The Wicked Problem Of Climate Change And Interdisciplinary Research: Tracking Management Scholarship’s Contribution

Abstract

Climate change represents a “wicked problem par excellence”. Since it pervades numerous natural systems and social communities, an understanding of climate change requires interdisciplinary research, broadly defined as research crossing disciplinary boundaries. In this investigation we map the evolution of interdisciplinarity in climate change research using bibliometric data and methods. We pay special attention to the contribution of the social sciences in general, and the discipline of management in particular. Our findings suggest that (1) while interdisciplinarity has grown somewhat over 37 years of climate change research (1980-2017), the contribution from the social sciences remains v..