Article Outline
- 1. Democratising the future
- 2. Learning to participate
- 3. Anticipatory action learning
- 4. Beyond planning
- 5. Freeing the mind
- 6. Reimagining conversation
- 7. Global multilogue
- 8. Questioning the future
- References
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1.
Christine A. Ralph MacNulty 《Futures》1977,9(2):128-138
The term “scenario” is familiar to those involved in forecasting, but too few people are aware of what exactly a scenario is, or how it can best be developed and applied. The author describes a method developed over several years in response to a need which most forecasting efforts have left unfulfilled. The method enables quantitative and qualitative forecasts to be combined in a manner which can be directly related to an organisation's planning and decision-making processes, and which permits the evaluation of a company's objectives and performance in the light of those forecasts. The analysis of an organisation's likely performance in given scenarios can, in turn, provide a basis for contingency planning. 相似文献
2.
Robert E. Tevis 《Futures》2010,42(4):337-344
Do current scenario planning techniques ignore an organizations ability to create its future? Social constructionists and organizational theorists have indicated that the future of an organization can be enacted by its constituents. Yet it is apparent that scenario planning techniques, used by organizations to plan for their future, tend to emphasize a future that the organization must react to instead of create. By emphasizing a future that the organizations must react to, it may ignore and completely miss the opportunity it has to create or enact the future it wants to have.Scenario planning, however, can evolve to support a creative foresight and approach to the future by recognizing the power behind enactment theory and applying a goal-oriented approach to the scenario planning process. Using goal-oriented scenario planning an organization can match the world it wants with the world it expects to see. 相似文献
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This paper proposes experimenting with anticipatory action learning for helping to create the future. It is an interactive process that relies strongly on a central thread of conversation among a variety of participants, from multiple perspectives, concerned with the social unit or project. Basically, anticipatory action learning is action research modified for foresight. It integrates research/search with decision and action, and downgrades the prerogative of a research elite, empowering all participants. Conversation allows meaning from a range of different worldviews to be shared and negotiated for studying, theorising and otherwise engaging the future—and more importantly, for helping to create it. Criteria are proposed for anticipatory action learning and procedural and administrative limitations are addressed.The visions we have about our own futures vary according to the mindset each of us stands in. It would be fascinating to compare the personally envisioned futures of everyone at an international meeting of futurists. Our futures should converge in some way where we share common interests as futurists, and diverge on the point of intercultural variety. But, would they differ from each other as widely as those of Aung San Suu Kyi and the Burmese generals?It would be even more telling to compare the range of alternative futures envisioned by world leaders with the visions of their constituents and especially, say, with the visions of a woman in Africa’s Central Lakes region and of the homeless in Osaka.In a similar way, the means of engaging the future in order to study it, and its uncertainties, and the way people think about it, are variously dependent on the mindsets of the scholars and researchers, and the realities they find themselves in. Methodologies of futures studies range across the predictable: from empirical quantitative projection (linear and non-linear); to qualitative interpretation and critical analysis; and to participatory action research or its associate, action learning.Then, futures studies differs according to the disciplinary framework of the researcher, whether in physics, ecology, complexity science, social science and the humanities, critical cultural theory or philosophy. Further, there is the division of the pragmatic and academic perspectives.Actually, the very fact of having a formal methodology is itself derived from a dominant civilisational and ethical perspective, mainly Western.There is another important distinction in futures studies. On the one hand, there is the perspective from which futurists research, analyse and critique the future, or more precisely what other people think and say about the future. On the other, there is the perspective from which people in the focal social unit may think and act to create their own futures.Then, acting to create a future poses at least two further distinctions depending on whether one believes the future is structurally preordained, or whether human interaction and intervention play a significant part.It is from the perspective of participative human agency acting to create one future or another, at least partially, that this paper proceeds.Before going further, let us address the question of whether future-creating can rightly be claimed to constitute the study of the future, or future studies. If it is not part of futures studies, then at least future-creating activity does rely on input from the field, the results of studying and reflecting on alternative options for the future—futures, plural. Whatever way we look at creating the future, as opposed to merely researching data about it, the activity does represent a fairly direct, personal engagement of the future, as much as anyone can do about a time–space that has yet to arrive. This is an important distinction, since many empirical futures studies do not so directly engage the future, well not personally. Rather, they examine stated opinions of others about future options, and other people’s preferences, emerging issues and the like, themselves all valuable activities.
If, as Michel Godet has said, ‘...the future is not written anywhere and has still to be built...’ [[1]], creating the future is a central activity which at least deserves full consideration by the field of futures studies, especially if it relies on the analysis and critique of data generated or accessed around the activity itself.
1. Democratising the future
Creating the future can be controlled by the wealthy, powerful and famous, and their minders and lackeys. But in the spirit of democracy, future-creating would seek to ensure that people who have a stake in the future, either through their likely habitat there, or their successor generations, should be able to participate in that creation. This does not happen with the more traditional methodologies of futures studies, where experts stand aside from the vast majority of other citizens.A methodology, a procedure even, that permits such participation can generically be termed as participatory action research. It allows relative freedom from structure and process to encourage invention and more diverse exploration of the perspectives and issues than are often allowed with any other single methodology. In fact, participatory methods usually employ a range of other methodologies, to input data for analysis and critical reflection.But participation is not without its limits, which could be why so much futures work is done by experts. We have limited opportunities, in even the most so-called democratic societies, for participation in action research by more than a chosen handful of people. It is therefore not surprising that most action research happens within small, discrete communities, be they villages, classrooms, or even prisons.In fact, participative activity is valued less highly than adversarial competition, and this could be a good argument against its use. It can be threatening to the controlling elite. But have we given it a fair trial?2. Learning to participate
Whatever, we should not be blind to the problems of action research, flagged elsewhere: [[2]], including:- • the difficulty of finding participants willing and able to engage in protracted and intense inquiry, including particularly the people who hold power and decision authority;
- • the difficulty of building mutually inclusive communication frames of meaning between participants, including the experts and others; and
- • the necessity to maintain vigilantly the distinction between action that advances open inquiry and decision, and instrumental action for its own sake.
3. Anticipatory action learning
Anticipatory action learning seeks to link inquiry, anticipation and learning with decisions, actions and evaluation, during an openly democratic process. The communication style needs to be what Lee Thayer [[3]] once called diachronous, as opposed to synchronous. By diachronous Thayer means that the goals and the means for achieving them are decided during the participation process itself. With synchronous or top-down communication, the goals and the means are imposed before the participation begins.Anticipatory action learning, as proposed here, borrows from the seminal concepts of Morgan and Ramirez [[4]]. They see action learning as holographic, as a means of developing capacities for people to investigate and understand their own situations, and to go further, to decide and act within an ongoing social context.This stands in contrast to the approach of more conventional methodologies where research seeks primarily knowledge and understanding. Important as these needs are, they can be taken out of their social context into that of the expert researcher.As with Morgan and Ramirez, anticipatory action learning needs to meet certain criteria. It should be democratic, multilateral and pluralistic. It needs to empower and be proactive, linking individual with social transformation. Thus, it would integrate different levels of understanding in an evolving and open-ended way. In this sense, creating intelligent and humane action is more important than contributing to formal knowledge.I would change this slightly, first by saying that it should be anticipatory and interactive, or preactive, rather than proactive. What is envisaged is a collaborative, anticipatory activity. The term “proactive” most often suggests a determinism that I doubt is intended by Morgan from his successive writing. Proaction is a notion that has been appropriated by can-do marketing, among others, to impose preordained change.Second, I would prefer to use the term coevolutionary, again to stress pluralistic mutual adjustment, since one criticism of evolution suggests it is still based in a progressive determinism.Simply put, anticipatory action learning is a matter of taking one of the many well-developed action learning processes, such as that of Peter Checkland [[5]], and adding the anticipatory component. In such a case, it is important that the spirit and integrity of exploring alternative futures be observed.4. Beyond planning
Anticipatory action learning differs from much of the scenario planning that happens today, even if conducted in a participatory way. There needs to be more deliberate attention to exploring a full range of alternative futures, from the probable to the possible, the preferred to the undesirable, not forgetting the futures that are not easily seen from a conventional mindset. Scenario planning still tends to extrapolate from the past more than work back from the future. Anticipatory action learning does use trend analysis for suggesting certain alternative futures, but seeks to backcast from future visions to infer the actions along the way, including the first steps to be taken in the present.Characteristics of the process, include:- • Identifying the people who will take part in the activity, hopefully as many of the social unit as possible, and inclusive of as many views as possible.
- • Defining the scope of the anticipation.
- • Collaboratively agreeing on what is to be explored and how, during the process itself, not as preordained objectives.
- • Collecting data, via an appropriate variety of methods and procedures, with agreement on who gathers what.
- • Analysing and critically deconstructing the data, with particular attention to the consequences of trends and changes.
- • Developing alternative futures, scenarios or visions (plural).
- • Reflecting on the alternative futures envisioned.
- • Deciding which futures to prevent and which to pursue actively.
- • Developing actions for participants to create preferred futures.
- • Re-evaluating early action.
- • Reiterating the process.
5. Freeing the mind
Human groupings show a tendency to stay in the conventional wisdom, or slip back into it for comfort, whether in small groups or the wider society. Scott Burchill [[6]] suggests that defining the ‘spectrum of permitted expression is a highly effective form of ideological control’, even in so-called free societies.He evokes George Orwell’s warning in Animal Farm [[7] that, in a democracy, an orthodoxy is a body of ideas which it is assumed all ‘...right-thinking people will accept without question...’. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself (sic) silenced with surprising effectiveness.More work needs to be done on how to encourage divergent thought in conversation to ensure that a range of alternative future options emerges, including some off-the-wall thinking. One suggestion that can be helpful is to ensure a range of different perspectives is present.As with participatory processes, conversation has its limitations and problems.The act (or is it art?) of conversation is often discounted, even ridiculed, in contemporary scholarly inquiry perhaps because it appears to lack the formality of structure and process that characterise most traditional methodologies. Is this because we take conversation for granted, and have not adequately studied it, or because we intend respectfully to value the systematic methodological processes we spend so much hard time mastering in the academy? Or are both factors at work? The answers beg further research elsewhere.6. Reimagining conversation
In a series of broadcast talks, historian Theodore Zeldin [[8]] argues for the value of conversation, in certain forms, though neither specifically for research—nor, perhaps more accurately, for futuring; for search. The kind of conversation he is interested in begins with a ‘willingness to emerge a slightly different person’. The really big scientific revolutions have been the invention not of some new machine, but of new ways of thinking, as with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.But can an individual expect to have an impact on other than oneself, if the world is controlled by powerful economic and political forces, as we see in the new globalisation? Does that justify not trying?Zeldin points out that revolutions such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are not the inventions of some machine but of the ways we talk about things. To him, the world is made of ‘individuals searching for a partner, for a lover, for a guru, for God’. But he calls for a new conversation that develops equality, opening up to each other in an entirely natural way. And further, ‘we need a new kind of novel and film to create visions of how people can live together as equals, with humour’.It seems that conversation can aid the search for a compelling image of the future, which, if we follow Johan Galtung, can be a potent force for change.Compelling images can be constructed autocratically or democratically. If the process is democratic, it allows the unbridled negotiation of meaning in order to construct images or visions in a collaborative way. It allows people to generate understandings that help them act in their own situation.Thus anticipatory action learning, incorporating conversation as it does, partly systematic and open, should ideally enable a rich exploration of a range of visions of the future from multiple perspectives, including the undesirable. There is nothing likely to be so compelling as the obverse of the undesirable future.7. Global multilogue
An example of the use of conversation for exploring alternative futures can be found in UNESCO’s 21st Century Dialogues in Paris, in September 1998. Compared with anticipatory action learning, the UNESCO event represented a relatively more ceremonially moderated use of conversation in global futures studies. The dialogues did not intentionally use action learning or action research, although that does not say the event was not thoughtfully designed.The UNESCO experience did show how the process of human dialogue—or better, multilogue—as an alternative to more formal methodologies, becomes problematic because of our epistemological distances from one another. Such distances are the result of often dramatic variations in culture, language, gender, history, attitudes towards subjectivity, objectivity and intersubjectivity, and our understandings and misunderstandings of the future.Conversation, especially when multicultural and interdisciplinary, also poses a dilemma. While cultural, linguistic and epistemological diversity ideally allow a rich array of perspectives on issues about the future, and thus a plurality of meanings, the very difference in perspectives contributes to difficulties in understanding each other. We only have to look at other cultures’ metaphors to realise this. And conversation which starts with the clean slate of a relatively distant future, say 50 or more years ahead, is not immune to conflict, even psychological and other forms of violence—interinstitutional and interpersonal.Events such as the 21st Century Dialogues will most likely be replicated in a variety of forms as we settle into a new “millennium”, unless futures interest has faded with millennial madness. In such dialogues, futurists would have an ideal opportunity to experiment with inclusive multicultural conversations as the means of navigating and negotiating through the differences that result from our divergent thoughts and proposals. But discrimination needs to be minimised against participants who do not speak or understand the main international languages.Other things that need to be taken into account when facilitating conversation are the structure, including the setting, and the process of conversation. Relative lack of structure, with minimum control of process, now sits quite comfortably with many people from American and Australian cultures, for example, while Russians and East Asians demand mandated structure and process. Timetabling, seating, ambience and allowing for the inarticulate to participate are also considerations.These requirements vary according to one’s cultural experiences and we need to experiment with ways to make people comfortable and to encourage their participation in open conversation when they come from a variety of backgrounds, including those that have experienced severe oppression. A big, echoing assembly hall with theatre-style seating is no longer necessarily the ideal venue for certain contemporary global citizens. But then again, it is for others, and we are still building plenty of such halls.8. Questioning the future
Conversation, also, needs to encourage the asking of questions, as well as the advocacy of ideas and ideals. It seems important, too, that we find new questions to ask, not simply the same, tired questions founded in the much-discussed issues derived from well-identified problems and categories often determined by academic disciplines and other vested interests.21st Century Dialogues did ask some important new questions, such as: what is the new social contract for the third industrial revolution and accompanying globalisation? We need more such questions, especially about emerging issues—those that are not yet in common currency—across a variety of categories, civilisational perspectives, worldviews and images of the future, especially long-term.One question for futurists is: how do we ensure adequate, inclusive or democratic participation in global conversations about the future when the planet is so vast and culturally diverse?Perhaps futurists need to become activists more than they already are, to step outside the academy more often and to go beyond merely esoteric writing. Futurists may need to become active advocates for the use of anticipatory action learning, or other participatory futures-creating processes, in real-life situations. As well, futurists may need to speak out more as public intellectuals in order to initiate and enrich public conversations about emerging issues and alternative futures.Certainly, further research is recommended on how to apply anticipatory action learning to ensure that meaning is shared with sensitivity and accuracy in multicultural situations. And, also, on how better to bring divergent perspectives to conversational situations that tend to reward convergent thinking.In these pursuits, futurists should not forget the potential of the Internet for global conversations about the future. However there is a long way to go before the Net can be relied on for non-discriminatory, intercultural and intercivilisational multilogue. More than 93 percent of today’s Internet users live among the world’s richest 20 percent, and most of these users are in the social elite that can converse in English; many are experts.The world’s poorest 20 percent, discriminated against because so very many lack an international language, still account for less than one percent of current Internet users [[9]]. 相似文献5.
This article proposes an innovative model of marketing practice for public services. This is rooted in the paradigm of relationship marketing and emphasizes the need to build relational capital between and within organizations operating in the public services arena. It is argued that this is essential for the effective management of contemporary public services in the fragmented state. 相似文献
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Julie Robson 《Journal of Financial Services Marketing》2015,20(4):282-291
The financial services sector is a huge and diverse industry comprising many different forms of organisations and product offerings. Yet, a review of past papers in the Journal of Financial Services Marketing (JFSM) reveals a heavy bias towards articles on banking, to the neglect of other equally important financial services categories. The purpose of this article is to address this imbalance and to call for more research to be conducted in a wider range of financial services categories. In particular, general insurance is singled out as a category worthy of further research. Looking to the past, this article reviews research published to-date on general insurance in the JFSM to establish a benchmark and explore theoretical contributions. Attention is then turned to the future to identify a research agenda for the general insurance sector going forward. Five important themes are identified: trust, transparency and simplification, technology, HNW, and Takaful. 相似文献
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This paper presents a case analysis of a successful scenario intervention in an organization. This intervention is compared and contrasted with an unsuccessful one reported in Hodgkinson and Wright [Confronting strategic inertia in a top management team: learning from failure, Organization Studies 23 (2002)949-977]. We demonstrate that analysis of the answers given by workshop participants in a pre-intervention interview can be helpful in determining the receptiveness of an organization to a subsequent scenario intervention. We theorize that strategic inertia-characterized by coping patterns of bolstering failing strategy, procrastination (over a strategic dilemma) and buck-passing (the responsibility for the dilemma's resolution), can be caused by the psychological attenuation of the perceived level of environmental threat to the organization, culminating in unconflicted adherence to the currently followed strategy. We contend that the expression of such coping behaviour is antithetical to a subsequent successful scenario exercise since, if the exercise fails to identify an unconflicted strategic alternative, the sharp focus of the scenarios on futures unfavourable to business-as-usual strategy will re-activate the cognitive stress-reduction mechanisms. Strategic inertia will thus be reinforced. We conclude with a review of the implications of our diagnosis for reflective practitioners.Our paper is divided into four sections. In Section 1, we overview writings on inertia in strategic decision making. We pay especial attention to identifying potential causes of inertia. Next, we present Janis and Mann's [Decision Making, Free Press, New York, 1979] views of the psychological processes invoked by conflicted decisions and analyse the relevance of this laboratory-based theory to provide a psychological explanation of strategic inertia. Finally, we briefly describe the scenario intervention process and argue that it contains the potential to overcome strategic inertia. In Section 2, we review an already-published study of an unsuccessful scenario planning intervention, which illustrates the operation of components of Janis and Mann's model. Next, in Section 3, we focus on our own case investigation of a successful scenario planning intervention. The early part of this section documents the “success”, whilst the latter part analyses the causes of the success—again using the components of Janis and Mann's model. We conclude in Section 4, where we compare and contrast the application of Janis and Mann's model to both cases and we demonstrate that application of the model to pre-intervention interview data can aid the practitioner determine, at the outset, whether or not the organizational context will be receptive to the intervention. 相似文献
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Collaborative planning for retrofitting suburbs: transdisciplinarity and intersubjectivity in action
This paper presents the transdisciplinary research program undertaken by the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Suburbs or GIRBa (Groupe interdisciplinaire de recherche sur les banlieues, in French), as well as the collaborative planning process put forward to orient the future of Quebec City’s first ring suburbs. The first section presents the research problem and its context. The next section discusses the concepts of transdisciplinary and intersubjectivity at the very basis of the group’s work and orientations. The last section describes the content of the ongoing transdisciplinary research and action program and reports on the in-progress collaborative planning process. 相似文献
9.
There is so much at stake, economically and socially, in the building of an airport that forecasting studies and planning a long time in advance are of the greatest importance. Aircraft, airspace, airports and ground environment are parts of a system which must be analysed and planned together so as to anticipate the expanding requirements of human and freight transport. 相似文献
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Environmental policy and social research tends to neglect the inner, experiential dimensions of human life. Yet, the ways in which individuals seek to achieve psychological and emotional well-being in their lives is inevitably expressed in behaviour that impacts on ecological (and social) processes.The yearning for this ‘inner human sustainability’ is psychologically rooted and subjectively experienced. Beliefs and worldviews about how best to satisfy it are culturally (i.e. inter-subjectively and collectively) constructed and expressed through behaviour that, in turn, supports or undermines the external ecological and social world. Consumerism and its associated behaviours are inherently unsustainable socio-ecologically and psychologically. Through a psychodynamic theory of human experience, meaning and behaviour, the paper explains why any policy, if it is to be effective in the long-term, must be attentive to psychological, experiential and cultural dimensions of human beings and beliefs about how needs and wants will be satisfied. It also argues that long-term societal and cultural transformation is only possible when individuals take responsibility for their own development, transformation and engagement in the larger social and ecological complex on which they depend. Policy-making, research and education are themselves cultural activities that seek to respond appropriately to changes in the external world within the constraints of powerful cultural (collective) and psychological (individual) values and priorities. A systemic approach to sustainable development requires consideration of the mutual dependence between eco-social and psycho-cultural realities. 相似文献
11.
From vision to action: Framing the Leitbild concept in the context of landscape planning 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Reviewing landscape developments in the last decades evidently shows that in the future most pressing changes can be expected for the land surface. This indispensably calls for strategic approaches based on visions and transdisciplinary creativity. Hence, this paper critically reviews the Leitbild concept, an idea on spatial planning which has been widely discussed in the German-speaking planning literature but which has received scant attention elsewhere. Although the term has been translated as a ‘vision’, this paper shows that the concept is far richer in its content than these casual translations suggest. The paper shows that it defines a particular paradigm for landscape planning that embodies a transdisciplinary approach in which lay-people and experts develop both goals and strategies for realising their joint visions. A systematic overview of the key characteristics that make up the Leitbild approach is provided and set in relation to already available approaches for decision makers. Although there are similarities between the Leitbild approach and other planning and decision-support tools, such as Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Strategic Impact Assessment (SEA) and Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA-sust), the paper shows that the particular combination of issues considered when developing a Leitbild makes it distinctive. Through an iterative process, the development of a Leitbild allows new approaches to spatial planning in which space and place can be considered as a social construct, and in which the values and understandings of local actors can be better represented. 相似文献
12.
Drawing on the social theory of practice, this paper ‘unpacks’ scenario thinking in the form of strategizing in product innovation teams to explore when and how the practice may lead to the identification of opportunities for innovation. Adopting a case-based approach, three software companies engaged in four new product development projects served as our empirical research sites. We found creative emergence and open-endedness of the practice in innovation teams serving as quintessentially embedded modalities and contingencies that supports the identification of opportunities for innovation as a potential outcome of scenario thinking. We also suggest a framework that specifies how specific team practices supporting scenario thinking (strategic conversation and human-material interactions, and reflexivity-in-practice) may operate in combination or serially, and which may lead in turn to the identification of opportunities for innovation. 相似文献
13.
Shuliang Li Jim Zheng Li 《International Journal of Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance & Management》2009,16(3):231-254
The increased complexity and competition in the global marketing environment present new challenges to decision‐makers. The characteristics of the international marketing planning problem are clarified in this paper. The advantages and disadvantages of relevant techniques and technologies that may be applied to deal with the planning problem are analysed. A multi‐agent‐based hybrid intelligent framework for international marketing planning and associated Internet strategy formulation is then established, with underlying techniques, technologies, software architecture and integration method outlined. In addition, a software prototype of the hybrid framework, called AgentsInternational, is created and presented, with initial evaluation results reported. Further work on this topic is also planned. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 相似文献
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John Hymas 《Journal of Financial Services Marketing》2001,5(4):326-331
The Internet and other electronic channels are enabling a radically different interface between the customer and organisation. This paper argues that too many practitioners in this environment have failed to recognise its primary role as a channel and have been seduced into believing, wrongly, that the medium itself is enough to create a motivational customer proposition. The paper then goes on to describe an approach for a sustainable model based on well-established best practice customer management principles. Finally, it concludes with an example of how real and virtual channels can be used in such a model in a way that each is used to deliver what it is best suited for. 相似文献
16.
This paper assesses the current status and future prospects for bioregional planning in the Southern Appalachian Man and the Biosphere (SAMAB) region in the United States. The SAMAB region is one of the most biodiverse temperate regions in the world. The region's environment is threatened by development, air and water pollution, and invasive species. Numerous institutions in the region have some responsibility for protecting the region's environment, including the National Park Service, the US Forest Service, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, several states, hundreds of municipalities, and numerous active non-profit organizations. Twenty-seven people associated with bioregional planning were interviewed to gauge their opinions on the state of bioregional planning in the SAMAB region. Overall, the respondents do not believe that the totality of all those efforts comprises bioregional planning because the efforts are limited in scale and scope and somewhat uncoordinated. With respect to the future of the region, the respondents found it difficult to imagine the state of the region 50 and especially 200 years into the future. Additionally, almost all of their definitions of bioregional planning included a spatial dimension but none included a time dimension. Thus, one of our conclusions is that the future of bioregional planning in the region will be hampered by difficulties people responsible for environmental protection have in dealing with ‘the future’. Much effort needs to be expended to inculcate people in the region with the desire to anticipate problems long before they occur. Reactive responses, which characterize the majority of current efforts, are likely to be ‘too little, too late’. 相似文献
17.
Participatory planning experiences highlight the crucial role of cognitions produced, shared and used throughout participatory processes. The construction of spatial plans is more and more intended as a socio/political activity producing highly cognitive visions able to guide collective action and make a common good of it.In accordance with the view that a relevant portion of such knowledge is revealed only through action, the paper proposes the idea of structuring-scenarios as open entities able to structure action and, consequently, to bridge participatory knowledge to the impetuous practice of action.The paper first presents and discusses the role of structuring-scenarios in the work carried out while developing an environmental plan for the delta area of the Po River in Italy. Then it reflects on the main features of content and structure of such scenarios. Finally, the paper analyses the ‘structuring properties’ of these scenarios and their role in structuring action. 相似文献
18.
The aging of the baby boomers will have an enormous impact on the future of long-term care costs. This article projects the magnitude of that impact, discusses sources of financing, and considers the cost and feasibility of three options for financing future long-term care services. The authors investigate the alternatives of increasing personal savings, raising payroll taxes and expanding employer-sponsored private long-term care insurance coverage, respectively. 相似文献
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《Futures》1999,31(3-4):333-350
Whatever the specific definition, the common denominator of any kind of forecast is a reference to the future. This implies that all sources of uncertainty associated with describing present and past must also be associated with forecasting—and one more: the specification error inherent in the future dimension. In particular, this error should be associated with the distinction between causality and correlation, i.e. the understanding of behaviour, the necessary prerequisite for prediction. Thus, the key representational problem, the gap between model and reality, and the conditions for controlling that gap, becomes particularly evident in forecasting. This article is an attempt at clarifying some of the uncertainties most prevalent in forecasting, as a means to show with what respect they must be treated. The discussion relates to forecasting in general, but with some special references to air traffic. 相似文献