Futures最新文献

The process of foresight, which allows companies and organizations to build scenarios and inform the creation and sustainment of their competitive advantage, relies on the integration of several steps. Scanning is a crucial step of foresight, as it informs and influences the results of the whole process and, thus, the strategic decision-making of the company. Sources and methods of scanning for foresight analysis can be diverse and lead to different results, although few studies investigate such differences: more specifically, the informative power of academic and non-academic articles and reports has not been assessed yet. This study aims to shed novel light on how the different analysis methods of full reading of records and text mining analysis isolate and gather forces of change differently, based on the source analyzed. The study’s empirical context is the metaverse and its application in healthcare. We find that each source and method by itself is unable to fully gather the whole set of forces of change; however, each source presents some topics that are specific to the target readers of the source, and each methodology presents some advantages as well as some limitations. From the comparison of the results, theoretical and managerial implications are drawn.

Along with a growing debate around the emergence of a new time on Earth, called the Anthropocene, a critical perspective has emerged in the field of Human and Social Sciences that questions the terms of this nomination, including its temporality, its view of humanity as species, its capitalist impetus and its colonialist position. In this essay, I seek to materialize this critical view by analysing how corporate discourse has promoted "ethical solutions" for the Anthropocene, particularly in the sphere of consumption. Taking The Fable of the Bees of Bernard Mandeville as a starting point, I show that in the context of capitalism, consumption is based on the logic of excess and the promise of unlimited satisfaction, which is opposed to what the time of catastrophes demands. In dialogue with a prolific interdisciplinary academic production on another way of understanding the Anthropocene, I argue that it is not possible to think about an ethical consumption in the Anthropocene. I propose a return to the ancestral future of Indigenous peoples as a means to envision another ethics, one in which the critique of consumption does not evolve into an implicit endorsement of it or its future.

Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) has emerged as a model supported by popular discourse on achieving greener, more efficient and equitable future mobility. While technological change is a primary driver for models of development, the policy pathways, implementation and implications of MaaS are complex and unclear. In this paper, we explore the implications and limitations of a participatory approach to co-produced MaaS futures in Greater Manchester (GM). We adapt a backcasting methodology involving two stakeholder workshops to develop shared future visions and action pathways. Our methodology includes a participatory approach to pluralistic vision development and the use of a Three Horizons method for backcasting. This approach provides the opportunity to explore multiple desirable futures and the formulation of action pathways without negating plausible future possibilities. The research identifies multiple policy and collaborative action areas while also revealing limitations in MaaS user agency and unaddressed sustainability concerns related to wider Smart City criticisms. Findings also suggest a lack of adequate theory within current MaaS frameworks to engage with uncertainty, change and adaptive capacity. Future areas of research include the expansion of current frameworks to incorporate alternative framings from planning and complexity theories already attempting to address these dimensions of futures.

Many expert commentaries predicting what life will be like in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic have been published. The views of the public on post-COVID futures have received less attention. To explore these issues, this article draws on qualitative interviews conducted with Australian adults, conducted in three stages in each of the first pandemic years of 2020, 2021 and 2022. The final questions asked were: ‘What do you think your way of life will be like once the COVID crisis has passed? Will it go back to the way it was before – or be different in important ways?’. This article analyses participants’ responses to these future-facing questions across the three annual interview sets. Continuities and differences in the imaginaries of pandemic futures expressed in each of these years are identified. Findings demonstrate the value of documenting public understandings, practices and feelings concerning imaginaries of the future of crises such as the pandemic across an extended timescale. The study identified the complexity of how quotidian life, emotions and biographical experiences are entangled with broader socioeconomic, policy, infrastructural, cultural and political dimensions in people’s predictions of what a post-COVID world might be like at different stages of the pandemic.