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The purpose of this paper is to present the three guiding ideas of the social foresight course, namely, the difference between abstract and concrete futures (i.e. the difference between risk and uncertainty); the three levels of futures studies (forecast, foresight and anticipation); and an overview of the early signs of the incipient shift of human and social sciences from their so-far predominant past-orientation to a new, still unfolding, future-orientation.

This paper is a reconstruction of the guiding ideas that have been used for designing the social foresight course.

As far as anticipation is concerned, the authors’ understanding of anticipation is still cursory, and the novelty of the perspective may conceal the difficulty implied by this otherwise refreshingly new vision. The theory is at such an early phase of development that it still lacks a unified conceptual language for theorizing and operationalizing anticipation to facilitate cross-disciplinary conversations.

The ability to anticipate in complex environments may improve the resilience of societies under threat from a global proliferation of agents and forces by articulating insecurities through anticipatory processes. However, to achieve this end, the joint expertise and theoretical awareness of both the futurists and the human and social scientists is needed.

A transformative service aims to improve wellbeing; however, current approaches have an implicit assumption that all wellbeing dimensions are equal and more dimensions led to higher wellbeing. The purpose of this paper is to present evidence for a new framework that identifies the paradox of competing wellbeing dimensions for both the individual and others in society – the transformative service paradox (TSP).

Data is drawn from a mixed-method approach using qualitative (interviews) and quantitative data (lab experiment) in an electricity service context. The first study involves 45 household interviews (n = 118) and deals with the nature of trade-offs at the individual level to establish the concept of the TSP. The second study uses a behavioral economics laboratory experiment (n = 110) to test the self vs. other nature of the trade-off in day-to-day use of electricity.

The interviews and experiment identified that temporal (now vs. future) and beneficiary-level factors explain why individuals make wellbeing trade-offs for the transformative service of electricity. The laboratory experiment showed that when the future implication of the trade-off is made salient, consumers are more willing to forego physical wellbeing for environmental wellbeing, whereas when the “now” implication is more salient consumers forego financial wellbeing for physical wellbeing.

This research introduces the term “Transformative Service Paradox” and identifies two factors that explain why consumers make wellbeing trade-offs at the individual level and at the societal level; temporal (now vs. future) and wellbeing beneficiary.

This article aims to contribute to futures theory building by assessing the inherent ontological and epistemological presumptions in foresight studies. Such premises, which are usually embedded in foresight studies, are contrasted with sociological imagination and contemporary social science discourse.

This paper is a conceptual analysis of theoretical assumptions embedded in foresight studies.

Sociological lenses, including concepts like anticipation, latency, time, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, change and plurality of images, offer clarity in terms of both futures studies and foresights.

Explicating presumptions embedded in foresight methods helps recognition of how such methods shape the concepts of future and time. This is vital for assessment of the analytical products of foresights studies.

This research contributes to the ambition of linking the theoretical world of futures research and the practical world of foresights closer together by explicating key concepts and implicit assumptions in both fields.

This research examines how construal level shapes the effectiveness of rational (vs emotional) messages for inducing cessation behaviors. Concrete mindsets foster self-improvement goals, whereas abstract mindsets boost self-relevance goals.

In four studies, this research examines the moderating role of construal level on health messages and the underlying mechanism of goal pursuit.

Results demonstrate that concrete (vs abstract) mindsets increase consumers’ intent to engage in cessation behaviors when exposed to rational (vs emotional) messages. Consistent with this study’s theorizing, the authors found that self-improvement goals underlie the effects for concrete mindsets, whereas self-relevance goals mediate the effects for abstract mindsets.

The reported effects are limited to health messages focusing on cessation behaviors.

This research can help public policymakers to design more effective health messages to foster specific cessation behaviors – quitting smoking and reducing drinking – focusing on concrete (vs abstract) mindsets and rational (vs emotional) messages.

This investigation highlights construal level as an important moderator for message appeals (rational vs emotional) on cessation behaviors, along with the underlying mechanism of goal pursuit, thus contributing to health marketing literature.

This study aims to explore the relationship between the content characteristics of destination online reviews and travel intention under three individual circumstances: temporal distance, social distance and experiential distance.

Based on construal-level theory (CLT), this study divides online travel reviews into concrete and abstract reviews. Three experiments were conducted to test the moderating effects of temporal distance, social distance and experiential distance on the influence of review content characteristics on tourists' travel intentions.

The results show that abstract reviews would lead to higher travel intentions than concrete reviews. Furthermore, tourists' travel intentions differed depending on social distance and were significantly affected by reviews posted by reviewers similar to review recipients. In addition, the study contributes by discovering that the moderating effects of temporal distance, social distance and experiential distance were not significant, which differs from most of the previous research conclusions.

This study focused on review content characteristics, which provided a novel perspective for constructing online travel reviews. Furthermore, this research defined the concept of experiential distance in the context of online travel and expanded the research on psychological distance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the intentions to share electronic word-of-mouth (E-WOM) messages on social media websites depending on tie strength, perceptions of temporal distance and the concreteness of promotional messages.

A 2×2×2 mixed design is used. Temporal distance (near vs distant) and message concreteness (text vs picture) are between-subjects factors; sharing intentions (close friends vs general public) is a within-subjects factor.

Findings indicate that consumers are more likely to share promotional messages with their strong rather than weak ties. If they perceive that purchases will occur soon, concrete promotional messages will more strongly motivate them to share the message with their friends. However, if they perceive that purchases will occur in the distant future, abstract messages are more motivating. The difference occurs because construal-level theory is more effective among strong E-WOM ties.

By studying senders’ perspectives, the authors make a new theoretical and practical contribution to the emerging literature on E-WOM communication. Specifically, the authors show how senders are persuaded to share information with their strong- or weak-tie audiences according to the concreteness of a message and temporal distance. The authors add construal-level theory and advertising message processing to the domain of E-WOM and social ties research.

Consumers usually respond favourably to ingroups but negatively to dissociative groups and products linked to dissociative groups, termed the dissociative group effect. Despite important implications for branding, advertising and celebrity endorsement, little is known about how to attenuate the effect. This paper aims to introduce a mechanism which attenuates the dissociative group effect by drawing on construal level theory.

An experimental approach was used which included two-part between-subjects designs.

High identifiers prefer products linked to their ingroup over ones linked to a dissociative group, however, the opposite is true for low identifiers. The difference in preference is attenuated for high and low identifiers when they are placed in an abstract mind-set. The underlying mechanism of this effect is similarity focus.

The same context was used to ensure that the attenuating effect found was not due to contextual factors. However, further studies should replicate the findings in a wider variety of contexts.

This research offers practical recommendations on how to manage multiple customer segments in increasingly diverse marketplaces. By inducing an abstract mind-set in customers, for example, via advertising copy, website architecture or contextual factors such as pitch of the music, marketers can increase the effectiveness of identity-linking marketing for consumers’ high/low in identification.

This is one of the first empirical studies to evidence the applicability of construal level theory within identity marketing and offers a novel mechanism to attenuate the dissociative group effect. The findings shed new light on how low identifiers relate and respond to identity-linked marketing.

The prospect of automatically generating abstracts has attracted researchers for some time, but the promise of superseding the human effort has yet to be realized. Surveys the approaches and techniques developed with the view to showing why this is so. Particular emphasis is placed on the requirements for the production of abstracts, which effectively serve their intended function, to show the ways in which this has hampered research in the past. Suggests that progress of automatic abstracting research may come about via the integration of some of the techniques into computerized information retrieval systems. This will allow researchers to shift the aim from reproducing the conventional benefits of abstracts to accentuating the advantages to users of computerized representation of information in large textual databases.

Hospitality companies increasingly sell their unsold, or so-called rescued meals, on food waste reduction applications (e.g. Too Good To Go [TGTG]). The purpose of this research is to explore the influence of product construal and benefit appeals on consumer evaluations.

Study 1 (N = 277 participants) is an online experiment with a 2 × 3 between subject design analyzed using ANOVA and planned contrast analysis. Study 2 is a 2 × 2 field experiment (N = 147 sold rescued food boxes) using chi-square tests for the main analysis.

This study finds that an abstract product description (e.g. a magic box with an opaque content) matched with an environmental benefit appeal renders significantly higher consumer evaluations in comparison to when the same product is paired with financial benefits. In contrast, a concrete product presentation featuring financial benefits as opposed to environmental benefits increases consumer purchase intentions and willingness to pay.

We empirically show how the interaction and congruency between product construal and benefit appeals affect evaluations in a last-minute purchase context.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to look at the interactive effect between product construal and benefit appeals in a food waste and technology context.

Second Leslie Patrick Memorial Lecture presented in Birmingham on 8th November 1919 at a meeting jointly organized by Aslib Midlands Branch, the Birmingham Metallurgical Association, and the College of Librarianship Wales. The role of the British Non‐Ferrous Metals Research Association, the Zinc Development Association and related bodies in the development of non‐ferrous information in Britain from the 1920s to the present day is viewed in relation to the information staff involved and the abstracting services provided. Future developments applicable to this field are viewdata services and video‐disc storage, and their potential is considered.