On the basis of career stories such as Torsten Hägerstrand's and careful scrutiny of published works by over a hundred scholars from various disciplines, a method was developed to identify potential common denominators among various scholarly specialists. The framework provides an opportunity to discern connections among knowledge interests, and the reverberations of changes in any one of these in the overall orchestration of scholarly effort. Most creative scholars avail themselves of more than one root metaphor in the course of a career. Contextualist approaches focus on particular career events which were obviously significant for the author, and then proceed to unravel the strands and textures of the context within which this event took place, explaining, as comprehensively as possible, the import of each event for the author's career. The trilogy of themes, meaning-metaphor-milieu, offers not only avenues for a contextual understanding of disciplinary ideas and practices and a heuristic framework for diverse empirical investigations.