Showing papers in "Futures in 1996"

TL;DR: Backcasting studies typically aim at providing policy makers and an interested general public with images of the future as a background for opinion forming and decisions as discussed by the authors. And if one is inclined to see teleology as a specific form of understanding, beside causality, then backcasting becomes interesting.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue for the development of a poststructuralist political ecology while considering the discourses and practices through which nature is historically produced and known, and examine the complex cultural and discursive articulations between natural and social systems established by capital and technology, particularly through discourses of sustainable development and biodiversity conservation.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that world capitalism is moving into a phase of development marked by an intensified regionalization of production overlaid by a global division of labour, and that a significant reallocation of economic coordination and steering functions is occurring, away from the sovereign state, up to the international and down to the regional levels.

TL;DR: The future of telecommuting depends on whether employers provide the opportunity to telecommute and whether workers take advantage of this opportunity; government policies can encourage both as mentioned in this paper, but there is little reliable data on trends.

TL;DR: The UK Technology Foresight Programme (UKFTP) as discussed by the authors is one of the most comprehensive national technology foresight programs in the UK, which has been running for over 20 years.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate the extent to which firms have sought to change the basis of their strategic decision making, from a shareholder value paradigm to one reflecting an environmental focus.

TL;DR: Futures study is not yet well established at the social level as discussed by the authors, and given the unstable conditions of the late 20th century, and the challenging outlook of the early 21st, this is a serious oversight.

TL;DR: This paper examined how 7-18-year-olds see the future at personal, local and global scales, and the responses of different age groups were examined as well as variations based on gender.

TL;DR: The authors argue that the apparent simplicity of the past was often more a function of the constraints put on the framing of the issue or problem at hand, both conceptually and in policy making, than it was a reflection of any inherent properties.

TL;DR: The authors focus on how cultures are embedded in diverse ways of knowing and how individuals teach (formal, action research, spiritual) and learn the world (action, science, technique or gnosis) differently.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the relationship between technology adoption and training in manufacturing firms and found that firms using either labour-saving or labour-enhancing technologies are more likely to train.

TL;DR: It is suggested that far from being a monolithic entity driven by ‘Western’ interests, the knowledge base of futures studies is a dynamic process that will evolve over time and become less ‘ Western’ and more truly global.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors recall the crucial role that popular images of the future play in societal development and highlight the value of futures workshops as a procedure for enabling participants to envision the future more clearly.

TL;DR: Learning about various possible futures is often an unsettling five-stage process as mentioned in this paper, where cognitive changes and personal choices for action can involve strong emotions and deep existential questions of meaning and worldview.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe the third phase of a research programme intended to validate the field anomaly relaxation (FAR) approach to the generation of scenarios for sociopolitical problems and to suggest improvements to the approach.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the problems of the meaning of work in a context of change and look forward to a future in which the nature of work as we know it now will have changed beyond recognition.

TL;DR: The authors argue that transformations occurring in the post-Fordist societies incorporate elements of the old system, and in many cases old and new are blurred together, in which a massive debureaucratization of work is occurring, together with the globalization of local economic systems.

TL;DR: In this paper, a critique of the minimal, or fleeting, present and some possibilities for extending what might be meant by the present is explored, and the authors suggest that considerable utility may be derived from a more careful and considered use of particular timeframes, and that questions of sustainability, the rights of future generations and the disciplined study of futures can be resolved without a number of innovations based on long-term thinking.

TL;DR: Futures as discussed by the authors presents life stories of selected futurists on how they became interested in the future, what methods they use to investigate the future and their visions of the future.

TL;DR: One of the central dilemmas of the knowledge economy is that the product knowledge often can be reproduced at essentially no cost, which makes it difficult to enforce private property relationships creating a difficulty for private firms as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a design for future-oriented government, which includes the Court of Generations and the Futures Congress, which diagnose the severity of threats to future generations and decide what actions to take, respectively.

TL;DR: This article came to futures studies in the mid-l 97Os, by which time most pioneering first-generation futurists, the ones who founded the discipline as we know it today, had done their major work.

TL;DR: The use of the new paradigm of complexity for futures research has been discussed in this paper, where the main shortcomings derive from the superficial application of physical concepts to social sciences and the univocal theoretical approach to futures studies.

TL;DR: A wide spectrum of recent futures-oriented, English-language literature on human rights and democracy is surveyed in this paper, with a broad overview of the literature on these two important concerns.

TL;DR: The development of a new framework for the IT industries is outlined, which can encompass a range of industry and market statistics and provide a model capable of generating insights into the relationships between IT products, services, markets and industry subsectors.