Integration

For the purposes of this Manifesto we may define integration as synthesis, the combining of insights from multiple disciplines into a greater whole. We can note, though, that there is debate about several key elements of the definition. While we stress integration across disciplines, advocates of transdisciplinarity would also stress the value of integrating academic understandings with the views of those beyond the academy. Most scholars of interdisciplinarity would, I think, welcome this broadening of definition. We can also recognize that in team research it is important to achieve some (social) integration of understandings of the research project and team members' roles in it at the start before (cognitive) integration of ideas can be possible.

There is debate also about how best to achieve integration and what the results of integration look like. We will take a broad view here, urging in Interdisciplinary research strategies a set of strategies that have worked in the past. In terms of outcomes, we accept many possibilities: We may achieve a unified theory, but may instead map a complex set of interactions guided by a range of theories.

Perhaps most importantly we can conceive of integration as a process rather than an outcome. We can not integrate immediately across all possible insights relevant to a particular research question. But we can try to integrate across the most important, and engage in a conversation in which ever-greater integration is achieved.

See O'Rourke, M., Crowley, S., Gonnerman, C. (2016). On the nature of cross-disciplinary integration: A philosophical framework. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science 56, 62-70.

We can also recognize here that some critical interdisciplinary scholars see disciplines as essentially problematic and would thus not embrace the goal advocated here of integrating across disciplinary insights.

We should also recognize a long tradition of multidisciplinarity, in which different disciplinary insights or perspectives are juxtaposed but not integrated. Multidisciplinary initiatives can be valuable in clarifying differences in insights or perspectives. But the author of this manifesto would urge us to carefully distinguish multidisciplinarity from interdisciplinarity, and would urge scholars to pursue integration.