Over the past week or so I’ve begun to wonder whether I should turn my curiosity about pandemic policy-making and related actor behaviour into a more serious investigation. One of the reasons is that, like Harvard’s Sheila Jasanoff has observed, I’ve noted the prominence of future projections and associated forms of model-based analysis. Additionally, specific … [Read more…]
As recently reported in the Guardian newspaper a new modelling study was recently published by the Institute for Sustainable Futures which looked at the potential cost and benefits of a rapid transition towards a renewable energy future here in Australia. The headline finding from this study – emphasised by the media in a slightly simplistic … [Read more…]
The use and, perhaps more frequently, non-use of the outputs generated by prospective knowledge practices is a big issue discussed by many people who conduct these activities. As one person I interviewed this week put it, you don’t want the end result/product to just be yet another report sitting on the shelf gathering dust! This … [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…]
Management professor Richard Rumelt has made the following interesting argument: Many writers on strategy seem to suggest that the more dynamic the situation, the farther ahead a leader must look [i.e. into the future]. This is illogical. The more dynamic the situation, the poorer your foresight will be. Therefore, the more uncertain and dynamic the … [Read more…]
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…]
Prospective practices often try to change the course of change, not just anticipate or predict change. However, the underlying causal logic of such interventions tends to be under theorised and/or remains mostly tacit. In the evaluation literature this causal logic is often termed the “intervention theory”, or the “program theory”, or underlying “theory of change”. … [Read more…]
In this post I consider the theory of “social fields” developed by two influential American sociologists, Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam, drawing principally on their book A Theory of Fields (Oxford University Press, 2012). A Theory of Fields offers “a general theory of social change and stability rooted in a view of social life as … [Read more…]
Authors of papers on prospective practices often take one of two stances: 1) they argue that these are learned crafts (and certainly not a science), and question the need for greater theorisation or greater use of theory; or 2) they, increasingly, question whether they have an adequate theoretical foundation, point to gaps, and/or try to … [Read more…]