Problematizing international business futures through a ‘critical scenario method’

This paper proposes the need for change in how managers in international business (IB) determine organisational objectives and what criteria they use in addressing complex problems. We propose a move from a largely firm-centric focus; on profit maximization and shareholder value; to a broader societal and environmental view. We see the educational context as the locus for initiating such a shift. However, we see obstacles within the canon of mainstream IB textbooks, with their focus on exposition of normative models of managerial action, illustrated by case studies of successful multinational enterprises (MNEs). Whilst we acknowledge their incorporation of critical issues, we view the lack of substantive critical reflection on the wider implications of IB activity as underpinned by an implicit assumption of the ‘good’ of IB. We posit that the normative structure of mainstream texts militates against students understanding the full range of possible futures for IB practice, and against developing the capability to cope with situations of uncertainty and ambiguity. Seeking to promote a critical pedagogy that accommodates consideration of both mainstream approaches and critical responses to these, we propose one approach to teaching and learning about IB futures that is based upon development of what we term ‘critical scenario method’. This offers a basis for active investigation of complex problems in the ‘real’ world from a range of perspectives, beyond that of profit maximization. We provide a worked, case example of our new method and demonstrate how it will enhance perceptions/understandings of involved and affected actors’ interests and their likely (re)actions as a particular scenario unfolds. The theoretical grounding for this approach is based upon contemporary social science interpretation of the Aristotelian concept of phronēsis, or ‘practical wisdom’.     

Confronting tourism's environmental paradox: Transitioning for sustainable tourism

Tourism requires environmental resources as core ingredients and compelling backdrops for the production of tourism experiences. Paradoxically it also depends on the protection of the ecological integrity of these features for sustained competitiveness. This ‘resource paradox’ has epitomized relationships between tourism and the environment for decades. However, unprecedented reportings of the frequency, severity and persistence of adverse weather conditions; climate change; natural disasters; disease outbreaks; and various forms of environmental pollution, cumulatively highlight the urgency for more systematically managing tourism's resource paradox. This paper characterizes the industry's environmental and sustainability performance, and suggests planning and management approaches that will be needed to move it towards a more sustainable future. It uses a case study of ‘sustainability-focused’ tourism destination planning to illustrate the type of collective actions that must occur if the industry is to successfully manage tourism's challenging environmental relationships. It is argued that more collective and vision-oriented approaches to tourism industry planning are needed to address broader and more pervasive environmental and sustainability challenges.     

Futures studies’ backcasting method used for strategic sustainable city planning

Achieving a sustainable city requires long-term visions, integration and a system-oriented approach to addressing economic, environmental and social issues. This paper case studies a sustainable city planning project, Göteborg 2050, that uses the backcasting method. Visionary images of a long-term sustainable future can stimulate an accelerated movement towards sustainability. The paper describes a special kind of scenario methodology to build a future model for city development as a planning tool in facilitating a sustainable society. Backcasting in futures studies is widely discussed together with the comparison of three selected backcasting approaches, including Robinson's approach, The Natural Step Framework, and the Sustainable Technology Development approach. The purposes of this paper are to examine and discuss the use of the backcasting method within the Project Göteborg 2050, lessons learned and findings drawn from the experience. The case study shows that backcasting is an appropriate method in developing action plans for achieving urban sustainability. This work can be served as a model for sustainable city planning in Thailand as well as other countries.     

Rationality and Politics in Pit Closure Decisions

This paper considers whether pit closure decisions can be justified solely on financial grounds. It examines a variety of approaches drawn from accounting and economics, which may be arranged in a crude ‘hierarchy of sophistication’. The paper's conclusion is that the pit closure problem is far more complex than has generally been portrayed to the public, and that satisfactory solutions to it cannot be derived solely from within traditional accounting or economic approaches. The paper is a pedagogic exercise which exposes the limitations and partiality of accounting and finance by applying them to a particular, well-documented case. The paper argues for the inclusion of externalities and social welfare considerations in a planning framework for British Coal guided by Schumacher's principle of conservation.     

From vision to action: Framing the Leitbild concept in the context of landscape planning

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.     

Cities of the imagination: Science fiction, urban space, and community engagement in urban planning

Stories, dreams, histories and myths, Michel de Certeau argues, connect people to particular places and makes place concrete and inhabitable. These narratives generate an imaginary, poetic geography that haunts the abstract city of street maps and development plans, and makes it socially meaningful. This paper is concerned with one particular kind of story-telling - science fiction - and its relationship with the city, urban planning, and questions of community engagement. The paper argues that the ‘cities of the imagination’ generated by science fiction and other forms of narrative provide a powerful means of understanding, communicating and enriching the connections to place in urban communities. Moreover, science fiction is often characterised by its ability to explore the future of cities. This gives the genre a fascinating and potentially useful resonance with urban planning as a discourse and set of practices; and, in particular, strategies for engaging communities in the design process and, thus, designing for future social sustainability. These ideas will be tested through a reading of near-future urban spatiality in the cyberpunk stories of William Gibson. The theorisation of the relationship between urban space and narrative in the work of de Certeau and other theorists will be used to help frame this discussion.     

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.     

Participation in budgeting: A critical anthropological approach

Accounting researchers adopting structural and post-structural interpretive approaches have long criticized mainstream assumptions about the enduring economic aspects of accounting systems, highlighting their roles in reflecting and shaping social realities that are contradictory, diverse, and changing. The paper aims to develop this critique by inquiring empirically and philosophically into the roles that constructing participation in budgeting might play in enhancing ‘ontological plurality’, that is, supporting actors’ perspectives, abilities and concerns which are generally excluded by structuring action to maximize private profits. It defines and elaborates a critical anthropological approach using Marx’s notion of ‘social praxis’ and Latour’s idea of ‘modes of existence’ to highlight the theoretical contribution of anthropologists exploring beyond traditional divides over social agency through studies of grassroots participative responses to contemporary socio-economic crises. Drawing on ethnographic data collected through a multiple site case study of eight worker cooperatives in Argentina, the paper analyses how reciprocal relations between the actors’ levels of agency in wider associative actions, and their degrees of participation in budgeting, caused gradual expansions in ontological plurality, moving the actors beyond their particular tensions and broader structural conflicts. Exploring the notion of ‘ontological movements’, the paper develops a continuum of participation and ontological pluralism in budgeting, which it argues contributes to the structural and post-structural interpretive accounting literatures through historical, constructive, and participative components.     

Operationalization of space/time perspectives of individuals—Theory and empirical results from Turkey

The overall aim of the research is to provide an evaluation of differences in time and space perspectives of individuals in Turkey in order to understand the different approaches, perspectives or priorities that they may bring to futures studies.An empirical study aimed to collect information about the varying differences in time and space perspectives among participant individuals (undergraduate and PhD students at Yeditepe University and managers at Siemens-Turkey) and any other possible factors affecting the participants’ choices. Two sets of statements are generated representing the time and space perspectives of participants using the modified constructs found in the literature such as “Time Strata”, “Space-Time Graph”, and “Different Time Frames and Activities”.Our sample population of 185 individuals indicated a time horizon of 4.8 years and space horizon of 530 km. Majority of the sample population is observed to be concerned with issues that affect only their close environment over a short time period of “next week”, along with their larger geographical area as the “city”. A few of the sample population indicated to have a global perspective on time and space that can further reach into the future.Literature suggesting different individuals having different perspectives on time and space, depending on culture, past experience and the nature of the problems are instrumentalized in our study by relating it to the foresight tools and methodologies. Such varying perspectives may explain individuals/managers’ time and space horizon in which they think and act/execute.Based on the analysis of space/time preference of participant individuals, policy makers will benefit from incorporating the diversity of time and space dimensions into their strategic thought and national policy roadmaps.This exploratory study is comprised of the assessment of differing definitions and approaches to the future via individuals’ space and time perspectives. It aims to contribute to foresight methodologies and approaches, as well as bringing a significant impact on the quality and success of the national foresight project results.     

Enabling control and the problem of incomplete performance indicators

To which extent do managers care about the design characteristics of performance indicators and other control systems? The paper examines this question with the help of the framework of enabling and coercive control. Drawing upon data from a longitudinal field study in a manufacturing organisation, we study operational managers’ attitudes towards the incompleteness of performance indicators. Managers are likely to perceive performance indicators as enabling if the latter facilitate their actions without unduly constraining them. This is true even for incomplete performance indicators as long as managers can handle these indicators in a flexible way, treating them as means rather than ends when carrying out their work. Our case also shows, however, how a flexible use of indicators becomes more difficult to sustain once top management signals an increased importance of the indicators. Incompleteness then becomes a more pressing concern for managers. We illuminate the various forms of top management sense-giving through which such tightening of control is achieved and we show how they translate into managers’ perception of the control system as being a coercive rather than enabling one. Taken together, the findings of the present paper add to our understanding of enabling and coercive forms of control and also extend previous studies that have addressed the problem of incomplete accounting information.     

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’.     

Unravelling the complexity of collective mental models: A method for developing and analysing scenarios in multi-organisational contexts

In multi-organisational contexts, scenario building has been used to engage stakeholders in a critical discussion on issues of mutual importance, and to gain their support with regards to possible future responses. A review of existing literature suggests that much has been written regarding the process of scenario development and the benefits of the process, but the detailed analysis of scenario building outcomes, which encompass a large number of issues and their complex interconnections, has not been made explicit for studying and enhancing understanding of a complex societal problem. This paper presents a systematic method for analysing such complex outcomes in order to facilitate reflective thinking on important issues within the wider context for policy development. The method was employed in a series of participative scenario development workshops, which yielded several causal maps around the theme of construction industry skills. A collective map merging the individual subject-specific causal maps was created to help provide a more holistic overview of the pertinent issues surrounding the construction skills debate. The analysis of this collective map promotes a better understanding of the issue in the wider context, the consequence of possible future events and actions, and of the pre-requisition required for certain events/desired outcomes to take place. The main benefit that could be derived from the method is the opportunity to help facilitate and encourage debate and discussion amongst key stakeholders regarding scenario theme, in this case skills improvement within construction. Due to its flexibility and adaptability, the method could potentially be applied to other areas requiring longer range planning and which contain multiple stakeholder perspectives.     

The hegemony of the physical sciences: an exploration in complexity thinking

Traditionally the natural sciences, particularly physics, have been regarded as the Gatekeepers of Truth. As such the legitimacy of others forms of knowledge have been called into question, particularly those methods that characterise the ‘softer’ sciences, and even the arts. This paper begins with an extended discussion concerning the main features of a complex system, and the nature of the boundaries that emerge within such systems. Subsequent to this discussion, and by assuming that the Universe at some level can be well-described as a complex system, the paper explores the notion of ontology, or existence, from a complex systems perspective. It is argued that none of the traditional objects of science, or any objects from any discipline, formal or not, can be said to be real in any absolute sense although a substantial realism may be temporarily associated with them. The limitations of the natural sciences is discussed as well as the deep connection between the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft’ sciences. As a result of this complex systems analysis, an evolutionary philosophy referred to as quasi-‘critical pluralism’ is outlined, which is more sensitive to the demands of complexity than contemporary reductionistic approaches.     

Futurists and their schools: A response to Ziauddin Sardar's ‘the namesake’

A ‘futurist’ is the generic term for someone seriously engaged in the consideration of future conditions. ‘Futures research’ has a systems science orientation with a planning horizon in excess of 10 years. ‘Futures studies’ has a social science connotation and ‘foresight’ is the most popular term within the management science and corporate sectors. Five schools of futures researchers are defined: 1. Environmental and geosciences. 2. Infrastructure systems and engineering technology. 3. Social, political and economic science. 4. Human life, mind and information science. 5. Business and management science. The academic route to a futures qualification is outlined with a list of futures orientated organisations. The inclusion of urbanisation in the next generation of scenarios for climate change research and assessment, would involve replacing the notion of economic equilibrium by the concept of far-from-equilibrium stability. Finally futures research is described as an evolutionary science, which will possibly become integrated within complexity science by 2050.     

Can internally generated futures accelerate organizational learning?

After many years of scenario planning, this paper takes a moment to reflect on its use within, and value to, organizations. The author states that ultimately the benefit of scenario planning must result from ‘changed and more skilful action by the organization within its business environment.’ Navigating through the business environment is discussed as taking on two forms, that of strategising and learning where the former is dominated by ‘knowing by gaining control’ and the latter by ‘knowing by participation’ and reflection. Taking this logic a step further, van der Heijden sees the purpose of scenario planning as being categorisable along two dimensions content/process and thinking/action producing a matrix of four categories of purpose. Although he sees these four reasons for using scenario planning as harbouring different degrees of difficulty and likelihood of success, he advocates above all that organizations think carefully about which category is appropriate for them and ensure that the process of scenario planning is designed to support this goal.     

Municipal visions: Reflexive futures between paradigm and practice

How does the reflexive knowledge we develop about institutions and environments influence the expectations we might have about the future? The paper addresses this question in the context of Foresight in local governance. It describes a project aiming at creating visions for a Norwegian municipality by inviting schoolchildren to contribute with their ideas of the future. The focus is on how the interactions between project owners and participants produced certain forms of resistance and led to visions best described as idealistic conformism. Introducing the idea of ‘reflexive futures’, I suggest that that a broader understanding of reflexivity as containing both enabling and constraining features can help to unlock certain paradoxes of current Foresight and provide a renewed inquiry into the practise of visioning for strategy and long-term planning.     

The impact of sovereign rating actions on bank ratings in emerging markets

This paper analyses the effects of sovereign rating actions on the credit ratings of banks in emerging markets, using a sample from three global rating agencies across 54 countries for 1999–2009. Despite widespread attention to sovereign ratings and bank ratings, no previous study has investigated the link in this manner. We find that sovereign rating upgrades (downgrades) have strong effects on bank rating upgrades (downgrades). The impact of sovereign watch status on bank rating actions is much weaker and often insignificant. The sensitivity of banks’ ratings to sovereign rating actions is affected by the countries’ economic and financial freedom and by macroeconomic conditions. Ratings of banks with different ownership structures are all influenced strongly by the sovereign rating, with some variation depending on the countries’ characteristics. Emerging market bank ratings are less likely to follow sovereign rating downgrades during the recent financial crisis period.     

The organizational dynamics of Enterprise Risk Management

This paper explores the organizational dynamics of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM). ERM is the main form taken by firms’ increasing efforts to organize uncertainty, which ‘exploded’ in the 1990s. The ERM approach seeks to link risk management with business strategy and objective-setting, entering the domains of control, accountability and decision making. In this work, the organizational variations of ERM are investigated through a longitudinal multiple case study, using data from three companies collected over a 7-year period (from 2002 to 2008). The findings contribute to our understanding of ERM as a practice, revealing its trajectory within the organizations as it encounters pre-existing logics, and as both are shaped by risk rationalities, experts and technologies.     

Books to be practiced: Memory,the power of the visual,and the success of accounting

The aim of this paper is to explore the conditions which allow the emergence of accounting as a performable technique that can spread successfully across economies and societies. Drawing on insights offered by studies on the art of memory, Actor-Network Theory, and that broader branch of history known as the history of the book, it is argued that the emergence and spread of accounting can be understood by studying the relationships among four interrelated aspects: the nature of accounting as a method of classification for the organisation of thinking and knowledge; its reliance on images and its visual impact; its ‘orthopraxis’ nature, which offers a workable space and time; and the relationships between accounting and the medium through in which it materialises. The combination of these four features explains how it is that accounting is a practice which is homogeneous enough to be recognised as autonomous and heterogeneous enough to attract diversity and create difference. I was motivated to study these issues after examining two early accounting treatises: the Indirizzo degli Economi, by the Benedictine, Pietra (1586) [Pietra, A. (1586). Indirizzo degli economi o sia ordinatissima istruttione da regolamente formare qualunque scrittura in un libro doppio. Aggiuntovi l’essemplare di un Libro nobile co ‘l suo Giornale ad uso della Congregatione Cassinese dell’Ordine in San Benedetto. Mantova: Francesco Osanna]; and the Trattato del libro doppio domestico col suo essemplare, by the Jesuit, Flori (1636), [Flori, L. (1636). Trattato del modo di tenere il libro doppio domestico col suo essemplare composto dal P. Lodovico Flori della Compagnia di Gesù per uso delle case e dei collegi della medesima Compagnia nel Regno di Sicilia, in Palermo, per Decio Cirillo]. Along with studies examining the emergence of modern management as a result of an economic need for rationalisation, the paper offers material for reflecting on a concomitant rationale which views innovations in the method of organisation, visual presentation, medium of communication, and praxis, as the mayor forces in the diffusion of accounting in both historical and contemporary settings.     

Specialists as risk managers: The competition between intermediated and non-intermediated markets

We develop a model that analyzes competition between a non-intermediated market (such as an electronic communications network) and an intermediated market (such as via the market specialist’s structure within the NYSE) when both markets are allowed to trade the same securities. Specialists are viewed as providers of a “volatility dampening” service, a mechanism for reducing round-trip trading costs, as well as an “order execution risk management” service. The economic value of these three specialist services is determined by five key factors (the difference in spreads between the two financial market types, investors’ holding periods, the specialist’s quoted spread in relation to the asset’s price, the relative probability of executing an order in the intermediated market, and the short-term risk-free rate).