Micro-Meso-Macro: From the Heritage of the Oracle to Foresight
While ‘foresight’ has become a vogue word for some successful participatory, future-oriented activities, the need for abstract definitions or theoretical underpinnings has arisen to improve efficiency. Defining foresight would be certainly easier if fores
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Micro-Meso-Macro: From the Heritage of the Oracle to Foresight Péter Alács
7.1
The Methodological Construction of Foresight
While ‘foresight’ has become a vogue word for some successful participatory, future-oriented activities, the need for abstract definitions or theoretical underpinnings has arisen to improve efficiency. Defining foresight would be certainly easier if foresight could be included in a special category of practice or if foresight fell under some of the major categories of academic activities. Indeed, some of the foresighters regard foresight as a practice, while others consider it to be more of a science. Practice-oriented foresight approaches (Horton 1999) focus mainly on strategy building and usually confine their scope to a specific field of practice like technology or regional development. Their objective is to aggregate stakeholders’ opinions and experts’ knowledge about the specific field to support executive decisions. Scientific-oriented foresight approaches (Slaughter 2003) are derived from future studies and social sciences. Here, foresight is distinguished from other categories of future studies by the application of participatory methods and the shifting of the focus from an objective notion of the future to subjective interpretations of the future itself (‘future in the present’). In spite of the many similarities, these two kinds of approach differ fundamentally. The centre of the differences is the emphasis on the achievement of a consensus or the exploration of the information about the future. Practice-oriented approaches need a kind of consensus among stakeholders to ground strategic plans and find pure autotelic exploration. Scientific approaches, on the other hand, refuse to seek consensus because of the presumed distortion of the opinions of the process, and so the loss of objectivity.
P. Alács (*) Jövőkutatás Tanszék, Fővám tér 8, Budapest, H-1093, Hungary e-mail: [email protected] M. Giaoutzi and B. Sapio (eds.), Recent Developments in Foresight Methodologies, Complex Networks and Dynamic Systems 1, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-5215-7_7, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
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The main differences between the two kinds of approaches to foresight explain the limits of their application. Consensus distorts information, and simple information gathering fails to meet the needs of decision support. In this chapter, we develop a more comprehensive notion of foresight that involves both kinds of approach. Realizing that foresight cannot be definitely interpreted as a kind of practice and cannot be efficiently applied as a scientific category, we decline an approach to the notion of foresight from the application point of view. Foresight, by its special nature, should have a special place in our way of thinking; therefore, foresight is interpreted as an intellectual activity. This differs from the practice-oriented approach, in that it has no definite output, hence no measures of efficiency. And this also differs from a scientific-oriented appro
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