Thinking Cross-Discipline 3 - Essay Example

Within my topic area, I had to deal with different disciplines like history, business and psychology. Establishing a perfectly balanced connection among the three was what would make my work complete and comprehensive. While discussing the history of bankrupt companies, I cannot ignore the legal definition of bankruptcy and the legal procedures involved. Law, being a highly technical subject area, I decided I would limit my exploration of this aspect of my topic just to the bare minimum necessity, and to some simple definitions.

Thus, I defined bankruptcy and gave some basic general information about its causes and consequences. After this, I had to explore the chronological evolution of bankruptcy in the society that I am studying. Here, the major problem that I encountered was about which examples and instances in history to pick. As I am not a historian or researcher in history, I found this job very challenging. I had to pick up representative examples from history, the correct examples that point to a common tendency or sign that leads a company to bankruptcy (Ekvall and Smiley, 2007, p.83). When the turn of business as a discipline came under the purview of my topic area, the many sub-disciplines of business like economy, management, marketing, public relations needed to be understood to arrive at analytical inferences.

I had to have some general knowledge on matters like debt restructuring and debt advice to understand and analyse company bankruptcy as a business phenomenon. Especially, understanding the technical financial details of bankruptcy was a difficult task for me who had not studied economics as such. The financial history of the debtee is yet another multidisciplinary area where business and history combine (Ekvall and Smiley, 2007, p.83). The management aspects of bankruptcy was also intriguing as there are plenty of examples of companies facing debt crises and recovering from them.

It is necessary in this context that I clearly argue why certain companies go bankrupt in the face of their debts. There are global, national and local factors involved. Also there are sector-wise specific problems and issues that lead a certain company to bankruptcy, which also I needed to have certain idea about. Practical recovery measures like out of court work outs, and sale of assets to avoid bankruptcy declaration are all part of business, management and economics and need to be understood and weighed (Ekvall and Smiley, 2007, p.32-38). Psychology as a distinct discipline also had a role in my topic area and this mainly was related to the company-public interaction.

To make the public regain trust in a bankrupt company indeed involved some level of psychological interventions and within my topic, psychology mostly manifested through public relations. Psychology was also involved in a bankrupt companys recovery through motivating the employees as well. Different management models that incorporated psychology into it had to be acquainted with, by me so that I could move ahead in this side of the analysis. Last but not least, psychology was also a discipline that had a role in winning back further debt from financial suppliers in the form of new capital to rejuvenate the company back into life.

How to integrate all these disciplines and their relevant applications into a cohesive argument has been a challenging task for me. In deciding where to apply which discipline, difficult choices were to be made. For example, whether winning back more debts was an attribute of psychology or business was a matter that involved ambiguity. Similarly, whether getting back to business was a lesson to be learned from history or from practical business and financial orientation was also a confusing probe.

Yet, the interaction of all the three disciplines involved brought in depth and wholeness to my arguments. ReferencesEkvall, L.L. and Smiley, E. (2007) Bankruptcy for businesses: Benefits, pitfalls and alternatives, California: Entrepreneur Press.