Bridging anticipation skills and intercultural competences as a means to reinforce the capacity of global citizens for learning to learn together

The view of the authors is that, in response to challenges created in many countries by the coexistence of communities of different origins and cultures, living together in peace requires a capacity to learn together and to navigate a plurality of cultures but also a plurality of futures.To explore this idea, a research has been conducted to identify future-oriented methodologies that can sustain activities in such fields as the culture of peace and global citizenship education. Such methodologies as Causal Layered Analysis, the Sarkar game, Transformative Scenario Planning and the framework of Futures Literacy are examined in relation to their added value for intercultural competences. The paper finishes on the presentation and analysis of a case study on a foresight participative workshop held with young people in Africa.The four methodologies and the case study presented in this paper provide, in our view, a strong impetus to further explore spaces where intercultural competences and the discipline of anticipation can be hybridized. Such hybridity seems to correspond to what is required of citizens in a globalizing world where solutions must not only be based on long term perspectives but also be shared across national, cultural, ethnic or religious boundaries.     

Accounting as an affective technology: A study of circulation,agency and entrancement

This paper argues that accounting is an affective technology. We show how people’s feelings and emotions are constructed through accounting practices and templates. Much research in accounting and economics is based on rationality assumptions that suggest that people act after working through cost–benefit calculations. Information may be imperfect and our cognitive abilities constrained but such modes of calculation and economic reasoning are assumed to drive action. Whilst not setting aside the significance of rationality and intelligibility, this study illustrates that it is affect and passion alongside cognitive calculation that generate movement and action in organisational networks. An in-depth case study of a very large and well known global American corporation spanning 4 years illustrates how affect is engineered by corporate executives through accounting templates and targets. In local sites, periods of excitement and elation ensue but so do anxiety and sleepless nights as yet again, budgets are cut and stated targets rise. Productivity spreadsheets, planning pyramids and human resource programs all contribute to the circulation of affect in the global network as new identities (both individual and collective) are defined and underperforming employees managed out. The committed and devoted ‘Players’ of the organisation express love for the firm, tolerate inconsistent instructions and overlook what might (by outsiders) be conceived as breaches of trust. As such, they collaborate in their own entrancement. We conclude that accounting technologies play on people’s passions and emotions rather than purely on their intellectual and reasoning skills, and that it is this emotive edge to accounting that generates and sustains action in organisational networks.     

Top dogs have set the agenda for peace: international social position and peace attitudes

Everybody agrees that peace is good, but not on how to achieve it. The Y2K study contained many questions on peace proposals, as well as on prospects for East/West and North/South peace. It ranked these proposals by popularity and studied how the social positions of the 1967 respondents and their countries affected what proposals were preferred and their predictions on peace or war. It now turns out that, neither centre, nor periphery got it quite right. In the former East, the people set the agenda and removed the iron curtain. In the West, however, the top dogs set the agenda, with military intervention, even called ‘peace enforcement’, high on it. Recent political and military developments indicate that ‘peace’ is likely to remain ‘peace between top dogs’; there will be few advocates for putting severe conflicts and violations of human rights in the periphery (e.g. Burundi and Sudan) high on the peace agenda.     

A green future for religion?

In recent decades, debates have erupted and intensified about the relationships between religions, cultures, and the earth’s living systems. Some scholars have argued that ritual and religion can play a salutary role in helping humans regulate natural systems in ecologically sustainable ways. Others have blamed one or more religions, or religion in general, for promoting worldviews and cultures that precipitate environmental damage. Religious production in recent years suggests not only that many religions are becoming more environmentally friendly but also that a kind of civic planetary earth religion may be evolving. Examples of such novel, nature-related religious production allow us to ponder whether, and if so in what ways, the future of religion may be green.     

Building collaborative enterprise

Can large companies be both innovative and efficient? Yes, argue Adler, of the University of Southern California; Heckscher, of Rutgers; and Prusak, an independent consultant. But they must develop new organizational capabilities that will create the atmosphere of trust that knowledge work requires--and the coordinating mechanisms to make it scalable. Specifically, such organizations must learn to: Define a shared purpose that guides what people at all levels of the organization are trying to achieve together; Cultivate an ethic of contribution in which the highest value is accorded to people who look beyond their specific roles and advance the common purpose; Develop scalable procedures for coordinating people's efforts so that process-management activities become truly interdependent; and Create an infrastructure in which individuals' spheres of influence overlap and collaboration is both valued and rewarded. These four goals may sound idealized, but the imperative to achieve them is practical, say the authors. Only the truly collaborative enterprises that can tap into everyone's ideas---in an organized way--will compete imaginatively, quickly, and cost-effectively enough to become the household names of this century.     

Performance measurement,modes of evaluation and the development of compromising accounts

In this paper we develop the concept of compromising accounts as a distinctive approach to the analysis of whether and how accounting can facilitate compromise amongst organizational actors. We take the existence of conflicting logics and values as the starting point for our analysis, and directly examine the ways in which the design and operation of accounts can be implicated in compromises between different modes of evaluation and when and how such compromises can be productive or unproductive. In doing so, we draw on Stark’s (2009: 27) concept of ‘organizing dissonance’, where the coming together of multiple evaluative principles has the potential to produce a ‘productive friction’ that can help the organization to recombine ideas and perspectives in creative and constructive ways. In a field study of a non-government organization, we examine how debates and struggles over the design and operation of a performance measurement system affected the potential for productive debate and compromise between different modes of evaluation. Our study shows that there is much scope for future research to examine how accounts can create sites that bring together (or indeed push apart) organizational actors with different evaluative principles, and the ways in which this ‘coming together’ can be potentially productive and/or destructive.     

Flight of the young flamingoes: alternative futures for young entrepreneurs in South Africa

The opening of South Africa’s once-protected borders to global trade has severely affected the employment opportunities and wealth creation of traditional industry in the country. Alongside this, the enormous political change with the abolition of apartheid and the presence of majority rule creates a new political regime and new expectations of the people of South Africa. Young people cannot look to traditional ways for their future. Instead of being dependent on others they must learn to be enterprising and self-dependent. Many forms of small businesses can be created as part of the economic development, and there are a range of government and industry-backed programmes to engender the ‘can do’ mindset and the market conditions and intelligence needed to succeed.     

Seeking legitimacy for new assurance forms: The case of assurance on sustainability reporting

Based on the development of a more refined conception of legitimacy than has been used in prior audit/assurance and sustainability accounting research, this paper analyses how the legitimation processes adopted by sustainability assurance practitioners in a large professional services firm have co-evolved with and impacted upon their attempts to develop this form of assurance practice - particularly the construction of assurance statements. The analysis reveals a complex and interdependent interplay between attempts at securing pragmatic, moral and cognitive legitimacy with three key constituencies - clients who commission the sustainability assurance services; (socially constructed) non-client users of the assurance statements; and the firm’s internal Risk Department that approves the wording of assurance statements. Securing these types of legitimacy is shown to require the adoption and alignment of varying legitimation strategies according to the constituency practitioners seek to influence. Developing pragmatic legitimacy with clients depends on establishing moral legitimacy with non-client users of assurance statements while securing moral legitimacy with non-client users is contingent on acquiring pragmatic legitimacy with the firm’s internal Risk Department. The practitioners’ legitimation strategies are underpinned by a commitment to opening up dialogue within the assurance process which is evident in their engagement with potential users of assurance and their efforts to expand assurance statement content and encourage user influence over what is assured. This provides a counterpoint to Power’s (1994, 1999) concerns about the tendency for new assurance forms to restrict debate and dialogue and reveals a rare empirical domain where Power’s (2003b) call for more customised and informative narratives in assurance reporting is being heeded.     

Interruption, interrogation, integration and interaction as process: How PNS informs interdisciplinary curriculum design

We focus on the decision to include PNS in the curriculum for a first year tertiary environments degree. Building on case studies that described complex environmental issues, we understood PNS actions to require a critical gaze at our disciplines and then a process for change. We used the idea of disrupting—or interrupting—the established ways of reading the literature and ‘accepted stories’ of what occurred. The interruption allowed the creation of a space in the academic discourse to question the interpretation- and discipline-based assumptions underpinning subject discussions. This opening of a place for questions about the various case study situations allowed students to act as extended peer communities and to acknowledge other stakeholders in to the discussion. The commonest interruptions were to recast the issue as part of a wider and more complex system, to acknowledge uncertainty and to consider the drivers and risks in scaling up and down within systems and sub-systems. We actively promoted interdisciplinarity and extending science as cornerstones to dissolving paradigms and to facilitating negotiation of innovative ways of ‘seeing and knowing’.     

The new society of organizations

Managers in every organization from the largest publicly owned company to the smallest not-for-profit face the same unsettling imperative: to build change into their organization's very structure. On the one hand, this means being prepared to abandon everything that the organization does. On the other, it means constantly creating the new. Unless this process of abandonment and creation goes on without ceasing, the organization will very soon find itself obsolescent--losing performance and with it the ability to attract and hold the people on whom its performance depends. What drives this imperative is the nature of the organization itself. Every organization exists to put knowledge to work, but knowledge changes fast, with today's certainties becoming tomorrow's absurdities. That is why any knowledgeable individual must likewise acquire new knowledge every several years or also become obsolete. Familiar as the term "organization" is, we have only begun to reckon with the implications of living in a world in which the fundamental unit of society is--and must be--destabilizing. That is why questions of social responsibility now arise so often and from so many quarters. We need new ways to understand the relationship between organizations and their employees, who may in fact be unpaid volunteers, independent professionals whose organization is a network, or knowledgeable specialists who can--and often do--move on at any moment. For more than 600 years, no society has had as many competing centers of power as the one in which we now live. Drucker explains why change is--and must be--the only constant in an organization's life and explores the consequences for managers, individuals, and society overall.     

Communities of tomorrow

The social spotlight seems to be refocusing to the scale of local community at a time when globalisation of the economy is threatening the authority of nation-states. Certain small communities are in peril of falling out of the global economy while losing local customs to a globalised culture. Globally beleaguered nation-states are being squeezed in a two-pronged grip: from the growing weight of global capital and from local communities rising to global pressures by demanding local solutions. National authority is also being bypassed as new global communities of interest form on the Internet, expanding the meaning of the term community. But, is community more than common interest—a celebration of difference, negotiating symbiosis among diversity of ethnicity, lifestyle and aspirations for the future? This paper explores five scenarios of tomorrow’s communities. One scenario is a nostalgic return to the romantic notion of the white-picket fence. Then there is the drop-out feral community. In another future the fence becomes a fortress wall, or a ring of barbed wire. Yet another is a virtual community beyond place, where people sharing a common interest live in cyber-reality. The viable community is one for the long haul. To be viable in a global world it must make local-global links to create synergies by sharing resources and inspirations throughout a diverse, planetary society. Viable, local-global network communities of tomorrow set a global example for creativity by honouring difference and open exchange. They take responsibility for their own futures.Two powerful images from recent events remain with me, in juxtaposition. After considering the American attacks on Afghanistan, a well-experienced teacher feels isolated at the periphery, and powerless. In addition, she watches, in “quiet despair”, one of her pupils “virtually going crazy” before her eyes. She shares these words with me:

“Neither he nor I, it seems, have anywhere to run except to the graciousness and the care of the other children, that as classroom leader I’m tying daily to coalesce, in order to put a cocoon of community around him. Bit like the planet!”

“We all work to keep our very bright and fairly disturbed ADHD-labelled¹ learner connected to us in genuine relationship. That’s the foundation of authentic learning support. I’m not operating a medical model!”

Our leaders and the babbling mass media ignore this, the first image, and many similar to it.By contrast, the second image gets constant exposure. It gets instant recall from most TV viewers. It is the scramble of screen jockeys, on what is left of Wall Street, playing the casino economy, in a frenzy of greed. Curiously the main media focus emphasizes images that represent the world at the global scale. They largely ignore images of life at the scale of community.Why is this? Why does the second image of the so-called finance community, where the focus is the dollar, override the more basic image of a hometown community where the focus is human life-support? Are the media reflecting our true priorities, and have we got it wrong? Is money more important than community?     

The end of risk communication as we know it

According to the US National Research Council, risk communication ought to be viewed as a dialogue among people conducted to help facilitate a more accurate understanding of risks and, related, the decisions they may make to manage them. But, in spite of this widely accepted perspective on risk communication, there is often a disconnect between how it is defined and how it is practiced. Rather than focusing on a true dialogue aimed at improving risk assessments and risk management decisions, risk communication is often viewed as means of simply educating people about existing risk assessments so that, on their own, they might make (or contribute to) better risk management decisions. More worrisome, risk communication is still often seen as a means of ‘correcting’ misconceptions about, or perceptions of, risk; in other words, risk communication is used as a vehicle for attempting to align lay perceptions with their expertly assessed severity. In this paper, I argue that risk communication must become more decision-focused if it is to meet the objectives set forth – in 1989 – by the US National Research Council.     

Putting your company's whole brain to work

Innovate or fall behind: the competitive imperative for virtually all businesses today is that simple. Responding to that command is difficult, however, because innovation takes place when different ideas, perceptions, and ways of processing and judging information collide. And it often requires collaboration among players who see the world differently. As a result, the conflict that should take place constructively among ideas all too often ends up taking place unproductively among people. Disputes become personal, and the creative process breaks down. The manager successful at fostering innovation figures out how to get different approaches to grate against one another in a productive process the authors call creative abrasion. The authors have worked with a number of organizations over the years and have observed many managers who know how to make creative abrasion work for them. Those managers understand that different people have different thinking styles: analytical or intuitive, conceptual or experiential, social or independent, logical or values driven. They deliberately design a full spectrum of approaches and perspectives into their organizations and understand that cognitively diverse people must respect other thinking styles. They set ground rules for working together to discipline the creative process. Above all, managers who want to encourage innovation need to examine what they do to promote or inhibit creative abrasion.     

福建省海峡产业投资基金发展模式研究

当前的海峡两岸关系正处在历史的最好时期,和平发展已成两岸共同主题.建立海峡产业投资基金有利于深化两岸经贸合作,促进祖国和平统一.本文介绍了我国产业投资基金的发展情况,阐释了建立海峡产业投资基金的必要性及其发展模式,在此基础上提出了促进海峡产业投资基金发展的几点建议.     

Cross-impact analysis using group decision support systems: an application to the future of Hong Kong

When several interdependent events affect the future of an organization, an industry, or a society, it is often useful to know how these events may affect each other. Determining the impact of external events on other such events, called a cross-impact analysis, is usually accomplished by asking knowledgeable people to (1) discuss any relationships among the events and (2) provide subjective estimates of conditional probabilities relating the events. However, there are two possible problems. First, in some political environments people may be reluctant to discuss the events openly. Second, the subjective probability estimates may violate the laws of probability theory, such as Bayes' theorem. We present a simple method, using group decision support systems (GDSS), for eliciting anonymous comments and preparing consistent probability estimates concerning interdependent events. We then illustrate our method by using it to perform a cross-impact analysis concerning the future of Hong Kong.     

World betas, consumption growth, and financial integration

We define a country’s beta as the covariance of domestic consumption growth with world consumption growth scaled by the world’s variance. Beta is related to a country’s risk-taking position in models of international financial integration. Empirically, we find that an increase in beta leads to an increase in average consumption growth. This beta-growth relationship is present only among countries with high levels of financial openness, and is absent among the rest. However, we cannot fully discard the presence of non-financial factors (e.g., trade openness) as determinants of the beta-growth relationship.     

Agency problems,accounting slack,and banks’ response to proposed reporting of loan fair values

We investigate the determinants of bank representatives’ responses to the United States Financial Accounting Standard Board’s 2010 Exposure Draft that proposes fair value measurement for most financial instruments. Over 85% of the 2971 comment letters were received from bank representatives, with most bank-affiliated letters addressing—and opposing—one issue: fair value measurement of loans. The Exposure Draft proposes that companies report both fair value and amortized cost measures for loans; thus, the proposal should result in increased levels of loan-related information and improved financial reporting transparency. We investigate three reasons for bank representatives’ resistance. First, fair value measurement should result in less accounting slack than the current incurred-loss model for loan impairments; therefore, we propose that representatives from banks that historically utilized that slack will resist fair value measurement for loans. Second, we propose that agency problems are an important motivating factor because bank representatives reaping more private benefits from their franchises have less incentive to support increases in financial reporting transparency. Third, we test whether the most common reasons for opposition included in the comment letters are associated with negative letter writing. Our analyses support the first two determinants of bank representatives’ resistance to the Exposure Draft. Specifically, accounting slack and lower demand for accounting transparency are strongly associated with resistance to the standard. However, we find that stated reasons for resistance are not associated with letter writing. Specifically, representatives at firms with difficult to value loans and firms that mostly hold loans to maturity are no more likely to resist the standard than others. The narrow scope of bank representatives’ comments and our empirical findings suggest that bankers’ responses to the Exposure Draft may be more driven by concerns over reduced availability of accounting slack and accompanying de facto regulatory forbearance than by the conceptual arguments they offer. Our results have implications for standard setters, who must navigate special interests as they attempt to promulgate high quality accounting standards, and for users of financial statements who must consider how political forces shape generally accepted accounting principles.     

Dialogue and debate in a post-normal practice of science: a reflexion

Scientific activities are always embedded in the cultural matrix that gives purpose to the enterprise, and so we need to develop a rich and meaningful view of social reality. In doing so we realise that we all live different lives, but each of us can broaden our knowledge of the social world through dialogue with others. If scientific questions, which relate directly to society, were researched in a ‘dialogical' manner, ways would be sought to understand the concerned individuals, populations or stakeholders. While never rejecting concern for internal coherence and rigour, science can cope better with future uncertainties, and better solve the problems of those peoples that make up society, by extensively utilising social dialogue.     

Feminist futures: From dystopia to eutopia?

This essay evaluates the present and future state of world development from the perspective of Third World women, finding that globalization, alongside US foreign policy, is leading to a future of increased poverty, environmental damage, and conditions where peace and human security are not served. Yet, powerful new ways of organizing for change have been created by the actions and visions of the Zapatista communities of Chiapas, the rubber-tappers in the Amazon rainforest, the Self-Employed Women's Association in India, the movement against female genital mutilation in Senegal, and the Israeli peace activists of Women in Black. Their emphasis on principles of social justice and the love of life they embody offer a vision of a possible future eutopia—a better, not a perfect, society—that is within reach if enough people take them up and shape them further. Using the new paradigm of “women, culture, and development”, and the practices of future studies we analyze the ways in which women in a variety of settings are moving against the current of a dystopic future and are realizing visions of a more life-affirming form of development.