The Meaning and Purpose of Interdisciplinary Studies

Abstract

There are three distinct reasons for interdisciplinary work in development studies. First, specialists in different disciplines may work together on a specific practical planning problem. Second, assumptions, concepts or methods evolved in one discipline may yield fruitful results when applied to the problems previously treated by another. Third, the concepts, models and paradigms may have to be recast so as to encompass variables previously separated in distinct disciplines because of the demands of the social reality of a different culture. This is illustrated with the concept ‘capital’. There is a conservative and a radical version. In the former, new wine can be poured into old bottles; in the latter, wholly new concepts and models must be constructed.

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, vol. 1, no. 2 (1976).