Transdisciplinarity as epistemology, ontology or principles of practical judgement

Abstract

Workplaces are social systems and confound simple analysis. They are places where things change and things turn messy. There are many disciplinary approaches (e.g. anthropological, psychological and sociological) that can be applied in professional conduits (e.g. human resource management, marketing and operational management), but attempts to understand what, and why, things happen within organizations prove difficult to determine from such disciplined, epistemological perspectives. It is suggested in this chapter that a transdisciplinary approach, perhaps indeed implicit in successful professional practices that actually deal with emergent problems, could be helpful particularly in the form of the case study and needs more clarification in the professional studies literature. This is attempted by investigating how abductive reasoning might contribute to solving the ambiguity of transdisciplinarity open system problems.