Futures studies

About: Futures studies is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2996 publications have been published within this topic receiving 49505 citations. The topic is also known as: futurology & futurism.

Aiming for a sustainable future: conceptualizing public open foresight

Abstract: Sustainability as a global challenge concerns actors across organizational and national boundaries. Meeting the complexity of the sustainability challenge requires collaboration between various stakeholders and strategies with long-term focus. Various authors propose foresight activities to enhance decisions related to strategies and innovations for a more sustainable future. We follow this call and suggest a new direction to be taken in public management concerning sustainability and investigate ‘public open foresight’: an inter-organizational discussion and analysis process of public sector organizations regarding future developments. This article applies open foresight to the public realm by presenting a process framework and outlining propositions for further research.

Values, objectivity, and the good society

Abstract: Futures studies is a new field of inquiry involving systematic and explicit thinking about alternative futures. Wendell Bell's two-volume work Foundations of Futures Studies is widely acknowledged as the fundamental work on the subject. In Volume 2, Bell goes beyond possible and probable futures to the study of preferable futures. He shows that concern with ethics, morality, and human values follows directly from the futurist purposes of discovering or inventing, examining, and proposing desirable futures. He examines moral judgments as an inescapable aspect of all decision-making and conscious action, even in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Now available in paperback with a new preface from the author, Volume 2 of Foundations of Futures Studies moves beyond cultural relativism to critical evaluation. Bell compares depictions of the good society by utopian writers, describes objective methods of moral judgment, assesses religion and law as sources of what is morally right, documents the existence of universal human values, and shows that if human beings are to thrive in the global society of the future, some human values must be changed.