市场经济体制下基础性研究的若干问题

本文针对近年来我国市场经济的发展给科技领域特别是基础研究带来的变化进行客观的、较为深入的分析，从而进一步阐明基础性研究在我国经济建设中的战略地位。通过分析基础性研究面临的几个主要问题，以对比的方式说明在社会主义市场经济条件下加强基础性研究的必要性并提出相应的对策。     

Eco-logical education for the long emergency

In its inadvertent creation of multiple ecological crises including climate change, humanity as a whole appears caught in a lemmings loop, racing toward a probable future identified as The Long Emergency. One might think that even the possibility of this future scenario should be sufficient to effect a revolution in education. Yet overall there appears to be insufficient depth of respons-ability in this regard, of taking heed of ecological educational discourse. The paper advocates a deeply ecological education through identifying the significance of ecoliteracy as involving a critical contrast between two worldviews (modernism and a prospective ecological worldview). The paper advances futures of ecological thinking through a deep interpretation of ecology and related terms including ecosystem and eco-logics. The complex integrative character of conceptual ecology is foregrounded and extended through associating it with transdisciplinarity, integralism and critical realism under the overarching orientation of Boyer's scholarship of integration.     

Invisible work, invisible skills: interactive customer service as articulation work

The concept of emotional labour provides an incomplete account of interactive service work, underplaying its invisible cognitive and non-routine elements. In interactive work, from customer service jobs in the fast food industry to 'knowledge work' and at those levels in between on which we focus here, many jobs involve 'articulation work'—the often unacknowledged management of awkward intersections among the social worlds of people, technology and organisations.     

The evolution of futures in school education

School education seems to be mostly stuck in an outdated industrial era worldview, unable to sufficiently address the significance and increasing rapidity of changes to humanity that are upon us. An integrated forward-looking view should, now more than ever, be of central importance in how we educate. Yet there is little sign that—unlike corporations—school systems are recognising the true value of futures studies. A brief history of futures in school education shows the significant role played by the World Futures Studies Federation in its evolution to date. The article also introduces integral analysis as a way of opening up new possibilities to help school education develop due foresight and to more fully realise its potential as a prime facilitator in individual and cultural evolution.     

Managerial Behavior, Entrepreneurial Style, and Small Firm Performance

Considerable effort has been devoted to identifying the general characteristics of entrepreneur; however, much of this has been conducted from a trait–based rather than from a behavioral perspective. In this study of small firms in the United Kingdom, we explored the relationships among managerial behaviors (based upon a competence model), entrepreneurial style (based on Covin and Slevin's theory), and firm type (in terms of sales growth performance). Principal components analysis of a management competence inventory identified six broad categories of managerial behavior. Regressing a measure of entrepreneurial style on these six behaviors suggested that managing culture and managing vision are related to an entrepreneurial style, while managing performance is related to a nonentrepreneurial style. Entrepreneurial style—but not managerial behavior—was associated positively with the probability that a firm would be a high–growth type. The results are discussed from the perspective of a model of small firm management that posits separate entrepreneurial, nonentrepreneurial, and generic management behaviors derived from a global competence space.     

HIGHLAND FORESTRY: AN EVALUATION

Almost 20,000 acres of new forest are planted in Highland Scotland each year. At present high interest rates this investment is unlikely to be commercially profitable; the creation of employment in an area of high unemployment is held, however, to justify Government help. These opposing considerations may be quantified though the time-scale of forestry is so long that figures are necessarily tentative. Current levels of costs and prices suggest that the present value of projected forest is about -65 per acre; current rates of change of costs and prices suggest a figure of - 50. As an offset to this shortfall, a continued programme of afforestation of 20,000 acres annually would lead to the creation of an additional 400 jobs in 1985. Larger employment gains will only come about when the bulk of unemployment in the area has already been absorbed by the growth in labour demand attributable to pre-1970 afforestation.     

Futures of integral futures: An analysis of Richard Slaughter's analysis of Causal Layered Analysis

By way of exemplifying the problematisation of particular uses of Wilber's integral approach and its address of postformal thought, this paper analyses Slaughter's “integral” analysis of Inayatullah's Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) which forms part of Slaughter's article, “What difference does ‘integral’ make?” Futures 40 (2) (2008). Evidence given for Slaughter's assertions is investigated. His assertions are then analysed partly by way of hermeneutics, CLA and deconstruction including address of Koestler's holon theory, Jung's archetypes, and Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor. The potential of Slaughter's analysis involves the opening up or furthering of generative dialogue, specifically through extending the possibilities of CLA. As instituted, however, it enacts a premature foreclosure of such potential, partly through offering an inadequate and inaccurate evaluation of CLA. This paper specifically problematises the notion that CLA is not substantively postconventional, whilst pointing to unproductive modernistic tendencies in Slaughter's analysis. In so doing, it opens up new avenues for integral futures.     

Facilitating eco-logical futures through postformal poetic ecosophy

A perspective is given regarding global mindset change: two key interrelated features underlying late modernity – economism and modern atomism – are critically contrasted with three key interrelated features underlying prospective “eco-logical” futures, namely, ecosophy, postformal thinking, and poetics. From a transdisciplinary or complex-integrative perspective, both economism and modern atomism are identified as suffering “economies of truth” whilst postformal poetic ecosophy is identified as involving “complexities of truth” – a better fit for an eco-logical future. The desirability of the following hierarchies is indicated: that the archetype of economy be aptly embraced by ecosophy, formal by postformal, and prosaics by poetics.