• How can different and potentially incommensurable disciplinary ontologies be synthesized into an integrated set of metaphysical commitments? • How can different technical meanings be negotiated to yield a common understanding of the research landscape? • How can normative questions about intellectual and social virtue be answered in the multicultural context of cross-disciplinary research? • ...

Health policy has been termed a ‘chameleon concept’, referring to its ability to take on different forms of disciplinarity as well as different roles and functions. This paper extends Paton’s analysis by exploring the paradox of health policy as a field of academic inquiry—sitting across many of the boundaries of social science but also marginalised by them. It situates contemporary approaches ...