Search results

The purpose of this paper describes the set-up and results of the “futures forum” study. Through different methodological approaches, the future of work and its implications for the future (physical) workplace are explored. What will our office workplace look like in 2025 and how best to support future work, in alignment with the different organisational support services [human resources, information technology (IT), facility management and real estate]?

Different stakeholders were involved through different methods. First, a global literature study summed up some of the contemporary views on future directions and future studies. Second, focus groups were held with office end-users and employees of 11 participating organisations. Third, a Delphi study was applied to a multidisciplinary expert group. And finally, results were further developed in a “pre-design” workshop. The “forum” refers to the consortium of private and public partners that supported the study. The research involved large (>1,000 employees) knowledge-based and administrative organisations.

The fast-developing digitalisation will have substantial repercussions for work processes and environments. New types of work and work processes are appearing and need to be accommodated. Work will be organised in a more dynamic manner to adapt to the rapid changes in the market. Automation will lead to a continuous decrease of administrative processes which leaves more complex, knowledge-intensive work in organisations. Digitalisation and technology will lead to new ways of working and other necessary capabilities in the organisation with great emphasis on IT and technology-based activities. This dynamic environment brings the demand for an agile response of the support services in the organisation and a work environment that can accommodate changes easily. The main findings centre around eight themes for the future workplace that were considered to be the main, joint priorities of support services. These themes are changes in work, move towards digitalisation, adaptive potential of organisations, liberation of old structures, attract and retain employees, self-employment and self-marketing and future employee needs. Because of the dimensions of the research topic, a broad thematic perspective was applied so a further in-depth exploration might be valuable. The stakeholders that were involved in the data collection were mostly contacted through research partners, which might narrow research findings.

Many “future studies” have been taken place in the past, and they all apply a different research scope. This study aimed specifically at large office organisations in The Netherlands and on the implications for the future workplace that are to be addressed in a communal way by the organisations’ support services.

This paper seeks to explore the interrelationships between futures studies and public decision making in Sweden.

Based on a series of interviews conducted in Stockholm in December 2003, this paper presents the main players involved in futures studies in Sweden. It focuses especially on the activities of the Institute for Futures Studies, and that of the Lindbeck Commission on the Future of Sweden.

Futures studies are a decisive part of the public decision process in Sweden, where they appeared after the Second World War and gained momentum from the 1970s onwards. The paper gives a detailed account of the interplay between the various actors. There is a strong independence between the public decision‐making system and the producers of futures studies. Nevertheless, futures studies prove an important instrument for public policy in Sweden, as they raise awareness in the public debate, serve as a tool for consultation, and help define scientific and technological priorities.

Provides an insight into the state of futures research in Sweden.

In Finland, new forest-based sector (FBS) businesses are seen as important for the transition to the circular bioeconomy. The purpose of this study is to explore the transition of Finnish FBS companies to new business models. The aim is to understand how FBS companies define their ideal future states and related business models for the year 2030.

This study uses thematic interviews with managers from various FBS firms and companies from interfacing sectors. In the interviews, the key idea of backcasting was pursued when respondents discussed the desirable future states of their business.

The effort to achieve growth of the business and the appearance of new products characterize the company-specific desirable future states. In these desirable futures, expanded businesses will be based on strong knowledge. Resource efficiency and collaboration create a strong basis for the desirable future state of the whole FBS to create a sustainable and innovative “Wood Valley.”

The key limitations are that the backcasting process has been conducted only through interviews and a participative approach with stakeholder dialogue is lacking in the process. This means that the desirable futures are created by the FBS companies only.

As a practical contribution, the study shows the future-oriented thinking and goals of FBS firms. As a theoretical contribution, it extends research on sustainable business models and discussions on the novel field of corporate foresight.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how initial employment experiences of new entrants to the labor market, which results from changes in organizations employment practices affect individuals’ expectations from their future employers (their anticipatory psychological contracts and anticipated job insecurity) and to explore the implications of these effects for theory and practice.

The paper focussed on four common experiences and tested the hypotheses about their effects using data collected by a relatively large survey among mature college students with work experience (n=1,164).

Individuals who had been exposed to the experiences of being laid off, witnessing layoffs and having to accept reductions in pay or status held higher transactional and lower relational expectations from their future employers, in comparison with individuals who had not been exposed to such experiences. They also anticipated a higher level of job insecurity in their future employment.

In order to mitigate the potential negative consequences of the phenomenon discovered on employee retention and organizational performance, organizations have to develop and implement specific HR practices to deal with cohorts of new members, who have been exposed to the employment experiences investigated. Of particular importance are orientation and socialization practices that address new recruits’ concerns and expectations, and exposing new members to training and learning experiences that increase their employability outside the organization.

This is one of a few studies that documents empirically the (anecdotally based) claims about the effects of changes in the economic environment on individuals’ employment expectations and perhaps the first study to focus specifically on the effects of initial experiences of entrants to the labor market. It extends psychological contract research by focussing on the antecedants and formation of the psychological contract rather than on its consequences and on the anticipatory contract rather than on employees’ current psychological contracts.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an ontological foundation for future studies, based in part on integrating some prior albeit incomplete work in this area.

This manuscript is based on a literature review, as well as on conceptual and theoretical enhancements from this subject field.

As the future does not exist (it is always something yet to come), the ontological foundations for studying the future must be based on the current reality of the physical, biological and social-psychological worlds of experience and ideas. From this basis, 10 postulates are provided that are based on that current reality and are applied to studying the future. Thus, by characterizing the current reality and how it is understood by people, meaningful statements about the future are possible.

For each ontological postulate, one or more implications for the study of the future are provided as guidelines for practice.

This manuscript integrates and builds on prior offerings about ontological concerns into a comprehensive framework that legitimates and focuses the practices of studying the future.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the value of utilising future studies to explore citizenship for people with mental health challenges.

This paper critiques the discipline of future studies and considers it in the context of the citizenship and mental health literature. It explores how future studies can be utilised to promote marginalised voices, such as those of people with mental health challenges.

Technology is leading to rapid change in society including what it means to be a citizen (Isin and Nielsen, 2008; Isin and Ruppert, 2015). Whilst citizenship has been promoted within mental health for a long time, change has been slow (Rowe and Davidson, 2016). In order to create inclusive opportunities for people with mental health challenges, any focus on citizenship in mental health needs to not only address the present time but to anticipate and influence future technological directions.

This paper is original in bringing together mental health and the future impact on society of new technologies. It stands to offer a new perspective to discussions on citizenship.

This paper attempts to apply complex theory in futures studies and addresses prediction challenges when the system is complex. The purpose of the research is to design a framework to engineer the futures in complex systems where components are divers and inter-related. Relations cannot be interpreted by cause and effect concept.

First, the authors shaped a conceptual framework based on engineering, complex theory and uncertainty. To extract tacit knowledge of experts, an online questionnaire was developed. To validate the proposed framework, a workshop method was adapted with NetLogo simulation.

Opinion of participants in the workshop which is collected through quantitative questionnaire shows that the framework helps us in understanding and shaping scenarios. Harnessing the complexity in developing the futures was the main objective of this paper with the proposed framework which has been realized based on the experience gained from the workshop.

Iterative processes are very important to harness the complexity in systems with uncertainty. The novelty of the research is a combination of engineering achievements in terms of computation, simulation and applying tools with futures studies methods.

The purpose of this paper is to develop Delphi methodology toward a holistic method for forecasting market change. Delphi methodology experienced its culmination in marketing research during the 1970s–1980s, but still has much to offer to both marketing scholars and practitioners in contexts where future market changes are associated with ambiguity and uncertainty.

This study revives the Delphi methodology by exemplifying how a recently developed framework on market change can be combined with the Delphi technique for data collection to support forecasting activities and research. The authors demonstrate the benefits of the improved methodology in an empirical study on the impact of the fifth generation of wireless communications technologies (5G) on the Finnish media market.

The developed methodological approach aids marketing scholars in categorizing and analyzing the data collected for capturing market change; and better guiding experts/respondents to provide holistic projections of future market change. The authors show that using a predefined theoretical framework in combination with the Delphi method for data collection and analysis is beneficial for studying future market change.

This paper develops Delphi methodology and contributes with a novel methodological approach to assessing market change.

A rich agenda for future research in the field of Lean Manufacturing (LM) is available in the academic literature. The purpose of this paper is to determine the LM future research methodologies suggested in the literature and to classify them into themes. Classifying these themes into broad categories is also an aim of the present study.

For the purpose of the present study, a systematic literature review (SLR) of peer reviewed journal articles in LM was conducted. A total of 214 articles published in 46 journals during 2010–2020 were collected from four major management science publishers, namely, Emerald Online, Elsevier/Science Direct, Springer Link and Taylor and Francis. To organize the qualitative data into meaningful themes and these themes into broad categories, the quality tool “affinity diagram” was applied.

The review of LM articles that are increasing over time reveals the “vital few” academic journals, which have published most of the sample articles. The plethora of the suggested future research methodologies are analytically presented and classified into meaningful themes, namely, the size of the research sample and its composition, several types of study (other than surveys), longitudinal studies, applying advanced statistical analysis and (mathematical) modeling techniques, objective, real and quantitative data, surveys, mixed/multiple research studies, reliability and validity analysis, using computer-aided technology for data collection and processing and research collaborations. These themes in turn are classified into broad categories, namely, study, data and statistical analysis and modeling.

This SLR is not comprehensive because the number of the databases searched is restricted to four. Moreover, the literature review is limited to peer reviewed journal articles regarding Lean only in the manufacturing sector, while the subject reviewed is limited to the future research methodologies. The subjectivity of classifying the large number of the future research methodologies into themes and these themes into broad categories is also a limitation of the present SLR. Based on these limitations, future literature review studies can be carried out.

Researchers can be analytically informed about the future research methodologies suggested in the literature and their respective key themes and broad categories, to design original research studies of high academic and practical value.

This study goes beyond previous SLRs on LM by presenting analytically the plethora of the future research methodologies suggested in the literature as well as by identifying natural patterns or groupings of these methodologies.

An uncertain future means that Dutch government ministries need to think about not only what new policies have to be developed, but also how to organize themselves in the future. This paper aims to present an overview and analysis of various studies of the futures by and about Dutch ministries that show that these studies vary considerably, in terms of their process and cause, that the context in which they come about plays a major role and that the various ministries tend to take the same trends into account (for instance “life‐long‐learning”, sustainable development and the emergence of the demanding citizen).

The paper case studies: 11 different reports from nine different Dutch ministries. In each ministry an in‐depth interview with one or two representatives was held. The transcripts were summarized, structured, and analyzed.

The use of studies of the future for organizational change in Dutch ministries is very diverse. More and more images and other ways of visualizing the future are becoming important. Dutch ministries should find a good balance between hiring external expertise and using inside knowledge and expertise.

Because this is a case study it is questionable whether the findings are also valid for non‐researched ministries, especially since the research ministries and (their) studies of the future are very diverse.

More discussion is needed about these futures studies in the Government‐wide Strategic Council. Government‐wide studies of the future should be made to provide ministries with a common background in building up a future vision for (more balanced) policy making. There should be more involvement of external experts and stakeholders in the process of futures studies.

This is the first case study that focuses specifically on the use of studies of the future for governmental change (instead of focusing on. for instance, developing new policies or strategies).