The case for cross-disciplinary approaches in international development

As "a system of rules" for the construction of knowledge, and training in these rules, "discipline" is productive. But discipline is also constraining and may be repressive, so that good scholarship often involves a tension between "discipline" and "anti-discipline." Against the common oppositions made between "Economics = Rigoros" and "Social sciences = Soft" the paper argues that qualitative research can be rigoros and sophisticated mathematical modelling actually very "soft," because of the simplistic or simply false assumptions on which it rests. Mainstream economics gains from being confronted with historical and sociological reality. (D 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.