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From climate change to GM foods, we are increasingly confronted with complex, interconnected social and environmental problems that span disciplines, knowledge bases and value systems. This book offers a transdisciplinary, open approach for those working towards resolving these 'wicked' problems and highlights the crucial role of this 'transdisciplinary imagination' in addressing the shift to sustainable futures. Tackling Wicked Problems provides readers with a framework and practical examples that will guide the design and conduct of their own open-ended enquiries. In this approach, academic disciplines are combined with personal, local and strategic understanding and researchers are required to recognise multiple knowledge cultures, accept the inevitability of uncertainty, and clarify their own and others' ethical positions. The authors then comment on fifteen practical examples of how researchers have engaged with the opportunities and challenges of conducting transdisciplinary inquiries. The book gives those who are grappling with complex problems innovative methods of inquiry that will allow them to work collaboratively towards long-term solutions.

Global Modernity from Coloniality to Pandemic explores issues related to the global crises of our time: reason, science, and the environment by revisiting the notions of modernity, modernism, and modernization, which can no longer be considered purely Western or strictly secular. The book poses questions about viewing modernity today from the vantage point of traditionally disparate disciplines - engaging scholars from sociology to science, philosophy to robotics, medicine to visual culture, mathematics to cultural theory, biology to environmental studies. Leading sociologist Alain Touraine contributes a new text in which he reflects on the role of women, refugees and migrants, and the future of democracy. In their conclusion, the editors posit a fundamental ethical distinction between modernization and modernity and call for a new understanding of modernity that is globally distributed, informed by the voices of many, and concerned with crises that threaten all of us at the level of the species - a modernity-to-come.

Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change is a major new book addressing one of the most challenging questions of our time. Its unique standpoint is based on the recognition that effective and coherent interdisciplinarity is necessary to deal with the issue of climate change, and the multitude of linked phenomena which both constitute and connect to it. In the opening chapter, Roy Bhaskar makes use of the extensive resources of critical realism to articulate a comprehensive framework for multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinary understanding, one which duly takes account of ontological as well as epistemological considerations. Many of the subsequent chapters seek to show how this general approach can be used to make intellectual sense of the complex phenomena in and around the issue of climate change, including our response to it. Among the issues discussed, in a number of graphic and compelling studies, by a range of distinguished contributors, both activists and scholars, are: The dangers of reducing all environmental, energy and climate gas issues to questions of carbon dioxide emissions The problems of integrating natural and social scientific work and the perils of monodisciplinary tunnel vision The consequences of the neglect of issues of consumption in climate policy The desirability of a care-based ethics and of the integration of cultural considerations into climate policy The problem of relating theoretical knowledge to practical action in contemporary democratic societies Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change is essential reading for all serious students of the fight against climate change, the interactions between governmental bodies, and critical realism. Roy Bhaskar is the originator of the philosophy of critical realism and the author of many acclaimed and influential works, including A Realist Theory of Science, The Possibility of Naturalism, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, Reclaiming Reality, Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, Plato Etc, Reflection on Meta-reality and From Science to Emancipation. He is an editor of Critical Realism: Essential Readings and was the founding chair of the Centre for Critical Realism. Currently he is a World Scholar at the University Of London Institute of Education. . Introduction— Chapter 1 – Contexts of Interdisciplinarity Chapter 2 – Coda to ‘Contexts of Interdisciplinarity’: The Case of Climate Change—Critical Realist Interdisciplinarity: A Research Agenda to Support Action on Global Warming Chapter 3 – Seven Theses on CO 2 –reductionism and Its Interdisciplinary Counteraction Chapter 4 – The Dangerous Climate of Disciplinary Tunnel Vision Chapter 5 – Consumption—A Missing Dimention in Climate Policy Chapter 6 – Global Warming and Cultural/Media Articulations of Emerging and Contending Social Imaginaries: A Critical Realist Perspective Chapter 7 – Climate change: Brokering Interdisciplinarity across the Physical and Social Sciences Chapter 8 –– The Need for a Transdisciplinary Understanding of Development in a Hot and Crowded World Chapter 9 – Knowledge, Democracy and Action in Response to Climate Change Chapter 10 – Technological Idealism –The Case of the Thorium Fuel Cycle: A Critical Analysis Chapter 11– Food Crisis and Global Warming: Critical Realism and the Need to Re-institutionalize Science Chapter 12— Towards a Dialectics of Knowledge and Care in the Global System Chapter 13—Epilogue – A Conference Tourist and His Confessions: On the Travelling Circus of Climate Change

Many professional service firms today face a serious dilemma. Clients are demanding more sophisticated service for complex problems that can only be delivered by interdisciplinary teams of experts. No one consultant or lawyer--or even one functional group--can guide a client through today's challenges, which often span technological, regulatory, economic, and environmental issues on an increasingly global scale. The problem is, most firms have narrowly defined practice areas and partners with specialized expertise. These siloed experts are often \"stars\" who have built their reputations and client rosters independently, not by working with peers. What's more, most firms have grown so large and so fast that their members can't even know--let alone trust--their colleagues around the world. In Smart Collaboration, Heidi Gardner shows that a much more profitable--albeit difficult--path is to push the firm toward cross-partner collaboration. Gardner, a former McKinsey consultant and Harvard Business School professor, now a fellow at Harvard Law School, has spent over a decade conducting an in-depth study of more than a dozen global professional service firms. In a research tour de force, she brings together time sheet records, financial information, and personnel records--literally millions of data points--to uncover the effect of interdisciplinary teamwork in the professional services field. The result: conclusive proof that collaboration pays, both for employees and for their firms. Moving group by group through the ranks of a typical firm, she offers powerful prescriptions for how leaders can foster collaboration, move to higher-end and higher-margin work, increase client satisfaction, attract and retain top-caliber talent, and improve their bottom line.-- Provided by publisher.

The virtues of the humanities, including philosophy, history, and sociology, are more precious than ever. They serve as guiding lights, illuminating the dark regions of science, as the sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin would assert. Their importance in the digital age cannot be overstated. With this paper, we intend to open a debate on ‘digital humanism’ – the humanistic imprint of the digital world. We want to bring humans back to the centre of attention as idea builders (so to speak, ideators or creators) who promote the wellbeing of all living things: people, animals and natural objects (seas, lakes, rivers, mountains, etc.). This article outlines a cultural framework that aims to foster the creation of technologies by ideators who prioritise social justice, environmental sustainability and ethical behaviour.*Excerpted from Piero Formica. Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence: Exhibition at the Mind Gallery. Bologna, Italy: Edizioni Pendragon.

This edited volume breaks new ground by innovatively drawing on multiple disciplines to enhance our understanding of international relations and conflict. The expansion of knowledge across disciplines and the increasingly blurred boundaries in the real world both enable and demand thinking across intellectual borders. While multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary are prominent buzz words, remarkably few books advance them. Yet doing so can sharpen and expand our perspective on academic and real world issues and problems. This book offers the most comprehensive treatment to date and is an invaluable resource for students, scholars and practitioners.

Sustainable Knowledge rethinks the nature of interdisciplinary research and the place of philosophy and the humanities in society and offers a new account of what is at stake in talk about 'interdisciplinarity'.