Prospects for transdisciplinarity

The word “prospects” connotes the probability of success. The authors in this special issue of FUTURES have provided a broad view of the existing knowledge base, organizational structures, and strategies for implementing transdisciplinarity. At the same time, they were mindful of the remaining impediments. This closing reflection builds on their insights in two parts: (1) by defining the key imperatives of transdisciplinarity and (2) by reflecting on the requirements for a genuinely human science and transdisciplinary capacity.     

The practice turn in organization research: Towards a disciplined transdisciplinarity

This paper comments on Fauré and Rouleau (2011) and draws out implications for practice-theoretic research in organizations more generally. In particular, it points to the potential for the transdisciplinary application of practice theory, allowing issues, insights and methods to be transferred between all the organization disciplines, not just accounting and strategy. Responding to some recent criticisms of practice-theoretic research in organizations, the paper argues that transdisciplinarity will be fostered by a disciplined approach to practice theory, based on a commitment to social practices, and respect for agency, materiality, discourse, the limits of social scientific knowledge and a refusal of reductionism.     

Perceived incentives to transdisciplinarity in a Japanese university research center

As a method of investigating complex socially relevant phenomena, transdisciplinary research (TDR) is gaining increasing centrality as a model of knowledge production. However, it is being discouraged by a scientific reward system based on disciplinary logic. The disincentive is even stronger for junior scholars who should be developing the capabilities necessary for achieving long-term scientific excellence.Building on theories of the coordination of scientific communities and using the case of a research center of Kyoto University investigating the boundary between cell and material sciences, we aim to disentangle the interplay between institutional incentives and intrinsic motivation in the prioritization of TDR over monodisciplinary research.We find that, despite strong interest in TDR among scientists and the center's mission to promote this orientation, only a minority of scientists prioritize this approach. Choice of research strategy is associated with its perceived benefits for idea generation, publication opportunities, intellectual effort required, the costs of team coordination, and satisfaction with organizational resources. Furthermore, the propensity to prioritize TDR drops among scientists beginning their careers.Therefore, we recommend the development of evaluation schemes grounded in activity-based measures and the granting of permanent positions to scientists pursuing TDR.     

Advances in transdisciplinarity: Epistemologies,methodologies and processes

There has been a proliferation of contributions about transdisciplinarity during the last decade. Today transdisciplinarity is known and referenced in the natural and social sciences, and the humanities, as well as numerous professions. Hence it is appropriate to take stock of what has been achieved in both education and research during the last 10 years. These achievements include development of conceptual and analytical frameworks, a diversification of methods and approaches in precise localities, specific cases showing the creative, reflexive and transformative capacity of transdisciplinary inquiry, and concerns about the asymmetries of power and control of participants during processes of the co-production of knowledge. However, conceptual and institutional barriers for transdisciplinary inquiry are still common whereas incentives remain rare. This is not only due to the scepticism of decision makers in academic institutions, in conventional funding agencies and in policy decision making but also to the formal education and personal motives of scientific researchers in academic institutions.     

Consulting versus participatory transdisciplinarity: A refined classification of transdisciplinary research

This paper analyses transdisciplinarity and discusses the conceptual changes it has undergone during the past decade. Transdisciplinarity is currently perceived as an extended knowledge production including a variety of actors and with an open perception of the relevance of different forms of scientific and lay knowledge. By stressing scope of collaboration, a clearer distinction can be established between interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity than was possible with the former focus on degree of integration. However, integration is still an essential feature of transdisciplinarity and in emphasising the need to acknowledge the different roles actors can play in knowledge production a distinction can be identified between two different forms of transdisciplinarity; consulting versus participatory transdisciplinarity. This distinction draws upon the qualitative difference between research conducted including all kinds of actors on equal terms in the knowledge production process (participatory transdisciplinarity) or having actors from outside academia responding and reacting to the research conducted (consulting transdisciplinarity). Both forms fulfil the basic requirements of transdisciplinarity but differ regarding the challenges involved, and thus a distinction needs to be made between them when discussing, commissioning or evaluating research.     

建设创新型银行之管见

总行党委提出要把工商银行打造成为国际一流的现代商业银行，建设创新型银行。目前，我行正处在深化改革、优化结构、规范治理的关键时期，如何建设创新型银行，更好地为广大客户服务，谈点粗浅的认识。     

Living on the border: knowledge, risk and transdisciplinarity

Transdisciplinarity has been hailed as a potentially effective means of addressing increasingly complex societal problems, the nature of which cut across the boundaries between orthodox disciplinary knowledges. In this paper we are concerned with an approach to achieving a form of transdisciplinarity which entails making linkages between scholarship and practice, as well as across disciplinary boundaries. Such ‘border-work’, we suggest, provides important options for engaging with a range of practical economic and quality of life related problems. Moreover, it offers new and challenging possibilities for scholarly work and understanding. We discuss some practical and conceptual difficulties associated with discipline-based investigations, and illustrate these difficulties by focusing on risk-related phenomena. Here we argue that much of what is interesting and important about the character of risk tends to be lost by the generalising, decontextualising and reductionist tendencies of discipline-based research. Finally we consider two existing approaches to establishing a practice for border-work. These have both attempted to combine an appreciation of the active character of practical reasoning by human agents with the constraining and affording nature of social and material contexts.     

Reprint of “Discourses of transdisciplinarity: Looking back to the future”

The current ascendancy of transdisciplinarity (TD) is marked by an exponential growth of publications, a widening array of contexts, and increased interest across academic, public and private sectors. This investigation traces historical trends, rhetorical claims, and social formations that have shaped three major discourses of TD: transcendence, problem solving, and transgression. In doing so, it also takes account of developments that have emerged or gained traction since the early 21st century when a 2004 issue of Futures on the same topic was being written.The epistemological problem at the heart of the discourse of transcendence is the idea of unity, traced in the West to ancient Greece. The emergence of transdisciplinarity was not a complete departure from this historical quest, but it signalled the need for new syntheses at a time of growing fragmentation of knowledge and culture. New synthetic frameworks emerged, including general systems, post/structuralism, feminist theory, and sustainability. New organizations also formed to advance conceptual frameworks aimed at transcending the narrowness of disciplinary worldviews and interdisciplinary combinations of approaches that did not supplant the status quo of academic structure and classification.The discourse of problem solving is not new. It was fundamental to conceptions of interdisciplinarity in the first half of the 20th century. Heightened pressure to solve problems of society, though, fostered growing alignment of TD with solving complex problems as well as trans-sector participation of stakeholders in society and team-based science. The discourse of transgression was forged in critique of the existing system of knowledge and education. TD became aligned with imperatives of cultural critique, socio-political movements, and conceptions of post-normal science and wicked problems that break free of reductionist and mechanistic approaches. It also became a recognized premise in interdisciplinary fields, including cultural studies, women's and gender studies, urban studies, and environmental studies. And, calls for TD arrived at a moment of wider crisis in the privileging of dominant forms of knowledge, human rights accountability, and democratic participation.Even with distinct patterns of definition, though, discourses are not air-tight categories. Transcendence was initially an epistemological project, but the claim of transcendence overlaps increasingly with problem solving. The imperatives of transgression also cut across the discourses of transcendence and problem solving. Broadly speaking, though, emphasis is shifting from traditional epistemology to problem solving, from the pre-given to the emergent, and from universality to hybridity and contextuality.     

Collaborative planning for retrofitting suburbs: transdisciplinarity and intersubjectivity in action

This paper presents the transdisciplinary research program undertaken by the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Suburbs or GIRBa (Groupe interdisciplinaire de recherche sur les banlieues, in French), as well as the collaborative planning process put forward to orient the future of Quebec City’s first ring suburbs. The first section presents the research problem and its context. The next section discusses the concepts of transdisciplinary and intersubjectivity at the very basis of the group’s work and orientations. The last section describes the content of the ongoing transdisciplinary research and action program and reports on the in-progress collaborative planning process.     

金融信息化呼唤复合型人才

2003年底，新中国历史上的第一次全国人才工作会议提出“把实施人才强国战略作为党和国家一项重大而紧迫的任务抓紧抓好”：随着人才工作被提到了前所未有的高度，如何确定金融信息化领域的人才战略也成为各大金融机构领导们越来越重视的问题。     

Beyond West and East: Co-evolution and the calling of a new enlightenment and non-duality

Evolution was once a dividing mark between the “developed us” and the “underdeveloped or primitive them” but there has been certain foundational transformations in the theory and normative quest of evolution which challenge us to overcome this. Developments in both the discourse and practice of socio-cultural evolution as well as biological and cosmic evolution point to the need for cultivating a new enlightenment and non-duality going beyond the dualism of environment and the organism, ontogenesis and socio-genesis and much more fundamentally, “us” and “them.” The present essay discusses the contours of a new evolutionary theory under the rubric of “co-evolution.” It builds upon the seminal works of both Bergson and Sri Aurobindo and discusses the outline of a new enlightenment and non-duality. It also discusses the evolutionary challenge before self and society in terms of realizing a new enlightenment which just does not valorize rationality and dualism but strives for realization of non-duality in manifold relations of being and becoming in self and society.     

A pragmatist approach to transdisciplinarity in sustainability research: From complex systems theory to reflexive science

The importance of questioning the values, background assumptions, and normative orientations shaping sustainability research has been increasingly acknowledged, particularly in the context of transdisciplinary research, which aims to integrate knowledge from various scientific and societal bodies of knowledge. Nonetheless, the concept of reflexivity underlying transdisciplinary research is not sufficiently clarified and, as a result, is hardly able to support the development of social learning and social experimentation processes needed to support sustainability transitions. In particular, the concept of reflexivity is often restricted to building social legitimacy for the results of a new kind of ‘complex systems science’, with little consideration of the role of non-scientific expertise and social innovators in the design of the research practice itself.The key hypothesis of the paper is that transdisciplinary research would benefit from adopting a pragmatist approach to reflexivity. Such an approach relates reflexivity to collective processes of problem framing and problem solving through joint experimentation and social learning that directly involve the scientific and extra-scientific expertise. To test this hypothesis, the paper proposes a framework for analysing the different types of reflexive processes that play role in transdisciplinary research. The main conclusion of the analysis is the need to combine conventional consensus-oriented deliberative approaches to reflexivity with more open-ended, action-oriented transformative approaches.     

Calling circles: network competition with nonuniform calling patterns

We introduce a flexible model of telecommunications network competition with nonuniform calling patterns, accounting for the fact that customers tend to make most calls to a small set of similar people. Equilibrium call prices are distorted away from marginal cost, and competitive intensity is affected by the concentration of calling patterns. Contrary to previous predictions, jointly profit‐maximizing access charges are set above termination cost in order to dampen competition if calling patterns are sufficiently concentrated. We discuss implications for regulating access charges as well as on‐ and off‐net price discrimination.     

保险企业IT规划呼唤科学化的项目管理

作为金融业的重要组成部分，保险业对国民经济的发展及社会的稳定起着举足轻重的作用。而保险业本身是经营风险的特殊行业，因此建立健全内控机制、防范和化解金融风险、开展集约化经营和管理是现代保险企业的必由之路。     

中国文化创意产业的投资价值

2012年岁末,清科研究中心发布中国国内首份文化创意产业投资价值报告,该报告全面阐述了中国文化创意产业行业发展现状,中国文化创意产业投资机会分析,以及中国VC/PE关注的文化产业细分行业投资方向。在2012中国文化金融创新峰会上,清科集团创始人、董事长兼CEO倪正东对该报告作出如下要点解读     

Local creative culture and audit fees

This paper examines the association between local creative culture and audit fees. Using a large, unbalanced panel data of listed US firms between 2004 and 2018, we find evidence that firms headquartered in US counties with high creative culture tend to pay higher audit fees than firms headquartered in counties with low creative culture. We also find that such firms tend to have longer audit report lag and are subject to more shareholder litigation. Cross-sectional tests show that real earnings management, managerial risk-taking propensity, and external corporate governance environment moderate the positive association between creative culture and audit fees. The positive association between local creative culture and audit fees remains robust to controlling for endogeneity concerns. Our study contributes to the emerging literature on local creative culture by providing evidence that local creative culture encourages managers and employees to undertake risky initiatives, thereby increasing audit risks.     

Critical thinking about creative accounting in the face of a recent scandal in the Turkish banking sector

In the last two decades, serious accounting scandals occurred in large companies (e.g. WorldCom and Enron) and in the banking sector (e.g. BCCI, Barings, Allied Irish Bank and Baninter). Then the problem of creative accounting with its legal and illegal aspects has come into agendas of business firms and governments. In this paper, a certain type of creative accounting practices (i.e. fraud) has been examined in the light of a Turkish case (i.e. the Imarbank Scandal). It has been found that deficiencies in the legal frameworks for banking and accounting, inadequacies in the autonomy of governmental regulation and supervision bodies, practical difficulties in enforcing legal and ethical rules due to the slow functioning of the judicial system are significant reasons for creative accounting practices in addition to the personal greed of both owners&top management of Imarbank and its customers. However, the intention and capability of political power in combating such kind of corruption are also crucial.     

Public entrants,public equity finance and creative destruction

We explore the importance of new public firms and public equity finance for R&D and creative destruction in the US high-tech sector. Over 1900 new public firms enter high-tech manufacturing between 1970 and 2004; they are increasingly R&D intensive and rely extensively on public equity finance in the 1980s and 1990s. We estimate dynamic R&D models and find a strong link between public equity finance and R&D for new entrants, but not established entrants or incumbents. Further, recent cohorts of public entrants have a substantial economic impact: by 2000, recent public entrants account for almost half of high-tech sales and more than half of R&D. Variation in the availability of public equity finance has a marked impact on entrant R&D and the rate at which entrants take market share from incumbents. Our findings identify a key channel through which public equity markets facilitate the process of creative destruction.