Like most future-oriented movements, transdisciplinarity is very conscious of its past. Several transdisciplinary researchers have written histories of the approach that, taken together, give a good idea of the diversity of its origins and present state (Bernstein, 2015; Klein, 2015). But there is also a more elusive historical picture that is often implied or suggested and only occasionally spelled out (cf. Etzkowitz, 2002). This argues that transdisciplinarity was the natural ‘next step’ after interdisciplinarity, which itself was the logical response to monodisciplinarity. The story is a neat narrative in three stages, where each inevitably gave rise to the next generation. It also presents a clear starting point in everything that transdisciplinarity is not: a primordial state of single disciplines, as isolated from each other as they were aloof from the needs of society. This Monodisciplinary Ivory Tower was the building to be razed to the ground.

As an advertisement the narrative has definite merits. But as historical description, we suggest, it is too simplistic. The story is as linear as it is predetermined. And it has a beginning that itself lacks history: a set of disciplines that appear always to have been there. Consequently, the narrative not only caricatures the past, but also fails to help understand the present conditions of transdisciplinary research. If the rise of transdisciplinarity is so straightforward and inevitable, then why are there still debates and struggles about its nature and position? In this chapter, we want to give an alternative historical account, not a complete counternarrative, which space and resources do not permit, but a few general points that arise from historical evidence. We hope these will help shed light on both the past and the current condition of transdisciplinarity.

2.1 Pre-disciplinarity

Let us start where the standard narrative begins: at the stage of single disciplines. Where did they come from and how did they develop? The historian and philosopher Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (2016) asked this very question and concluded that disciplines should not be envisaged as being like trees, growing from their own trunk of pure core concepts and practices and branching out to ever wider applications. Disciplines, she argues, do not have and have never had a core. Rather, there has always been a whole range of approaches to reality (conceptually as well as experimentally), entangled with each other with no clear-cut distinctions. Rather than a tree, Bensaude-Vincent proposes the image of the rhizome to capture this continuum. A picture that also captures the situation is that of the physical map of the Earth—showing different kinds of landscapes blending into one another, sometimes with ruptures, and here and there a boundary, but nothing like the sharp and hard borders between uniformly coloured nation-states that a political world map presents. That map would be like the map of modern disciplines: clearly distinguished, each with their own, identifying colour.

The latter should not imply that disciplines are mere fictions (we will discuss their reality below), just that they are not naturally given, not determined by the complex variety of theories and practices that form the landscape of what scientists actually think and do. Just like nation-states, disciplines are superimposed on these practices, and the ways in which they cut up the field are deeply contingent.

The image of physical and political maps helps to make sense of the rise of disciplines. Just as nothing predetermined that the region of Limburg would end up in the Netherlands (rather than Germany or Belgium), there is little essential or decisive about what kind of scientific activity would ever belong to what discipline. The study of heat, for example, used to be a part of chemistry before it became a pillar of physics, sometime in the nineteenth century. Optics was long a branch of mathematics, as was the design of fortifications. And until the early twentieth century, Dutch students of the natural sciences self-identified not as scientists, but as philosophers (philosoophen). Labels have shifted while others have come and gone. What today is ‘nanoscience’ was ‘colloid chemistry’ a century ago. In fact, what we recognize as modern disciplines, fields like biology and physics, emerged as institutionalized entities only in the second half of the nineteenth century. Before that, there were no university programmes in psychology, history, or physics, while professors taught across the board, on subjects ranging from astronomy to medicine or from pharmacology to zoology. The map showed only a few broad territories, such as medicine and philosophy, with uncertain and flexible boundaries.

2.2 The Rise of the Disciplines

Modern disciplines as we know them are a product of the research university that emerged (at least in Europe, Japan, Canada, and the United States) in the second half of the twentieth century. They were not defined by the terrain of knowledge and research practices, but by the organization and institutionalization of the latter. Modern disciplines clustered contingently chosen sets of theories and research approaches into specialized training programmes resulting in disciplinary degrees. Hence, they created communities of experts, sharing specific vocabularies, outlooks, skills, and values. Disciplines materialized around a whole range of institutions, such as professorial chairs, university departments, specialized journals, research institutes, and disciplinary societies and their conferences (Van Lunteren, 2013). Hence modern disciplines became isolated, self-contained worlds, characterized by shared assumptions, practices, and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion (Turner, 2017). They provided a major locus of belonging that gave their members a strong sense of identity. International conferences especially became occasions where disciplinary affiliation was celebrated, and participants were reminded that their field was ‘The Goddess that We Serve’ (Somsen, 2023).

Leading in the process of discipline formation were the sciences and humanities. These branches of knowledge had been liberated from their subordinate positions in the European universities through the elevation of the former faculty of arts to the level of the higher faculties of law, medicine, and theology. Increasing specialization in these fields, coupled with a new research-oriented pedagogy, resulted in a gradual transformation of the university. By the end of the nineteenth century, modern disciplines had become the main engines of knowledge production, and in the early twentieth century the disciplinary system expanded through the emancipation of the social sciences. New disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, political science, and sociology gained an independent academic status, at least in the rapidly expanding US universities, where the new disciplines were marked by the emergence of new departments (Ross, 1991). Although, strictly speaking, psychology is not a social science, it was increasingly recognized as such, as were economics and, in many cases, history.

Seen as such, transdisciplinarity’s Other, ‘monodisciplinarity’, is not ‘science as it always used to be’ but a relatively recent phenomenon (Stichweh, 1984; Turner, 2000). While universities go back to the Middle Ages and Academies of Science to the seventeenth century, most disciplines that we are familiar with are hardly a century old. During many more preceding centuries, science and scholarship existed, but their cartography was different. They were organized more broadly, much less tightly institutionalized, and in ever-changing ways.

Nor can the Ivory Tower component of transdisciplinarity’s Other be maintained. The Ivory Tower, as Steven Shapin has argued, never existed, except as a rhetorical figure used to mark unwanted academic practices as airy or irrelevant (Shapin, 2012). As for the modern disciplines, their institutionalization in fact relied strongly on their social relevance. In order to sustain themselves they needed society’s support as well as a job market for their graduates. If research in the natural sciences was closely aligned with the needs of emerging chemical and electrical industries, and modern agriculture, the social sciences were expected to address the problems of the emerging industrial-urban societies. In that sense, the isolation of disciplines was always partial at best, and ties to the wider society have never been absent.

2.3 The Origins of Interdisciplinarity

It is against this late nineteenth-century background that we need to understand the rise of interdisciplinary approaches. If interdisciplinarity designates research involving different disciplines that are not just juxtaposed but interact in meaningful ways to solve certain problems, then its emergence may be said to have followed closely upon—or even been concomitant with—that of disciplinarity. In fact, it was precisely the creation of hard disciplinary boundaries that made certain combinations of approaches look like border-crossing—In the blurry, pre-disciplinary landscape, they would hardly have been recognizable as such. Hence, the new disciplines’ new borderlands gave rise to hybrid specialties. These often involved the use of methods and concepts from one field to solve problems in the other. In several cases, members of both disciplines contributed to this process. This phenomenon became highly visible in around 1900 when fields like as astrophysics, physical chemistry, genetics, and biochemistry saw the light of day. Experimental psychology, combining physiology and philosophy, even became a full-fledged discipline of its own. More typically, however, the new fields were incorporated in one of the mother disciplines as new sub-specialties.

This process contributed to the fragmentation of the disciplines, along with a general tendency to specialization. Such fragmentation was a constant source of concern, which was voiced ever louder and more frequently after the turn of the century. While lamented, most scientists also agreed that specialization was an inevitable consequence of scientific progress, that could not be reversed. Moreover, fragmentation hardly affected the strength of the disciplinary system. University departments, societies, conferences, and journals guarded the integrity of the disciplines, as did an academic job market increasingly tuned to disciplinary distinctions (Somsen, 2023). Partial solutions were also sought in general overviews or ‘popular’ journals aimed at a broad scholarly public (Van Lunteren & Hollestelle, 2013). Interdisciplinarity was hence another belated proposal for overcoming the predicament. In most cases, external problems or needs—socio-political, economic, military, or healthcare-related—functioned as a trigger, as they were seen to require solutions that crossed disciplinary boundaries.

The major trigger was World War I. The mobilization of scientists for goal-oriented research, often through cross-disciplinary collaboration, resulted in a new way of thinking about the way science was organized. A well-known example is Fritz Haber’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry, in Berlin. With a 50-fold increased budget, the institute set up interdisciplinary teams focusing on subjects such as gas masks, Ersatz explosives, and so on (Szöllösi-Janze, 2017, pp. 16–17). Similarly, the development of sound-ranging devices for artillery, resulting in human–machine combinations, involved a teaming up of theoretical physicists, acoustics experts, and experimental psychologists. These were not just cases of looking at a problem from different disciplinary angles, as all these approaches needed to be integrated in order to yield a solution. Nor do they present examples of ‘applied science’ as the problems to be solved required all kinds of basic research. And even if such cross-disciplinary collaborations may not have been new per se, the vast scale of such projects during wartime certainly was (Ash, 2019).

Whereas the main concern of disciplinary organizations remained the integrity and preservation of the disciplines, new post-WWI umbrella organizations, such as the US National Research Council (NRC), tended to pay more attention to the relationship between different disciplines and to the borderland areas (Cochrane, 1978, p. 176). Most outspoken in these forums was the astronomer George Ellery Hale, who had been instrumental in the foundation of the NRC during World War I. Even before then he had proposed that the National Academy of Science foster interest in ‘subjects lying between the old-established divisions of science: for example, in physical chemistry, astrophysics, geophysics, etc.’ (Ibid., p.327). He found an ally in the physicist Joseph Ames, who, upon his appointment as Chair of the Academy’s Physical Sciences Division in 1924, established a ‘Committee on Borderland Fields’. These campaigns for what soon was termed interdisciplinary research were continued by NRC President Isaiah Bowman in the 1930s (ibid., pp. 328–331).

A similar trend was visible in the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), which was founded in 1923 to promote empirical and policy-oriented research and to foster closer integration of social sciences, such as political science, economics, anthropology, and sociology (Worcester, 2001, pp. 15–33). It was at one of the early SSRC meetings that the term ‘interdisciplinary’ seems to have emerged. For many years, ‘co-operative research’ continued to be a more widely used label, but by the mid-1930s, the term started to take wing (Frank, 1988, p. 141). Its application was no longer reserved for research, but now also included education. Even more than in the natural sciences, interdisciplinary approaches were seen to be required for the study and solution of many social and economic problems confronting modern societies. To this end, the SSRC created special committees with representatives of several disciplines dedicated to specific issues such as the effects of the Prohibition or the Great Depression. The great challenge of the future was deemed to be the integration of the natural and the social sciences (Worcester, 2001, p. 6).

Interdisciplinarity was grafted onto disciplinarity, and this point is further illustrated by a contemporary counterexample. In interwar Europe, the social sciences were far less institutionalized than in the United States, and, as a consequence, European social scientists tended to have a much broader outlook. In both France and Germany, leading social scientists like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Max Horkheimer did not see themselves as representing a single well-defined field, but moved across sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and political science. The Institut für Socialforschung was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 to promote a critical understanding of the conditions of modern capitalist societies, and, to pursue this goal, mingled classical Marxism with a healthy dose of psychoanalytic theory and existentialist philosophy (Ross, 1991, pp. 224–225). However, none of this work was considered ‘interdisciplinary’, as that term presupposes the existence of well-established disciplines, which European social science lacked.

Interdisciplinarity only occurred when there were two or more disciplines present, yet it happened outside the places where they were most firmly institutionalized: universities and disciplinary societies. Early hotspots of interdisciplinary research were umbrella organizations, like the NRC. But even more effective were new research funding agencies, like the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations in the United States, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Germany, and the Medical Research Council in Britain (Ash, 2019, p. 628). It was the MRC that boosted the new field of biochemistry through the foundation of new research laboratories for nutritional chemistry and bacterial chemistry in Cambridge. The Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft funded comparable extramural research institutes, some of which were clearly intended to meet industrial demands, like the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes for Metals, Fibre, and Coal Research and the KWI for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (Ash, 2019, p. 628). The last of these was co-funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, as was the above-mentioned SSRC. Under the aegis of Warren Weaver, director of Natural Science Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, the division shifted its grants from physics to research in the life sciences, using physical and chemical methods. This deliberately interdisciplinary move resulted in the new field of’molecular biology’, a term famously coined by Weaver in 1938.

2.4 Disciplines and Interdisciplines After World War II

World War II gave an even greater boost to interdisciplinarity than World War I had done. The reasons were the same: this war also produced a host of pressing problems as well as a new string of research institutes outside the universities. To harness scientists to the war effort the US government established the National Defense Research Committee followed by the even larger Office of Scientific Research and Development. Well-known examples of interdisciplinary wartime projects involving teams of physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and engineers are the Manhattan Project, the ‘Rad Lab’ (developing radar), and the work on proximity fuses. A German variety was the rocket programme. The war also created new interdisciplines such as operations research. This involved a mixed team of experts analysing particular wartime operations in order to improve tactical planning and decision making. To this end, all kinds of relevant data were assembled and, because of their secretive nature, made available in an operations room. The first operations research team, led by the British physicist P.M.S. Blackett, included physiologists, mathematicians, mathematical physicists, an experimental physicist, an astrophysicist, an army officer, and a surveyor. One of its tasks was to advise on the optimal use of radar in the defence of London against German bombing raids. Another was to develop a strategy that would prevent German U-boats from cutting off maritime supply-lines (Fortun & Schweber, 1993). Similar practices were also introduced in the United States, where the term ‘operations research’ was coined (Miser, 1980).

Such war-related efforts involving interdisciplinary teams were not limited to the natural sciences, but also involved the social sciences and the humanities. An example is the German Kriegseinsatz der Geisteswissenschaften, meant to provide a scholarly justification for the Nazis’ new order in Europe. In the United States, research by social scientists on the engineering of public opinion, on stress resistance among American soldiers, and on psychological warfare had long-lasting effects on the sciences involved (Pooley, 2023). As in the previous world war, research on man–machine interactions coupled social scientists with engineers (Schweber, 2002). The Research and Analysis branch of the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA), established in 1942, recruited scholars from both the humanities and the social sciences to support intelligence work—among them seven future presidents of the American Historical Association and five of the American Economic Association. As Barry Katz has argued, their wartime experiences turned many of these participants into advocates of interdisciplinarity (Katz, 1989).

Another important new interdisciplinary field was systems analysis, which emerged in the immediate post-war period. It focused on future weapons systems and rational decision making on a quantitative basis amidst many uncertainties. An early adopter was the think tank RAND (short for Research ANd Development), created by Douglas Aircraft Company but later becoming a non-profit, the RAND Corporation. Although systems analysis soon widened its scope to all kinds of policy-related complex problems, most of its research during the Cold War concerned military issues. Most generally, it implied integrating several research techniques into a coherent framework to enable a balance between goals and their costs. This always implied collaboration between various kinds of experts, including economists, engineers, managers, and military officers (Fortun & Schweber, 1993).

One more major interdiscipline was cybernetics, the term coined by Norbert Wiener in 1947 for the new science of control mechanisms based on an exchange of information. It combined Wiener’s experience with communication technologies with his interest in feedback mechanisms. Although likewise rooted in war-related problems (in this case anti-aircraft fire control) cybernetics became an all-encompassing worldview where the boundaries between living systems and machines were fully blurred, both being part of complex ‘servomechanisms’. As Wiener stressed, from a cybernetic perspective there was little difference between a living creature and a machine: human purposeful behaviour was not different from that of self-regulating machines. As a way of understanding and doing it crossed disciplinary boundaries just as much as systems analysis did. Indeed, already in 1946, several meetings were held where natural scientists, mathematicians, and social scientists discussed circular causal systems and feedback mechanisms in the life sciences and social sciences (Galison, 1994).

A final example of a new interdisciplinary field, and likewise a Cold War product, was Area Studies. It emerged in the United States immediately after World War II in response to a widespread concern about the lack of knowledge about new global rivals, such as the Soviet Union and China, and about political events in parts of Asia and Africa in the wake of the processes of decolonization. Already in 1946, the SSRC founded a Committee on World Area Research. New research institutes, such as Columbia’s Russian Institute (1946) and Harvard’s Russian Research Centre, could count on lavish funding by the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations, as well as the US government. They also had close ties with the US intelligence agencies (Cumings, 1997).

And so interdisciplinarity had accompanied the disciplines almost as soon as they started—just as the notion of ‘international’ followed that of nation-states. The more disciplinary science was strengthened, the more crossovers became self-consciously interdisciplinary. But by the 1970s, the heyday of basic disciplinary science came to an end. Trust in the linear model, which saw innovation as a straight development from basic research to applied research to development, was starting to dwindle. Interdisciplinarity now appeared as an escape. The National Science Foundation, whose mission had been to support basic research, established a programme for applied science and called it Interdisciplinary Research Relevant to Problems of Our Society (Belanger, 1998).

Interdisciplinarity now also started to enter university education. Programmes such as Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, Area Studies, and Science and Technology Studies combined multiple approaches from the social sciences and humanities towards a particular problem area. These were followed in the natural sciences by programmes in, for example, environmental science, medical biology, bioinformatics, and—perhaps most recently—circular engineering. Today, there are even wider combinations, such as medical humanities and cultural heritage management. Still, none of these developments has meant the end of disciplines. Student numbers have dropped in some programmes, but it seems unlikely that chemistry, sociology, or history will disappear. In a sense, the rise of interdisciplinary research and teaching has as much corroded the disciplines as it has propped them up. Interdisciplinarity needs to draw on disciplinary approaches, or it ceases to be.

2.5 Transdisciplinarity and the Unity of Science

Transdisciplinarity, in many ways a product of the post-Cold War era, developed as seamlessly from interdisciplinarity as the latter did from disciplinarity. Thus, advocates of most schools of transdisciplinarity echoed the familiar arguments for interdisciplinarity: above all, the inability of discipline-oriented science to deal with complex social challenges. Moreover, in historical overviews the emergence of transdisciplinarity is usually dated to the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Research and Education held at Nice in 1970 (Bernstein, 2015; Klein, 2015). This conference was organized by the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation which had just been established by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with the help of a grant from the Ford Foundation. It was the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget who allegedly first used the word ‘transdisciplinarity’ in his talk on ‘The Epistemology of Interdisciplinary Relationships’. His largely philosophical discourse addressed ways to integrate various disciplinary approaches in non-reductionist, non-hierarchical structuralist manner. At the end of his presentation, he expressed the hope of reaching a higher synthesis expressing the unity of science: ‘This would be “transdisciplinarity”, which would not only cover interactions or reciprocities between specialized research projects but would place these relationships within a total system without any firm boundaries between disciplines’ (Piaget, 1972, p. 138).

The striving for epistemological unification in science had a long heritage, going back to late nineteenth-century philosopher-scientists like Ernst Mach and Karl Pearson. After World War I the unity of science became an overriding theme among the logical empiricists, resulting in a series of international conferences on the unity of science and the foundation by Otto Neurath of the Institute for the Unity of Science in The Hague (Cat, 2021; Kamminga & Somsen, 2016). Neurath and his Vienna companions coupled their philosophical programme explicitly to higher social and political goals, i.e. ‘endeavors toward a new organization of economic and social relations, toward the unification of mankind, toward a reform of school and education’ (Carnap, Hahn & Neurath (1928) cited in Uebel, 2020, p. 37).

After the war this tradition was continued in the United States, especially at Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Philipp Franck, also formerly a Vienna Circle member, founded another Institute for the Unity of Science. The new view of unity that emerged here was closely connected to the US-post-war perception of the cross-connections between disciplines and the rapid rise of interdisciplines like cybernetics and operations research (Galison, 1998).

In the 1960s, the Hungarian-British polymath Michael Polanyi, likewise a scientist-philosopher, teamed up with US colleagues to organize a Study Group on the Unity of Knowledge. Casting his net wider than his US predecessors, Polanyi not only sought to integrate different disciplinary approaches in a higher non-reductionist synthesis, but also aimed to include other forms of knowing such as art and religion—hence unity of knowledge, rather than science. In contrast to the logical empiricists’ creed that a scientific worldview would help to solve humanity’s problems, Polanyi considered the rampant scientism and positivism of his time to be responsible for the recent crises. The Study Group organized several international interdisciplinary conferences with financial support from the Ford Foundation. Leading scientists and scholars and, occasionally, artists attended these meetings to discuss a wide variety of problems and find common ground. One of the gatherings discussed the psychological theory of Piaget, whose anti-reductionist ideas about the relationship between the sciences went back to 1918, and who also participated (Breytspraak & Mullins, 2020).

The point of this little exposé is to show that neither the 1970 conference, nor the ideas presented there, were unprecedented. They were part of a long-standing debate that flared up again in the late 1960s. Indeed, even Polanyi’s call for a higher synthesis that would incorporate non-academic, more spiritual kinds of knowledge, was hardly new. Such calls had been rampant in the early twentieth century, and even more so in the interwar period, and they generally overshadowed the more scientistic approaches of the logical empiricists (Baneke, 2008).

Piaget’s linking of the term ‘transdisciplinarity’ to the long-standing concerns about the fragmentation of science and the resulting quest for a shared conceptual framework has been consolidated by several later advocates of transdisciplinarity, such as the US philosopher Kockelmans (1979), and more recently the Romanian particle physicist Basarab Nicolescu. The latter managed to institutionalize his views on transdisciplinarity in multiple ways. In 1987, he founded the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research and Studies in Paris. He was also the co-founder, with the Swiss philosopher and art historian René Berger, of the Study Group on Transdisciplinarity at UNESCO (1992), as well as being the main author of the Charter on Transdisciplinarity (1994) that resulted from the First World Congress on Transdisciplinarity held in Portugal in 1994. His co-authors were the French philosopher Edgar Morin and the Portuguese artist Lima de Freitas. Nicolescu also helped organize the 1997 Locarno International Congress of Transdisciplinarity as well as the 2005 Second World Congress of Transdisciplinarity in Brazil (Bernstein, 2015; McGregor, 2015).

The tenor of Nicolescu’s writings was above all deeply humanistic, echoing several of Polanyi’s concerns. Indeed, what was beyond the disciplines was, above all, the Human Subject. An improved methodology should include the subject, i.e. experiences, meanings, values, and emotions. Tellingly, the 1994 Charter related the need for a ‘synthesis ‘across, between and beyond’ disciplines’ to ‘the complexity of our world and the present challenge of the spiritual and material self-destruction of the human species’, ‘a techno-science that obeys only the terrible logic of efficacy of efficacy's sake’, and ‘the present rupture between increasingly quantitative knowledge and increasingly impoverished inner identity’ (De Freitas et al., 1994).

2.6 Transdisciplinarity and Mode 2 Knowledge Production

Another, more practical, research-oriented school of self-proclaimed transdisciplinarians likewise emerged in a smooth way from interdisciplinary foundations. Its main aim was to redirect scientific and technological research to the solution of the increasingly complex real-world problems confronting humanity, using different perspectives and methodologies. These may, but need not, derive from existing disciplines. Rather than striving for an overarching method based on an underlying metaphysics, as in the Nicolescu school, here the aim was to generate conceptualizations and methods in the context of application. As we have seen, many twentieth-century advocates of interdisciplinarity had shared this application-oriented outlook. However, several characteristics were added to the primacy of problem-oriented research.

An important source of inspiration for this school of transdisciplinarity was the publication of The New Production of Knowledge by the writers’ collective Michael Gibbons, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott, and Martin Trow (Gibbons et al., 1994). In contrast to the scientist-philosophers whom we encountered in the previous, more philosophical school, these authors were mostly rooted in the social sciences. In their book, they highlighted the supposedly new trend of ‘Mode 2 knowledge production’, which they contrasted with a long-standing traditional approach, named ‘Mode 1’. The book was both a description of, and a plea for, this new approach.

Whereas Mode 1 was characterized by the focus on problems shaped by the interests of disciplinary communities, i.e. basic science, Mode 2 was seen to be application-oriented, transdisciplinary, socially distributed, and reflexive. Here transdisciplinarity referred to the transient networks of researchers with differing backgrounds and the methodological opportunism that transcended disciplinary boundaries, the social distribution to non-local collaborations, and the possible involvement of non-academics, such as representatives from industry, government, or non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and adopting reflexivity to replace the objective ‘view from nowhere’ by multiple situated views. At the organizational level, this latter aspect amounted to a shift from a ‘culture of autonomy’ to a ‘culture of accountability’ (Gibbons et al., 1994; Nowotny et al., 2001).

These ideas were in line with the research practices of Swiss and German researchers on environmental problems in the 1990s and, partly for that reason, they were central to the 2000 International Congress in Zurich on Transdisciplinarity: joint problem-solving among science, technology, and society. In the vision that emerged at this conference, reflexivity and, even more so, stakeholder participation, were seen as essential characteristics of transdisciplinarity, rather than Mode 2 add-ons. Ideally, stakeholders and ‘end-users’ should be involved in both the design of the transdisciplinary research projects as well as in their execution. The Congress gave rise to the foundation in 2002 of the Swiss-based Network for Transdisciplinary Research, which has been instrumental in spreading the new view of transdisciplinarity. Meanwhile, this view has been widely adopted by institutes and researchers all over the world (Bernstein, 2015; Klein, 2015; McGregor, 2015).

Although there is common ground between both schools—for instance, a joint concern about the complex problems facing today’s world—there are also clear distinctions. Whereas the Nicolesu school strives to understand the world from a unitary viewpoint, the Zurich school aims to do science in a better and more useful way. As a result, current reviews of the literature on transdisciplinarity tend to distinguish the Nicolescu school from the Zurich or Swiss-German school. However, their approaches—one theoretical, the other more practical—are seen as complementary rather than as being in opposition (McGregor, 2015).

2.7 Conclusion

The development of disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary science cannot, therefore, be seen as a process of three consecutive stages. On the contrary, interdisciplinarity emerged almost in tandem with the disciplines themselves, and transdisciplinarity repeated important orientations and justifications from interdisciplinary initiatives. Besides, the disciplinary matrix onto which the other forms were grafted cannot itself be seen as a preordained starting point. The modern disciplines are recent phenomena and, moreover, themselves contingent clusters of research practices around themes and social demands that presented themselves at particular moments. The actual, physical map of knowledge-making shows a rough and unruly landscape with no absolute borders—even what counts as scientific versus lay, experiential, or amateur knowledge is far from predetermined. What counted as science and disciplines were once projected onto this map, and interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary revisions are rearrangements of such projections.