary units, problems, approaches, and structures.

This article presents the case for interdisciplinarity as a useful methodological framework for the social sciences. Interdisciplinarity is examined as a process of both disciplinary incorporation and paradigmatic evolution, which can deepen understandings of political and social questions. As social and political institutions, events and movements become increasingly more complex, hyphenated disciplines can lend critical new perspectives to the analysis of power, politics and social action and importantly, help to develop political solutions. Drawing on the evolution of the author's own interdisciplinarity trajectory (which includes fieldwork on political movements in Ghana, Uganda, Latin America and Japan), the article demonstrates how an emergent paradigm, discourse theory, can, in particular, bring new light to the connection between the relationship between thought and action. Indeed, a key advantage of discourse theory is that the categories of analysis, as discussed by theorists such as Levi‐Strauss and Eco, allows for an in‐depth analysis of how thoughts on an individual level can develop and be transformed into action on a collective level. This is critical to understanding the underlying motivations of members of political movements, who seek to overcome difficult individual circumstances by transcending negative social and political circumstances, not least by violence.

This article presents the case for interdisciplinarity as a useful methodological framework for the social sciences. Interdisciplinarity is examined as a process of both disciplinary incorporation and paradigmatic evolution, which can deepen understandings of political and social questions. As social and political institutions, events and movements become increasingly more complex, hyphenated disciplines can lend critical new perspectives to the analysis of power, politics and social action and importantly, help to develop political solutions. Drawing on the evolution of the author's own interdisciplinarity trajectory (which includes fieldwork on political movements in Ghana, Uganda, Latin America and Japan), the article demonstrates how an emergent paradigm, discourse theory, can, in particular, bring new light to the connection between the relationship between thought and action. Indeed, a key advantage of discourse theory is that the categories of analysis, as discussed by theorists such as Levi-Strauss and Eco, allows for an in-depth analysis of how thoughts on an individual level can develop and be transformed into action on a collective level. This is critical to understanding the underlying motivations of members of political movements, who seek to overcome difficult individual circumstances by transcending negative social and political circumstances, not least by violence. Adapted from the source document.

Since philosophy is not strictly a discipline, but a habit of interrogation, it is an appropriate approach to the problem of characterizing the interdisciplinary fields. In particular, the impossibility of any one system of knowledge being totally closed suggests a need for interdisciplinary approaches. The growth of classical physics through the interdisciplinary union of physics & mathematics illustrates the value which such approaches can have. At the same time, such interdisciplinary approaches often themselves grow into new disciplines. Interdisciplinarity is not a science using other sciences in an auxiliary manner. It is best understood, as exemplified by operational research, as the effort to make practical decisions using all the relevant data; such efforts are most crucial in political decision making, as suggested by Plato's metaphorical comparison of politics to weaving. W. H. Stoddard.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of illustrations -- Foreword -- Acknowledgements -- List of acronyms -- 1. Introduction -- Interdisciplinarity, health, and wellbeing -- Outline of the book contents -- The audience of the book -- PART I: Antinomies of mainstream interdisciplinarity -- 2. Overview of the contemporary literature -- Driving forces of interdisciplinarity -- Defining interdisciplinarity -- Interdisciplinarity without metatheory risks failure -- Preoccupation with personalism -- Institutional and organizational failings -- Bibliometric analysis of interdisciplinary research -- The absence of an adequate metatheoretical perspective -- 3. Contemporary ways to justify interdisciplinarity -- The pessimistic view -- The optimistic view -- The pragmatic view -- Some problems with mainstream metatheoretical strategies -- PART II: A critical realist general theory of interdisciplinarity -- 4. Core concepts of critical realism -- The role of philosophy -- Seriousness -- The nature of philosophical argument -- The nature of philosophy itself -- Enhanced reflexivity -- Critical realism and ontology -- A new ontology -- An immanent critique of Humean ontology -- The domains of the real, the actual, and the empirical -- The dialectic of science -- Three senses in which reality is structured -- 5. Critical realism and social science -- Structure and agency -- The individual and the collective -- Meaning and law -- Comparing the natural and social sciences -- A toolkit for social scientists -- 6. The ontological case for interdisciplinarity -- The DREI(C) and the RRREI(C) -- The stages of interdisciplinarity -- Conditions for interdisciplinarity -- 7. The seven steps to deeper understanding of ontology -- Step 1: being (ontology) is unavoidable and layered -- Step 2: being as process