Futures-thinking and identity: Why “Futures Studies” is not a field, discipline, or discourse: a response to Ziauddin Sardar's ‘the namesake’

Is the future a political economy? Functional analysis of three leading foresight and futures studies journals

“…Moreover, as much as we understand that science is overrepresented in scientific publications, so too do we wonder why scientific publications feature a considerable under-representation of the mass media system even against the background of the fact that our mass media search terms (cf. With regard to the overall field of futures studies, our research adds a new dimension to the discussions on the foundations of foresight and futures studies (Masini 1993, Masini & Gillwald, 1990Inayatullah 1990;Malaska 1995;Keenan et al 2003;Slaughter 2005, Lombardo 2008, Loveridge 2009Miles 2010;Martin 2010;Marien 2010, Cummings & Daellenbach 2009Sardar 2010;Kuosa 2012, Son 2015. Recently, Hyeonju Son (2015) presented a historical analysis of Western futures studies.…”

Evolution of futures studies

“…2 Besides the more or less frequently demonstrated methods such as scenarios or Delphi, futures studies methodology is not so well known to the academia. 3 Michael Marien [41] has divided all futurists to three general categories which are Mainstream Futurists (those who call themselves ''futurists'' as a primary identity), Marginal Futurists (those who are only secondarily ''futurists'', and Non-Futurist Futurists, which again can be divided to a typology of 12 special types of futurists as follows: Among Mainstream Futurists there are: the Synoptic Generalist (more an ideal than a reality), the General Forecaster, the Normative Generalist (Willis Harman was the prototype), the Pop Futurist (John Naisbitt was the prototype), the Multi-Identity Futurist (Zia Sardar is a pertinent example here-none of his recent books on cultural matters identify him as a futurist! ), and the Specialized Futurist confined to one or two sectors.…”

“…a discipline, discourse, field or interest area, and is it multi, inter-or trans-disciplinary field, and how should we discuss all this to the public? [44,41,45,46]. (iv) Overall fragmentation of the field [41].…”

Futurists and their schools: A response to Ziauddin Sardar's ‘the namesake’

“…In 1974 he wrote an article for Futures on 'The Futures Field' [7] in which he made a forecast that futures research would disappear within some broader science of complexity and change. Marien [8] has the advantage of having met a large number of futurists over the years at the annual conferences of the World Future Society, and on the basis of his own classification of futurist types, he may be described as a 'pessimistic greenie'. He was a joint editor of a special issue of Futures 'Visions of Sustainability' [9] and in the introduction he rebuked the authors of a special issue of Futures on 'The future of industrialisation' [10] for being intellectually and morally inadequate in failing to make any reference to sustainability issues.…”