Transdisciplinarity
The word ‘ psychosocial’ marks a concern with the interface between the psychological and sociological. Interest in the relation between societal processes and subjective experience has blossomed in recent years, no doubt partly in response to the increasingly explicit relevance of the psychological dimension within contemporary societies and within specific fields such as health, welfare, law, politics, the media and so on. Such interest is also animated by the recognition on the part of many social scientists that the psychological dimension (often discussed in terms such as ‘subjectivity’ , ‘affect’, ‘experience’ and ‘desire’) suffers profound distortion when studied in abstraction from its social, cultural and historical context. Such abstraction is arguably endemic in the circumstances of the received disciplinary organization of research into departments of psychology, sociology, history, politics and so forth, and this is also a charge regularly levelled against mainstream social psychology. Those who have responded to these structural and intellectual challenges have often adopted a critical and challenging orientation to existing disciplines and an eagerness to develop modes of thought and practice that can move across and between disciplinary boundaries and that can ‘think’ so called psychic and social dimensions ‘together’.
Three notable responses have gathered force in the last decade or so. These include:
- (a)the striking rise—particularly in the health sphere—of technical interventions, and scientific approaches/methodologies self-identifying as psychosocial or even bio-psychosocial (Keene 2001; Stephens 2008; Gonzalez et al. 2014);
- (b)the continued development of critical psychology, particularly amongst theoretically informed social psychologists (Cromby et al. 2013; Slaney et al. 2015; Parker 2015); and
- (c)the emergence of the field of research and teaching known as psychosocial studies (Frosh 2015; Hollway 2015; Woodward 2015; Adams 2016).
Each of these developments has been amply discussed elsewhere, and so I will not repeat those discussions here. Also, each of these responses makes an important contribution that should be continued. The purpose of this book, however, is different. The main business of the book will be to contribute to the development of a transdisciplinary way of thinking about, and working on, psychosocial phenomena as processes. This is because, in my view, the existing responses have not gone far enough in moving across and beyond existing disciplinary modes of practice. In these days of widespread university restructuring, however, transdisciplinarity risks becoming a mere slogan and this must be avoided.
The concept of transdisciplinarity is actually part of a theoretical and practical effort to move beyond the limitations of disciplines. For this reason it is typically contrasted with disciplinarity (Pohl and Hirsch Hadorn 2007). Disciplines are cultural formations that function as agencies for the production, dissemination and application of specialist knowledge. I have defined transdisciplinarity as ‘a concept that has been used in efforts to describe integrative activity, reflection and practice that addresses, crosses and goes through and beyond the limits of established disciplinary borders, in order to address complex problems that escape conventional definition and intervention’ (Stenner 2014, p. 1989). The concept emerged in the 1970s as part of the global ambitions of general structuralism and general systems theory. The term transdisciplinarity was first used by Piaget (1972) as part of structuralism, and by Jantsch (1972) as part of systems theory.
It seems to me that the word system says in Greek pretty much what the word structure says in Latin: both say something like a patterned arrangement of elements. Both movements stressed the centrality of relations (as opposed to distinct entities), not just to the specific systems dealt with by specific disciplines, but generally to the universe as such conceived qua structured system of structured systems. Hence what made general structuralism and general systems theory ‘transdisciplinary’ was this ontological recognition given to relationality (it is the patterned arrangement of elements that is decisive). Structuralism and systems theory fell out of favour from the 1980s onwards as post-structural arguments gathered force to challenge their static tendencies and to rethink patterned arrangements as temporal flows in the flux of constant change. This development can now be understood as an ontological recognition given, not just to relationality, but to process. Process here does not just mean regular change through time. Process is not to be understood as the antithesis of content, for instance, but as the emergence of novelty: the transformation of patterned arrangements and, we might say, the emergence of new patterned arrangements. Not just change by adding new elements to an existing pattern , but a change of pattern or ‘pattern shift’ (Greco and Stenner 2017). Now , the growing consensus (amongst those few who do not simply ignore theory) is of some form of relational process ontology (Brown and Stenner 2009). This book develops and illustrates this relational process ontology of the psychosocial, drawing inspiration from a range of process thinkers including Bergson , Whitehead , Mead , Harrison , Langer , Schutz and Deleuze .
In the early 1990s, interest in transdisciplinarity was re-ignited along ‘relational process’ lines in a broadly post-structuralist form by Funtowicz and Ravetz (1993), Mittelstrass (1993), Curt (1994) and Gibbons et al. (1994) and since then it has been fruitfully developed by a range of thinkers, but notably Klein et al. (2001), Moran (2002), Nicolescu (2002), Barry et al. (2008), Motzkau (2009) and Stenner (2015). Between the hypothetical extremes of disciplinarity (with its well organized and recognized ‘patterned arrangement’) and transdisciplinarity (with its patterned arrangement in process of liminal transformation), further distinctions are typically made between multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity (cf. Nicolescu 2002). Following this tradition , Stenner and Taylor (2008) define multidisciplinarity as approaching a problem in a coordinated fashion from various discipline-based vantage points, reserving the term interdisciplinarity for collaborations involving the transfer of concepts and/or methods from one discipline to another. An example of multidisciplinarity would be a team of experts who divide their labour into the sociological, psychological and biological aspects of drug addiction. An example of interdisciplinarity (which involves changes induced by transactions at the borders between disciplines) would be the budding of cognitive neuroscience when new medical brain-imaging methods were incorporated into psychology from medicine (Stenner 2014, p. 1998).
Paradoxically enough, there is now enough literature on transdisciplinarity for a new disciplinary field of transdisciplinarity studies. This book, however, is not a discussion about what transdisciplinarity is, but an effort to show what it does: to show transdisciplinary thought in process, as it were. Having provided this essential background, I will therefore keep discussion of transdisciplinarity to a bare minimum. It is worth observing, however, that the three responses with which this chapter began are, for the most part, not transdisciplinary in the sense I have articulated. The first (and in terms of outputs, the largest) of the three responses to the ‘psycho/social’ division noted above operates in a multidisciplinary manner. For the most part, this huge and growing body of research remains within the sphere of mainstream scientific and social scientific research practice in so far as it aims to deliver facts using scientific methods. We might call it the ‘psychosocial factors and variables approach’ because it tends to continue the practice of seeking causal variables explanatory of health (and other) outcomes, or, when formal experiment is not possible, correlating factors. The psychological and the social are construed as variables that can be operationalized and put to use in more or less standard scientific designs to address well-defined practice and policy relevant questions. The novelty is the effort to bring sociological and psychological variables into play with other predominantly biological variables that are relevant to health and wellbeing (although this approach extends to other fields like welfare, education and justice). This research can yield interesting and also practically relevant findings. It is well-suited to the current evidence-based policy machinery and to the current organization of university research around publicly accountable research outputs with quantifiable impact and demonstrable cash-value. It is less well equipped, however, to grasp the socially constructed aspects of its variables, the subjective dimensions of the experiences involved or the political dimensions of power /knowledge that are becoming so obvious today. Each of these pressing issues is a blind spot for this research tradition, which is unable to reflexively observe the ways in which its own practice is part of the empirical field it studies.1 The approach I pursue in this book is not psychosocial in this multidisciplinary sense.
The second development is the conso...