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…]
The politics of green transformations is increasingly a key theme in sustainability-related research and books. Recently published examples include The Politics of Green Transformation (edited by Scoones et al., 2015), The Politics of Sustainability: Philosophical Perspectives (edited by Birnbacher & Thorseth, 2015), The Politics of “Big Brand Sustainability” (Dauvergne & Lister, 2014), Frank Geels’ recent … [Read more…]
(NOTE: This was originally written in my PhD journal but I’ve decided to post it here as I’d welcome thoughts and general feedback on the idea of developing a ‘sociology of prospection’) Increasingly I use the term prospection in my research and work. Psychologists use this term to refer to “our ability to ‘pre-experience’ the … [Read more…]
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…]
Economic sociology examines the effect of the social on economic behaviour. The introduction by Frank Dobbin (Professor of Sociology at Harvard University) to book The New Economic Sociology provides an interesting overview of sociological insights into economic behaviour (see here, here). It’s a really good starting point if you’re seeking to more deeply examine economic … [Read more…]
The question of whether futures studies is sufficiently theorised was raised in an exchange between Sirkka Heinonen (Finland Futures Research Centre) and Sohail Inayatullah. Heinonen states that “currently in futures research there are a lot of futures methods and foresight tools available but not so many theories” and asks “what do you think should be … [Read more…]
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…]
This is a question I’ve been pondering over the past few days. Lots of social science research has found that in situations when uncertainty in high such as where decision-makers are grappling with lots of “unknown unknowns”, and there isn’t a values consensus (e.g. there isn’t agreement on ends and means), that information doesn’t matter. … [Read more…]
What does it mean to muddle forward and to do so intelligently? This post is another that draws on and responds to Allenby and Sarewitz’s excellent book The Techno-Human Condition. In it I consider a central idea that they advance that, when we face a wicked problem or are grappling with a situation of “wicked … [Read more…]
When I first started considering the sustainability literature I engaged with commonly discussed frameworks like so-called ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ sustainability – the former commonly described as being technocentric and anthropocentric, whereas the latter is more ecocentric, communalist and preservationist – and environmental discourse frameworks. Such discourse frameworks include John Dryzek’s model of four ecodiscourses (the … [Read more…]