The past decade has seen an increasing call for the field of International Business studies (IB) to embrace interdisciplinarity, the interest moving from cross-disciplinary and multidisciplinary in nature to one that encouraged the blurring of boundaries and the integration of disciplines to render new insights.
In a recent roundtable session, the terms multidisciplinary (MD), interdisciplinary (ID) and trans-disciplinary (TD) were discussed in relation to the field of IB. As could be expected we all entered the debate with our own tacit knowledge of the field, to be put on the table and to disentangle our various definitions.
The task proved more interesting when one paper on the definitions of these words was placed on the table, that now set a reference point. And then more papers were presented that set a number of different reference points.
We did what we do best in such situations and that was to survey the ground from a top-down perspective, and then break for coffee.
With a single cardamom cookie on the side that came with the Swedish ‘fika’ in times of brainstorming, and sipping the strong doses of black coffee from the small coffee mugs in hand we set out to consider the various viewpoints.
If I had previously thought, that the list of 164 different definitions of the concept of culture, already back in 1952, by American anthropologists, Kroeber and Kluckhohn was confounding, only because as Apte (1994:2001) wrote in the ten-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, “Despite a century of efforts to define culture adequately, there was in the early 1990s no agreement among anthropologists regarding its nature.“, where Avruch (1998) noted that much of the difficulty of understanding the concept of culture stems from the different usages of the term ranging from high culture to popular culture and then culture as values and beliefs, that are still dominant in general discourse today, then the disentanglement of the three concepts of MD, ID and TD would certainly take more hours of critical reading.
Table 1: Partial table from Choi and Pak (2006:356) showing the variations in use of the terms MD, ID and TD, citing various literature sources.
The after fika session found the discussion turning towards the epistemological and spatial configuration representation of ID and MD, the latter becoming so if more than two disciplines are involved even if the disciplines interact little and far between themselves in collaboration. MD studies could be likened to looking at the various facets of a gem one perspective at a time, whilst ID studies would call for the crossing over of spaces, blurring the lines of disciplines and creating a new way of working altogether.
TD offered the point of greatest debate, mostly due to the differing starting points of reference and how the term was defined and subsequently applied.
– We’re partial to trans, because it’s trying to be something you are not. You’ll be cross-working in too many different fields where things get diluted and in the end, there is neither theoretical validity nor practical sharpness about it. In the end, it’s not an effective result.
There was a quiet silence in the room when that was voiced because TD of all three concepts was the one that embraced holism or a truly integrated way of thinking. TD was to go across, beyond and over disciplinary boundaries and it was a process to assemble disciplines and recombine information from a perspective that necessarily had to be recontextualized. Personally, from a critical linguistics perspective, was TD not the very deconstruction of coded compositions into their constituent elements, the unveiling of what is said when it is not said? Would not achieving TD in IB mean an “economy of knowledge” that transcends mere MD and ID functionality, each exponentially more complex than the previous to assume an open system capacity that lends greater organizational dynamics as Lotrecchiano (2010, 2011) suggests? Those questions of mine were met with a knowing gaze and a warm patient smile.
– Who was it you read that said “what is up, is also down”? Wilber? Because therein you have a logical impossibility isn’t it? With TD.
– You mean, like a tautology?
– Suppose you recombine information elements. If a combination makes sense, then the cognitive process goes nowhere. But if the potential connections are not immediately clear, the relationships are not defined enough, the mind tends to work on making sense with them, to find new connections. Sometimes, this doesn’t lead anywhere, but at other times, you get a eureka moment. So yes, in a TD environment, the ambiguity, the incongruence, the juxtaposition of heterogeneous information elements are all likely interacting through its interface, which is likely to stimulate the emergence of new knowledge. But once you have it, what are you to do with it?
– What is up, … is also down?
– < smiles > To make it effectively operational you need to finally sharpen it, define it and apply it to a specific field, to a specific research question, which then means it is most likely MD or ID in working, in practice. There is integration, but the integration takes place within disciplines that now becomes part of its ‘tool-box’.
As with most round-table discussions that involved numerous coffee breaks in-between in the Swedish context, there was no firm conclusion of any sort. But the compass had been set with the general feeling that the field of IB could be said to be mostly MD at the moment, with aspirations towards an ID interface. And TD would come in most useful as an environment that encourages and stimulates new knowledge, which this round-table session actually proved empirically.
Still, in general consensus, we remain partial.
References
Avruch, K. (1998) Culture and Conflict Resolution. Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press.
Choi, B.C.K. and Pak, A.W.P. (2006) Multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisiplinarity in health research, services, education and policy: definitions, objectives, and evidence of effectiveness. Journal of Clinical Investigative Medicine, 29(6):351–364.
Lotrecchiano, G.R. (2010) “Complexity Leadership in Transdisciplinary (Td) Learning Environments: A Knowledge Feedback Loop.” International Journal of Transdiciplinary Research 5.1 (2010): 29-63.
Lotrecchiano, G.R. (2011) Feature Article: Leadership is as Simple as A Child’s Game of Marbles: Transdisciplinarity, Learning, and Complexity in Fairsies, Keepsies and Mibs. 1 August, 2011.
Spencer-Oatey, H. (2012) What is culture? A compilation of quotations. GlobalPAD Core Concepts. Available at GlobalPAD Open House.