The Architecture of Collaboration in Transdisciplinary Research Teams

US National Science Foundation

Scientific research, so far, has been driven by star scientists working within epistemic communities. Transdisciplinarity (TD) has recently emerged as yet another vehicle for promoting scientific breakthroughs. TD science is based on the premise that scientific breakthroughs emerge through collaborative processes that integrate knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. However, this process is fraught with creative tensions as scientists from different “thought worlds” contribute in an asynchronous fashion to an ongoing initiative to obtain occasional breakthroughs. How such creative tension is managed can critically impact the outcomes of TD research. Despite the importance of TD science, there is only limited research on the processes that constitute such efforts. Our proposal seeks to develop a new explanatory model of the architecture of TD research in which we examine both its macro-structural and the micro-processual elements that enable translation across these disciplinary boundaries.