Introduction

Social science research into poverty, inequality and wellbeing has usually been conducted on a mono-disciplinary basis. The little cross-disciplinary research there has been has tended to take place within policy-related fields of study such as social policy and development studies, although even here true collaborations are rare. Since the early 1990s I have been involved, as a sociologist, in the theoretical and empirical study of poverty and related issues in Ethiopia and Uganda, and Africa more broadly. During this time I made a number of attempts to work with economists on these issues, recognising the potential synergies which could result from an interaction of the expertises. My failure to achieve a cross-disciplinary relationship with development economists is not unique, and I became interested in the underlying reasons, in particular in understanding the extent to which these are intellectual, rather than institutional, political and historical. This extended into a more general interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration, and, given the power of Sayer's argument for post-disciplinary approaches to ‘concrete’ issues, I was driven to enquire why there has been so little cross-disciplinary collaboration in researching poverty in developing countries: