Coming home: Sex, lies and all the ‘l’ in India

The nation states of India and Pakistan cannot cope with the ethnic diversity and cultural complexity of South Asia. To rise above the ethnic divide and communal strife, the nation states of the region must come together as a civilization. Through an analysis of the work of the great Urdu short stories writer, Sadat Hassan Manto, this article explores various avenues through which the fragmented nation states of the Subcontinent can heal their divided Selves and provide a genuine civilizational home for the people of India.     

ESSAY: Attitudes to death and the future changing our thinking

The drive to survive has been extremely strong for individuals and groups over the course of history and across various cultures. Given the rapid increase in population, however, carrying capacity may have already been exceeded. Although limiting births, improving quality of and extent of participation in social life, applying technology and other approaches may help, the likelihood is that there are already more people than can be reasonably accommodated on our planet Earth. Attitudes towards death may need to and may in fact, change from shock and horror to a far greater acceptance than in the recent past.     

The future begins today: Nature as teacher in environmental adult popular education

The future begins today is a review of the importance and role of learning, specifically environmental adult and popular education, in working with communities and community-based organizations on planning, organizing and revisioning life from an ecological perspective. The authors report on their work based at the Transformative Learning Centre in Toronto, Canada which explores the role of nature as both teacher and site of learning. Theoretical and practical illustrations are included.All education, up to our present moment, has never countenanced the possibility of planetary destruction from the destruction of the life-support system. This viability of planetary existence was never an issue for educators because it was not, until now, part of our cultural understanding. (Hall and O'Sullivan, Transformative Learning: Contexts and Practices, 1994)The human enterprise cannot be separated from the natural world even in our minds because no such separation exists in nature.(Wackernagel and Rees, Our Ecological Footprint, 1995).     

The challenge of the future and the institutionalization of interdisciplinarity: notes on Herman Kahn’s legacy

This article is an attempt to explore Herman Kahn’s foundational contribution to the development of what he called “broad studies”, a combination of futures research and public policy analysis. In Kahn’s view, decision making and policy processes pose two crucial problems that the scholarly research is rarely forced to face: (1) the need to have and operate with a broad, multifaceted vision of phenomena and (2) the issue of coping imaginatively and realistically with future circumstances and conditions that can only vaguely be distinguished in the present. Implied in these two is the need to develop new methods and approaches fitted to the charges imposed by them. The paper discusses Kahn’s work as an integrated solution to these problems: The definition and advocacy of broad and future-oriented studies, his concept on how these studies should be institutionalized in interdisciplinary organizational systems, and the crucial position scenarios and propaedeutic and heuristic methodologies have in this context. A special attention is given to two methodological approaches he developed to cope with these challenges: Scenario Building and the Method of Classes of Variables.When twenty years ago, on July 7, 1983, Herman Kahn died suddenly at age 61, both friends and intellectual adversaries recognized that “the world lost one of its most creative and best minds” [1] and [2]. By that time Herman Kahn was one of the preeminent and best known Futures Studies scholars, a founding father of the field, with extensive and vital contributions in Strategic Studies, an area where he was also considered a founding figure and a leader [3] and [4]. His work was followed all over the world and the directions he traced in the public debate on very sensitive issues of crucial public concern have continued to be unaltered today, twenty years after his unexpected and premature death. Yet in spite of the incessant influence of his arguments and ideas, today his intellectual legacy is still to be accounted for and the breath and depth of his contributions are still to be reviewed and analyzed in a systematic way. This paper is an attempt to explore only one dimensions of this legacy: Kahn’s foundational contribution to the development of what he liked to call “broad studies”, a combination of futures research and public policy analysis.The two decades that have passed since his death allow us today to approach his work undisturbed by the “sound and fury” of the many public debates and controversies he participated in and to focus on some of the deepest and most enduring dimensions of his intellectual contributions. However while doing that, we should keep in mind that for Kahn the public policy process shaping the future and the public debate associated to it were always the focal points and the ultimate ends of his efforts. Indeed, probably the best approach to Kahn’s work is to see it in the light of his continuous concern for the practical relevance of the social research. For him the research process was always action-oriented and its ultimate test was its relevance for policy and social action. As a result, the most promising starting point for any overview of Kahn’s thought and work should be a set of crucial conclusions he reached about the policy making process and decision makers early in his career.     

The future of tourism and globalization: Some critical remarks

Present-day generalizations on the future of tourism see it as a key force in the process of globalization. This paper challenges this notion by pointing out that our knowledge of the real shape of world travel and tourism is still quite limited and that the sketchy evidence we can gather with present-day tools thus presents a much more modest picture confronting the claim that tourism has reached a high level of globalization. While it is an activity practiced all over the world, it is scarcely global. In this sense, the perception that tourism is wholeheartedly global and that it mainly connects the richer parts of the world with the poorest pleasure peripheries is but a figment of the post-romantic collective imagination that dominates much tourism research.     

Traditional energy resources : Present state and future development

In the United Kingdom, in particular, the difficulty of reconciling short-term economic and commercial objectives with long-term technical and supply problems has been complicated by new elements: the nuclear energy programme, the discoveries of natural gas and the extension of off-shore oil exploration. The situation is further complicated when the energy problems of the third world are considered, for world consumption will reach astronomical proportions if it were to approach the current North American level. The most hopeful feature of the energy situation is that its seriousness is now being realised.     

Timeliness of corporate and audit reports: Some empirical evidence in the French context

The issue of timeliness of financial reporting, an important qualitative characteristic of accounting information, has received much attention from regulatory and professional bodies in France in recent years. The increasing presence of international investors, particularly from the US, on the Paris Stock Exchange adds to the importance of this issue. The timeliness of corporate and audit reports in the French context is analyzed by examining the trend in reporting delay of companies, the effect that qualified reports have on the timeliness of corporate reporting, and the relationship between reporting behavior and types of audit reports over a 10-year period. The data are taken from more than 5000 annual reports of French publicly held companies for the years 1986-1995. These bear witness to an improvement in timeliness of corporate and audit reports. This improvement is greater for reports from consolidated accounts of groups than those from annual accounts of companies. There is also evidence that qualified audit opinions were released later than unqualified opinions and that, in general, the more serious the qualification, the greater the delay.     

Evolutionary analogies and sustainability: Putting a human face on survival

In recent years, analogies taken from the natural world, and from evolutionary theory in particular, have been increasingly applied to problems outside the field of biology. The growing interest in issues of sustainability has not escaped this trend and the application of evolutionary analogies to issues of sustainability is discussed and its benefits outlined. Furthermore, a conceptual tool for addressing issues of sustainability within an evolutionary framework is presented and its main features investigated. There are, however, a number of reasons for caution when adopting any analogy for the purposes of theory development. These points of circumspection are investigated and a number of suggestions are made for enriching the framework to facilitate the application of evolutionary analogies to human-centred and other non-biological systems. This is achieved by recognizing the unique characteristics of human beings and interpreting the component factors of evolutionary theory so as to account for the fundamental differences between humans and other species.     

Intangibles: The soft side of innovation

The ‘soft side’ of the innovation process is easily ignored. Nonetheless it is crucial in understanding the complexity of innovation processes and competitiveness in a knowledge-based, de-materialized economy. This article focuses on intangible investments as a component of this soft side of innovation practice. First, we will introduce and discuss the concept and meaning of intangible investments. Next, we will illustrate the growing significance of intangibles by considering examples from five industries (producing clothes and fashion, flowers, beer, publishing and financial services). Synthesizing the results from these five cases, we will link the role of intangible investments with service functions in innovation practice. Finally, we will discuss some emerging implications for both future business strategy and policy-making.     

Sri Lanka: Futures beyond conflict

Not so long ago, Sri Lanka was stereotypically portrayed as a stable, model democracy inhabited by friendly and fun-loving natives; a place in the sun reserved for enjoyment; an oasis in the so called (poverty and disease ridden) ‘Third World’; a virtual paradise for tourists and natives alike. In reality, Sri Lanka has seen the burgeoning of revolutionary struggles and nationalist fervour, from putschist attempts to capture state power to liberation and self-determination. The author argues that it is the model of parliamentary democracy that is largely responsible for the ethnic violence and bloodshed on this island. It ensured the rise of the post-colonial political élite who then ensured that all the hegemonic tendencies of colonialism were preserved and entrenched. It is imperative for shaping viable futures for Sri Lanka that a new ethics and moral code of good governance—which includes transparency in government and politics—is initiated.     

The zeno event: Science and the acceleration of history

It is commonly accepted that the scientific and technological revolution constantly increases its speed. There are a variety of indicators of this process, and an interesting, perhaps important, question is whether they tend to a common conclusion about the future of our society. In this study, we examine several such indicators, relating to both short- and long-term processes. We find that they all agree, predicting a sort of ‘Zeno event’ around the middle of the next century. This current investigation serves as a signal to those who wish to study the possibility of such a limit-event; its time-series can be tested again in the near future. If they are corroborated, this approach can serve as a well-validated warning, so that we may not merely study the world of the future but also transform it.