Merging art and design in foresight: Making sense of Emerge

Emerge: Artists and Scientists Redesign the Future, hosted by Arizona State University in 2012, united artists, engineers, bioscientists, social scientists, storytellers and designers to build, draw, write and play with the future. Over three days, and in nine different workshops, participants created games, products, monuments, images and stories in an effort to reveal the texture and feel of emergent futures. The Emerge workshops drew from a burgeoning field of future-oriented methods that infuse art, design and information technology into the development and delivery of scenarios and design fictions – a constellation of practices I call “mediated scenarios”. This introduction and the articles in this special issue, work to make sense of these emerging practices, and of Emerge itself, in order to develop appreciation of this rising genre. In doing so, the papers in this issue ask critical questions about the nature of these novel forms of foresight practice and investigate the trade-offs and potencies involved in the workings of mediated scenarios.     

Scenarios based on sustainability discourses: Constructing alternative consumption and consumer perspectives

This paper describes a research based scenario project on sustainable consumption in Belgium. In the Consentsus project a scenario method was developed and tested by the research team to assess scenarios both as learning and participation tools for sustainable consumption. By using a decomposition analysis a solid ground was laid to adequately summarize three guiding principles on how to reach a (more) sustainable consumption: eco-efficiency, de-commodification and sufficiency. These ‘pure’ strategies – showing significant similarities with concrete discourses – were then translated into a participative process: two expert-driven workshops and interim research yielded three future images of food consumption as well as indications on their boundary conditions. These three images reflect significantly diverging approaches on how to organize practices related to food consumption. This structural diversity allowed us to address an archetypical consumer, i.e. a generalized consumer based on the specificities of the scenarios. These consumer perspectives do not aim at indicating real (even potential) groups, but aim at illustrating how the environment of interactions around the consumer fundamentally changes throughout the three sustainability discourses. It is argued that thinking through alternative modes of consumption is of importance to support and elucidate debate in governance arenas that address transitions towards a more sustainable consumption.     

A dynamic systems perspective on fine art and its market

This article focuses on dynamic systems theory applied to art systems, especially the social system of art. By this integrative approach, the field of art and culture can be linked to, as well as profit from, other fields where systems-theoretical approaches have been influential, such as sociology, psychology, communication theory and the natural sciences. We show that systems models help to describe and conceptualize essential phenomena characteristic of the fine arts, such as pattern formation, reduction of complexity, and self-reference. Pattern formation can be observed in emerging artistic styles, fashions and trends. The property of self-reference becomes tractable by using the concept of endosystems, i.e. systems that include participating observers and second circularity feedback. The consequences of such dynamics are uncertainty, destabilization, and diversification. Endosystemic modeling promises to capture core properties not only of contemporary art, laying an emphasis on novelty and self-reference. Endosystems are appropriate models of further social systems, especially markets systems, which pose problems for foresight. Within the horizon of foresight that is at all possible in endosystems, three futures scenarios are worked out for the art system.     

Scenarios as a scholarly methodology to produce “interesting research”

Recent debates identified the insufficient production of “interesting research”, namely research that is innovative and develops theory while being both usable and rigorous. We propose that scenarios methodology as a scholarly form of inquiry is one way in which we can generate “interesting research”. We present and compare how this methodology was used to investigate three research studies: (i) the unfolding of retailing formats in India; (ii) the evolution of migration patterns in Europe and the Mediterranean; and (iii) climate change and regional and urban planning in the Tulum region of the Peninsula of Yucatán. We found that when scenarios are used as a scholarly methodology involving iterations and revisions, they help to challenge existing assumptions, identify novel lines of inquiry, and enable new research opportunities to emerge,—thus opening up a research mode that helps engaged scholars to make sense of and address complex and uncertain contexts and produce interesting findings.     

A case of an early 1900s principal-agent relationship in the Mississippi lumber industry

Correspondence for the L. N. Dantzler Lumber Company, dating from 1904, survives in the Lumber Archives of the University of Mississippi. The correspondence is from the personal files of R. Breland, who rose to the position of office manager of the Dantzler Mills. An analysis of the correspondence reveals a unique agency relationship between the Dantzler Lumber Company and Breland. Breland was hired by the Dantzlers as a land agent. At the time, he was also employed by the Finkbine Lumber Company, a competitor of Dantzler's. Breland's behaviour supports the traditional behavioural assumption in agency theory that individuals will maximize their own self-interests with guile. His access to information allowed him to profit at the expense of others. He used his connections in land-related transactions to achieve personal gain.     

Deconstruction and the responsibilities of the accounting academic

This paper draws on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida to review and re-evaluate the responsibilities of the accounting community and in particular of the accounting academy. The paper begins with a brief explanation of deconstruction and implications of responsible deconstruction for truth in accounting. It is argued that Derrida's philosophy is compatible with a pragmatic approach to the pursuit of truth in accounting. In the second section of the paper the responsible, and essentially ethical, nature of deconstruction is discussed and the charge that it threatens to undermine institutions like accounting that rely of notions of truth, reasons, objectivity and disinterestedness, is rebuffed. In the third part of the paper responsibilities of the university as an institution, and accounting, are discussed drawing on some of Derrida's work on that theme, and in particular responsibility to and for reason. Derrida's analysis is applied to accounting and two competing orders of responsibility are identified and contrasted: a traditional responsibility grounded in representationalism and a new responsibility of openness to the other's demand. In the fourth part of the paper discussion of contrast and tension between types of responsibility is extended into a consideration of the relationship between moral and ethical responsibilities, in the context of accounting education. The paper concludes with reflections on the responsibilities of accounting educators.     

Deconstructing the future of management: Pharmakon,Gary Hamel and the impossibility of invention

There has been a growing tendency to argue that the practice of management must be reinvented in the future in order to energize the creative potential of employees. However, the discourse on ‘management innovation’ attributes a curious dual function to the concept of management. On the one hand, management is portrayed as the ‘toxin’ that can impede innovation. But on the other hand, management is portrayed the ‘cure’ that will heal the defects that prevents innovation. Informed by Derrida's reflection upon the dual meaning of pharmakon, a word that means both ‘remedy’ and ‘poison’, the paper engages with Hamel's popular management handbook The Future of Management. Although Hamel attempts to establish a clear-cut distinction between those principles of management that obstruct and those that facilitate innovation, one is ultimately left uncertain whether management is a cure or a poison for innovation. This ambivalence points to an underlying paradox of contemporary post-managerial thinking that is characterized by incorporating transgression into its productive logic.     

Agency and ownership of housing

In this model, landlords cannot enforce leases conditional on their tenants' efforts to care for their residences, but can exploit economies of scale in maintenance. Also, multifamily properties that have been converted from rental apartments to condominiums or cooperatives cannot be reconverted. In this case, tenants optimally expend less effort on care than homeowners, while landlords partly offset this reduced care with extra maintenance. As a result, single-family houses and residences in small multifamily dwellings are optimally owned by their occupants, while residences in large dwellings are optimally rented to tenants. These results are roughly consistent with the available data.     

Scenarios and design: Scoping the dialogue space

This paper examines the intersections between two futures-oriented domains of practice and research: scenario planning and design. Both are practice-led, with uneasy but productive relationships with theorizing. Exploring their relations offers ways to address challenges faced by interdisciplinary management research, which struggles to connect research and practice. The authors describe how they brought the two fields together. We outline how we convened, designed and facilitated the fourth Oxford Futures Forum held in May 2014. This event brought together leading practitioners and researchers in a collective inquiry based on self-organizing, generative and reflexive making and dialogue. How participants engaged, from responding to the invitation to take part, as well as their practical and discursive encounters with one another during the event, threw up similarities and differences between the two fields. We present nine themes that capture the links and spaces between design and scenarios, yet suggest that they are not a straightforward overlap or a simple relationship, but rather a range of interactions between the fields, including feeding in, bridging, tension and repulsion. The paper's contribution is to suggest how scenario planning can engage with design, resulting in new opportunities for research and projects. These modes of engagement provide a framing to explore dialogues between other management disciplines.     

Scenarios on the spatial and economic development of Europe

Countless autonomous, self-reinforcing and countervailing forces impact the future competitiveness of Europe and its spatial structure. Poignant examples include globalization, ageing and climate change, but also policy decisions taken by nation-states or the European Union. Scenarios are an appropriate method by which to explore possible future developmental pathways in a dynamic context. This contribution describes and discusses four economic policy scenarios produced by the ESPON 3.2 project and link these to the Lisbon Strategy and the European Social Model. In each scenario, a policy package is assembled from existing EU policy areas according to a particular ideological context. Afterwards, its territorial consequences are discussed in terms of socioeconomic disparities, migration and the environment. In so doing, some observations will be made regarding possible spin-offs, trade-offs and side effects of European policy when placed in a spatial context. These scenarios should hold interest for policy discussions on territorial cohesion, a concept which seeks to integrate economic development and spatial planning, as well as on European competitiveness and cohesion.     

Framework foresight: Exploring futures the Houston way

Over the last several years, the University of Houston developed and codified a method for teaching students how to carry out foresight projects. This development represented a philosophical shift from a neutral presentation of methods without particular advocacy for one or the other. The challenge that this neutral approach presented is that each method is somewhat different and especially for those new to foresight, it became challenging to find common ground, distinguish them, or to know when to use one or the other. Our experience is that our initial wariness of promoting a standard method and thus a “one-right-way” of doing foresight proved unfounded. Not only does it not detract from the teaching of other methods, in fact it has made it easier. Framework Foresight was deliberately built to accommodate and incorporate other methods and approaches. It provides a basis of comparison of how various practitioners and methods do the work, enabling them to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each. Framework Foresight thus could be viewed as a meta-method in that it is a modular approach that accommodates a substitution of, or supplementation from, other methods or techniques at various steps. As students became practitioners and used the method in their practice, they have provided useful feedback and have generally reported back good results. Thus, Framework Foresight is offered to the foresight community as a method for carrying out foresight projects     

Food scenarios 2025: Drivers of change between global and regional

This article presents the results of a future study of the food sector. Two scenarios have been developed using a combination of: 1) a summary of the relevant scientific knowledge, 2) systematic scenario writing, 3) an expert-based Delphi technique, and 4) an expert seminar assessment. The two scenarios present possible futures at global, national (Denmark) and regional (Zealand, Denmark) levels. The main scenario is called ‘Food for ordinary days and celebrations’ (a combination of ‘High-technological food production − The functional society’ and ‘High-gastronomic food − The experience society’). A less likely scenario is called ‘The reappearence of the sea − The aquarial society’. The purpose of the scenario writing has been to provide strategic tools for societal actors who to create economic growth and jobs, particularly regional governments and firms. Suggestions concerning regional industrial policy and firm actions are included in the article.     

Puzzling,powering and perpetuating: Long-term decision-making by the Dutch Delta Committee

Long term policy issues like climate change adaptation are considered wicked in the sense that uncertain knowledge and volatile societal understandings associated to the issue might jeopardize long term sustainment of adaptation policies. Uncertainty or sudden societal opposition might politically be employed to dismantle earlier made policies or investments and therefore threaten long term adaptive capacity. This article highlights how successful long-term decision-making can be understood as a matter of puzzling over uncertainty and powering for getting things done, but above all requires sustainment of these decisions on the long term. For doing so the paper analyses the decision-making process of the Dutch Delta Committee in 2008, which firmly put the climate adaptation issue on the Dutch political agenda and subsequently sustained the issue on the policy agenda through the creation of a Delta Commissioner, a Delta Fund and a Delta Act. Our analysis illustrates how the crucial actors in and around the Second Delta Committee deployed strategies of puzzling, powering, and what we define as perpetuation to deal with the long-term policy issue of climate adaptation. The latter is especially important for policy issues that require a long-term continued effort by policy-makers, or will only manifest themselves on the long term. Then, it is not only important to create meaning and organize power now, but also to maintain and ensure that meaning and power for time to come.     

Agency theory and the House bank affair

In one of the worst political scandals of the 1990s, a large number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives wrote checks on nonexistent balances in what has become known as the House bank scandal. Agency theory tells us that the most entrenched members of the House should be more likely to consume excessive perquisites in the form of writing more bad checks. In this paper, we employ a Tobit model to test whether more entrenched members of the House engaged in excessive writing of bad checks. Our results support the agency-theoretic interpretation and confirm that entrenched members were more likely to write a greater number of bad checks.     

A note on the interaction effects of non-financial measures of performance

Using principal-agent analyses, the effect of the interactions between two non-financial measures of performance in an agent’s incentive compensation scheme is studied. The agent can allocate effort between “meeting output targets” and “getting output that needs no rework.” The principal trades off (1) a penalty for not meeting output targets, and (2) cost of reworking output that is defective when initially produced. In a compensation mechanism that includes incentives based on measures of output that needs no rework, as well as total output, it is shown that the agent may respond to an increased weight on output that needs no rework by reducing effort allocated towards it. This occurs when the increased weight on the output that needs no rework is accompanied by a sufficiently steep decrease in the weight on total output in the compensation mechanism, leading to a reduction of all effort, and all output. Numerical analyses and implications for the use of multiple measures of performance-based incentives are provided.     

Corporate voluntary disclosure and the separation of cash flow rights from control rights

We find that corporate voluntary disclosure is negatively associated with the separation of cash flow rights from control rights. This result is consistent with the notion that as the separation of cash flow rights from control rights increases, controlling owners have larger incentives to expropriate the wealth of minority shareholders and low corporate disclosure constitutes a mechanism to facilitate controlling owners in masking their private benefits of control. The negative association between voluntary disclosure and the separation of cash flow rights from control rights is less pronounced for firms with greater external financing needs. This result suggests that for firms with high separation of cash flow rights from control rights, those with greater external financing needs undertake higher firm-level voluntary disclosure to reduce information asymmetry. We also find that the negative association between voluntary disclosure and the separation of cash flow rights from control rights is less pronounced for firms that have a large non-management shareholder. Our result supports the role of large non-management shareholder in mitigating agency problems associated with the separation of ownership and control.

Social trust and the demand for audit quality

Our study explores the association between social trust and the demand for audit quality. We argue that social trust reduces the demand for audit quality because it mitigates agency problems. By exploring Chinese listed firms, we find that firms in regions with higher social trust are less likely to choose big auditors, suggesting that higher social trust is associated with lower demand for audit quality. This finding arises because social trust disciplines managers by creating norms and relational networks to constrain opportunistic behaviors. Moreover, firms in high-trust regions have higher financial reporting quality, and the influence of social trust is more pronounced for firms with severer agency problems. Our results suggest that social trust allows firms to rely less on quality audits.     

Small firms and the value of improvements in corporate governance mechanisms

Since 2002, many firms have been required to alter their board of directors and committees to increase management monitoring. Kinney and McDaniel (1989) and Chhaochharia and Grinstein (2007) provide empirical evidence suggesting that investments in corporate governance may differ based on firm size, and that under-investing in monitoring may be more pronounced in smaller firms. To further test whether the benefits of recent changes in companies' governance mechanisms accrue to smaller firms that have underinvested in governance, we examine the stock market reaction to changes in board structure over the twenty-four months following the passage of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act. We construct a new composite measure of board structure and regress buy-and-hold abnormal returns on changes that occur in the Board Structure Index, finding that improvements in corporate governance quality result in economically significant abnormal returns accruing only to the smaller firms with weak initial board structures.     

多元化战略与代理成本、公司业绩关系的实证研究

本文主要研究上市公司采取多元化战略后对公司代理成本及公司业绩的影响。许多学者对目前多元化折价现象进行了解释,认为由于内部资本市场的无效率导致了多元化公司的资源配置没有发挥着理论上应该具备的优势;很多学者从代理问题出发来解释多元化折价现象,但是针对代理成本与多元化程度的关系做实证检验就很少。验证多元化是否真的提高了代理成本,本文正是基于这一点来展开研究的。结论为代理成本与多元化程度成正比,公司业绩与多元化程度成反比。     

Optimal warranty arrangements for the design of accounting information systems

This paper investigates optimal price/warranty arrangements for the design of accounting information systems (AISs) when the user of the system has alternative sources of information. A mathematical model is developed that focuses on two systems design scenarios commonly encountered in practice: (1) enhancement and (2) replacement. In an enhancement scenario the AIS user hires the AIS designer to enhance the value of the current AIS by incorporating additional features into the original system. Systems replacement, on the other hand, implies that the designer produces a new system that makes the original system obsolete. Under a replacement system, a simple limited warranty implements the user's optimal decision rule so that no losses occur due to unobservability of the user's decision. For the enhanced AIS design however, the user's action may depend upon the signal from the user's preexisting AIS. Therefore, when the user's decision is not observable, the designer does not know if the user's decision is a result of the systems enhancement or a result of the original system. Due to incomplete contracts, a more complex and costly warranty arrangement is required. Hence, losses occur under enhancement AIS although quality can be maintained with a limited warranty. Since it is difficult to assess the quality of the information system prior to purchase, the potential for a market failure exists where high-quality systems are driven from the market by low quality systems. These findings show that a market failure can be prevented in the design of information systems through contractual warranty arrangements. These warranty arrangements, however, must be tailored to the specific design task.