A Transdisciplinary Economy for Individual and Collective Well-Being: Starting a Scientific Journey in Economics and Management Science
摘要
While defining a unifying concept of well-being has always been a challenging endeavor, it has nevertheless been investigated in many science fields throughout history. The pursuit of well-being in economics and management science has mostly been based on theories and measurement scales that focus on abstraction and aggregation and have thus been able to properly depict neither the complexity of human beings nor that of the world surrounding them. Yet, today’s social and ecological challenges that are closely tied to the topic of sustainability call for improvement in science in order to offer better solutions. In this chapter, we explore the introduction of transdisciplinarity in economics and management science as a suitable approach in this regard. As the very last article of this book, it draws on the inputs of the 27 contributors from different academic and practical fields and attempts to sketch cornerstones for a transdisciplinary context-specific research program in the future that puts well-being at its heart. We discuss what a suitable research philosophy might look like, play with initial ideas about a research framework, and introduce potential research questions.