Theory of and within foresight — “What does a theory of foresight even mean?”

The North Sea Offshore Wind Service Industry: Status, perspectives and a joint action plan

“…the partners felt it uncomfortable to base conclusions on patent analyses or bibliometric analyses, as they viewed these as surrogate measures too far removed for what they considered the reality of the industry and its key stakeholders. While qualitative data are valid as such, the risk in terms of using exclusively qualitative data is that especially when dealing with interviews, the interviewer is interpreting others' interpretations of the present and the future [37]. However, the findings in this study are corroborated by other studies in the area, and the validity of findings are in general reasonable.…”

“…The other is normative (anticipative, backcasting) [34,35]. ISF emphasises understanding the evolutionary path of a given system in its context and the processes that drive that development, borrowing from the field of innovation studies in conception of innovation systems and their evolution [18,26,36,37]. There are some assumptions that come with this orientation.…”

“…First and foremost, foresight and its implications and recommendations are context dependent [38][39][40]. It follows that foresight needs to include an analysis of the context and forces that drive the development, an explanation of the system [37], to offer evidenced recommendations for innovation policy. Traditionally foresight has had a limited impact to decision making [27], and one of the key reasons is that to process and outputs do not serve the needs of the stakeholders of the system [41,42].…”

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

“…1 The right question may wish to ask is therefore how contemporary foresight and futures research critical variables are actually selected. This question is critical not only for theorizing in foresight and futures research (Keenan et al 2003(Keenan et al , Öner 2010Piirainen and Gonzalez 2015, Son 2015, Kaivo-oja 2015, but also because all tools applied in the field involve a concentration on certain factors and the neglect of others; and it appears even more critical when we assume that processes of the identification of key factors and trends might follow trends themselves. Notably such fashionable biases in the selection of supposed key factors would hence considerably jeopardise the accurateness, scope, and impact of research in foresight and futures studies.…”

Is tourism futures a theoretical proposition? Why do not you join the debate

“…Moriarty argues that scenario planning in particular, is a method without a theory. Piirainen and Gonzalez (2015) also argue that the link between theory, scientific knowledge and futures studies is relatively weak. Based on the practices of numerous scenario planners and futurists, other researchers argue that scenario planning, which is the predominant futures research method in the literature, is a fog and art (Asselt et al, 2010).…”