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Anticipatory action

Examining the role of anticipatory knowledge in institutional change

November 16, 2015 / Leave a Comment

Initially major motivations for doing my PhD research were to contribute to the evidence base that underpins ‘foresight’ work (given that formal evaluations are rarely conducted and practitioners rarely have the time or the capacity to do this research), and to contribute to a better understanding of the roles such tools and practices can play … [Read more…]

Posted in: Anticipatory action, PhD research, Sustainability issues Tagged: institutional change, PhD research

Studying prospective practices at Australia’s national science organisation (PhD update)

August 28, 2015 / Leave a Comment

The past two weeks have been eventful ones for my doctoral research. As a result, the eventual thesis  (one day I’ll get there…) will now be a single “nested” case study which examines the use of techniques and practices of prospection by the Energy Flagship within CSIRO, Australia’s national science organisation, with a focus on … [Read more…]

Posted in: Anticipatory action, Futures practices, PhD research Tagged: CSIRO, PhD research

Rethinking the received wisdom on ‘foresight’ practices

July 18, 2015 / 1 Comment

Early in my PhD studies I reviewed the literature on so-called ‘foresight’ practices such as on scenario-building, scenario-based planning, and techno-economic modelling. What came through clearly is that there is a dominant set of ideas about these practices. These ideas can be termed the received wisdom. These ideas include that foresight methods and practices are … [Read more…]

Posted in: Anticipatory action, Climate change, PhD research Tagged: foresight, institutional change, Scenarios, uncertainty

Has Paul Gilding lost the plot?

July 15, 2015 / 4 Comments

Former Greenpeace International Executive Director, Paul Gilding, has written a new blog post entitled “Don’t be Fossil Fooled – It’s Time to Say Goodbye”. He claims that “the fossil fuel energy industry [and not just in Australia, the global fossil fuel industry] is now entering terminal decline and will be all but gone within 15-30 years” … [Read more…]

Posted in: Anticipatory action, Futures practices, Sustainability issues Tagged: prediction, Scenarios

The management of expectations, ‘temporal work’, and the functions of fictional expectations in structuring action in the present

July 14, 2015 / Leave a Comment

Recently I’ve been reading some papers in which sociologists take the uncertainty and indeterminacy of decision situations (such as most decision situations in economic contexts) as a key starting point for their analysis and theory-building. For example, because of the fundamental uncertainty that characterises many decisions in economic contexts Jens Beckert argues that the decision-making … [Read more…]

Posted in: Anticipatory action, PhD research, Sustainability issues Tagged: Expectations, PhD research, uncertainty

On the too little considered, but crucial, politics of prospective exercises

June 6, 2015 / Leave a Comment

This aim of this post is to develop an initial outline of some of the politics of prospective exercises – both ‘small p’ politics such as the exercising of power to influence such studies, the findings, and use of the outputs; and broader Politics related to how such activities are often conducted and used in … [Read more…]

Posted in: Anticipatory action, Futures practices, PhD research Tagged: Politics, prospective practices

The Population Bomb revisited – again

June 2, 2015 / Leave a Comment

It’s a bit too soon, arguably, to do a full postmortem on the book The Population Bomb and especially on related debates – given the global population continues to rapidly rise and is heading towards 9 or 9.5 billion by mid-century – but lately I spotted some interesting revisiting of the book, its impacts, and … [Read more…]

Posted in: Anticipatory action, PhD research, Sustainability science Tagged: Paul Erhlich, Scenarios, worst case scenarios

Reflexivity, experimentation and anticipatory action – considering Emma Marris’s Rambunctious Garden

May 24, 2015 / Leave a Comment

For a while I’ve been meaning to re-read Marris’s book Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-wild World. The book’s central thesis is that we must abandon the idea that the central goal of conservation is to preserve nature in a pristine, prehuman state, and consequently must rethink conservation goals and practices. I recall at … [Read more…]

Posted in: Anticipatory action, Climate change, PhD research, Sustainability issues, Uncategorized Tagged: Conservation, Emma Marris, Reflexivity, sustainability science

A practice lens on the use of strategy and decision-making tools

March 30, 2015 / Leave a Comment

A great paper just published in Strategic Management Journal contrasts the view of strategy and decision-making tools (such as those taught in business schools or economics classes) as “technologies of rationality” with a more sociological perspective that they term “tools in use”. One of the main ideas is to cast “a sociological eye on how … [Read more…]

Posted in: Anticipatory action, PhD research Tagged: PhD research

On ‘intelligent muddling’ and anticipatory practices

March 27, 2015 / Leave a Comment

The concept of intelligent muddling is proposed in a provocative little book called The Techno-Human Condition by two American scholars – Braden Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz from Arizona State University. The book is ostensibly a critique of transhumanism movements; however, it addresses much broader themes as per their notion of the ‘techno-human condition’, and critical … [Read more…]

Posted in: Anticipatory action, PhD research, Sustainability science, Uncategorized Tagged: complex systems theory, emerging technologies, Sustainability
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