ABSTRACT
There is a widespread view that interdisciplinary research is a good thing. Interdisciplinarity usually means something like the emergence of insight and understanding of a problem domain through the integration or derivation of different concepts, methods, and epistemologies from different disciplines in a novel way. However, it is also widely be-
lieved that “true” interdisciplinarity is very difficult to achieve and more often than not remains an elusive goal. In practice, many self-styled interdisciplinary enterprises actually work at the level of being multidisciplinary (or pluridisciplinary): when a group of researchers from different disciplines cooperate by working together on the same problem toward a common goal but continue to do so using theories, tools, and methods from their own discipline and occasionally using the output from each other’s work. They remain, however, essentially within the boundaries of their own disciplines both in terms of their working practices and with respect to the outcomes of the work.
