ABSTRACT
The lack of adequate metatheoretical awareness in discussions of interdisciplinarity results in ambiguity about interdisciplinarity. On the one hand, researchers acknowledge its importance, and on the other hand, they are unclear about how to achieve it. This ambiguity was noted in an ambitious analysis of interdisciplinarity in Sweden, conducted by the Swedish Research Council. In this analysis, the authors reported the existence of competing metatheoretical perspectives on interdisciplinary research, which they called: the pessimistic view; the optimistic view; and the pragmatic view. For such commentators, "grand" or broadly applicable theories, such as those provided by interdisciplinarity, are questionable. For many of these thinkers, "interdisciplinarity results when different disciplines try to colonize each other". This position therefore argues that interdisciplinarity has a repressive, imperialist agenda, namely the intention of one discipline to annex the territory of another. Interdisciplinarity in hard systems thinking and complexity theory also tends to fall into this category of optimistic interdisciplinarity.
