Crossing Borders: Toward a trans-disciplinary scientific identity

For several decades, researchers have addressed the topic of disciplines: how they come into existence, how they are institutionalized, and how they change over time. These discussions have focused on new disciplines and shifting paradigms in the natural and the social sciences, as well as in the humanities. Many of the shifts seem to require increasing reliance on what has been called interdisciplinary research--research carried out in teams whose members are experts in different fields. This article examines how a disciplinary shift was brought about in a single individual. The impetus for the shift is social and organizational, the process is undergone in a bureaucratic context, and the outcome is a kind of scientific identity that has not been explored specifically, that of a transdisciplinary identity in which competencies in the social and the life sciences are interwoven in daily practices.