Pursuing a Systems Approach

Bammer, Gabriele,Disciplining Interdisciplinarity: Integration and Implementation Sciences for Researching Complex Real-World Problems ANU E Press 2013

In chapter 5, Bammer asks: "What knowledge to integrate?" She suggests that we borrow from the systems approach. The first two strategies she reviews involve mapping: the first investigates different ways of seeing a problem; the second is agent-based and identifies measurable patterns and how individuals move between groups (e.g. changing frequency of drug use).

But Bammer worries that the existing literature on systems approaches is not that useful for interdisciplinary studies because that literature does not address issues of synthesis. Moreover, the strengths and weaknesses of different strategies are not clear. As elsewhere, Bammer urges comparative case studies.

The overall approach emphasized by Bammer has been diagrammed by De Santis in Diagrams of the Interdisciplinary Research Process

Styse Strijbos, "Systems thinking," Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (2010), 453-70, also reviews the nature of systems thinking and its important implications for interdisciplinarity.