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The purpose of this paper is to explore metaphors of human awakening in four recent futures works and propose a research agenda on the nature and future trajectories of awakening.

The paper reviews metaphors of awakening in Slaughter's The Biggest Wake‐up Call in History, the Great Transition Initiative, Gilding's The Great Disruption and Inayatullah's “Waking up to a new future”. It identifies seven characteristics of awakening and uses these to create an environmental scanning framework. It reports on a preliminary application of the framework and proposes a future research agenda.

The paper identifies seven signals of awakening: futures literacy, shifting values, activism, collective agency, engaged dialogue, distributed leadership and inspiring visions. While evidence for most of these signals can be found, it is often weak and dominated by other trends.

The environmental scanning framework needs to be expanded using additional literature and testing. The question of when confrontation with apocalyptic future images can deliver positive outcomes remains unresolved.

Perhaps the single most important thing that could be done to help rouse sleeping humanity is to begin to make connections between the diverse movements identified in the paper and to see them as pieces of the larger puzzle of how we wake up. Maybe an “awakening movement” could provide a common goal in the twenty‐first century.

The paper is an original exploration of the metaphor of awakening in four prominent works on sustainable futures. It will have value to foresight practitioners and change agents who are building movements for sustainable futures.

The purpose of this paper is to present the idea of a global crisis plan that will be demanded when global society finally decides that the climate challenge is a real threat, requiring immediate and strong policy action at the super‐national level. The authors believe that this demand will arise before 2020, and the authors hope that this paper will encourage others to improve on the plan.

The paper seeks to achieve the purpose by presenting the first draft of such a plan – “The one degree war plan” – in rather concrete terms, and estimating (in quantitative terms) the expected reduction in climate gas emissions that would result from implementing the crisis plan.

The paper finds that it is surprisingly simple to develop a plan which will reduce global emissions by 50 per cent in five years. It also seems possible to lower global emissions to zero in the ensuing decade, and then run negative emissions of 6 GtCO2e/year for the rest of the century (through carbon capture in various forms). The result, using the C‐ROADS climate model, is to keep the temperature rise in 2100 below +1°C above the pre‐industrial level. Much work needs to assure these conclusions.

The authors argue that public awareness of the dangers associated with climate change will increase over the next decade, to the level where it is perceived to be a significant threat to global economic and geopolitical stability. The public will then demand emergency action to cut global climate gas emissions. The authors argue that such emergency action ought to be based on a well‐prepared crisis response plan that seeks to keep global warming below +1°C over pre‐industrial levels. The paper presents a draft of the crisis response plan and encourages further efforts to improve the plan.

The social value of having a well‐considered and well‐prepared climate crisis plan in place once the public demand immediate climate action from their politicians, can hardly be overestimated.

To the authors' knowledge, no similar crisis plan has been published.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss and take forward several themes in two earlier papers by Ogilvy and Miller. After summarising their main points it seeks to consider different approaches to “sense making” in the work of future‐relevant theorists and practitioners; then to consider the case of sense making through integral approaches and then to explore implications through several themes. These include: a view of changes in the global system, generic responses to the global emergency, the critique of regressive modernity and how responses to “Cassandra's dilemma” (to know the future but not be believed) might stand in relation to the views of both authors. The paper aims to conclude with a view of the benefits to be obtained from the use of a four‐quadrant approach to understanding and responding to the human predicament.

This is a discussion paper that questions some of the views and assumptions of the earlier papers and explores some implications of an alternative view.

While supporting the drive to improve upon the theoretical foundations of futures studies and foresight, the paper questions whether such developments are as central, or will be as influential, as the authors suggest. A different view of “how to approach the future” is recommended, in part through four “domains of generic responses” to the global predicament.

The paper presents an argument supported by evidence. Both should be reviewed by others in pursuit of extending the conversation beyond philosophical questions to implications in practice.

The essence of a methodology to understand, approach and even to resolve many aspects of the global emergency is outlined here. As such the paper has many practical implications for the way that futures and foresight professionals operate and towards what ends.

The paper provides a substantive basis for qualified hope and engagement with a range of future‐shaping tasks. Specifically, these relate to the necessary shifts from “overshoot and collapse” trajectories to options for “moderated descent”.

Much of the work carried out on the perspective and issues discussed here has been carried out by those working outside of the futures/foresight domain. The value is both in affirming positive ways forward and extending the professional reach of futures/foresight workers to embrace new ideas and methods.

“BEFORE the leaves of Autumn fall” we were assured by Mr. Churchill that there might be heavy fighting. They have not fallen yet, although with September, beautiful as it often is, we know the Summer is over and our minds must be occupied most immediately with the war. Libraries may seem to some, even librarians, secondary in this maelstrom but, even if they are, that secondariness is really so important that at this month everyone looks to his own work to see in what ways it may be geared up more fully for its own special contribution. Immediate planning concerns such matters as winter service hours, staffing, the growing wear and tear on stocks, the inadequacy of new book supply, the growing shabbiness of our buildings and our continuing inability to carry on the extension work which was so prominent a feature of many libraries. Frankly, in most towns we are giving a book service, not doing the library work, personal and bibliographical, which every librarian desires to give. To do what is within our limits to the best advantage is, then, the immediate problem.

In many countries (Nigeria inclusive), major components of job creation and economic growth, are driven by small and medium-sized businesses that are mostly family-owned. However, over 50% of such businesses fail after intrafamily leadership transition. This chapter seeks to understand and explain the strategies that owners of medium-sized family-owned businesses explore in ensuring the sustainability of their business after a leadership transition from the founder. The focus is on three business leaders who sustained their family-owned businesses after a leadership transition from their founders. The conceptual framework is based on the transformational leadership theory. Data collection was from artefacts, company documents and semi-structured, face-to-face interviews. Analysis of data was supported by follow-up questions and member-checking to enhance the trustworthiness and credibility of the interpretations. Four themes that emerged were the founder's desire and support for transition, the preparation of successors or level of preparedness, trust and credibility of successors, and clarity of vision of both the founders and successors. Findings from this study may contribute to positive social change by providing leaders of African family-owned businesses with strategies for managing leadership transitions and ensuring the survival of the business after these transitions. Sustainability of family businesses might lead to job retention and creation, as well as enhance wellbeing and incomes of communities, family members and the African economy.

The paper aims to explore the nature of initiatives and strategies of inter-organizational cooperation to cross the valley of death in the biopharma industry.

The authors conducted an exploratory case study analysis in the Biopharma Innovation Ecosystem in Greater Boston Area (USA), which is one of the oldest, and most successful IE in the US, specialized in the Biopharma domain, by conducting a round of expert interviews with key informants in the area, chosen as representatives of the different types of actors engaged in the drug development processes at different stages.

Main findings suggest that cooperation can contribute to surviving the valley of death by reducing the barriers within the drug development pipeline through the promotion of strategic relationships among actors of different nature, including the establishment of government-led thematic associations or consortia, agreements between university and business support structures, proximity to venture capitalist and the promotion of a general culture of academic entrepreneurship within universities.

The authors believe that this paper contributes to the literature by shedding light on the nature of the specific cooperative initiative the barriers in drug development and help to survive the valley of the death.

The cardinal point to note here is that the development (and unfortunately the likely potential) of area policy is intimately related to the actual character of British social policy. Whilst area policy has been strongly influenced by Pigou's welfare economics, by the rise of scientific management in the delivery of social services (cf Jaques 1976; Whittington and Bellamy 1979), by the accompanying development of operational analyses and by the creation of social economics (see Pigou 1938; Sandford 1977), social policy continues to be enmeshed with the flavours of Benthamite utilitatianism and Social Darwinism (see, above all, the Beveridge Report 1942; Booth 1889; Rowntree 1922, 1946; Webb 1926). Consequently, for their entire history area policies have been coloured by the principles of a national minimum for the many and giving poorer areas a hand up, rather than a hand out. The preceived need to save money (C.S.E. State Apparatus and Expenditure Group 1979; Klein 1974) and the (supposed) ennobling effects of self help have been the twin marching orders for area policy for decades. Private industry is inadvertently called upon to plug the resulting gaps in public provision. The conjunction of a reluctant state and a meandering private sector has fashioned the decaying urban areas of today. Whilst a large degree of party politics and commitment has characterised the general debate over the removal of poverty (Holman 1973; MacGregor 1981), this has for the most part bypassed the ‘marginal’ poorer areas (cf Green forthcoming). Their inhabitants are not usually numerically significant enough to sway general, party policies (cf Boulding 1967) and the problems of most notably the inner cities has been underplayed.

The Marquis de Sade wrote that people behave differently in separate spaces and that, in different environments, they more easily reveal their true predilections. Throughout de Sade's writings, he reveals ways that hidden rooms, closets, castles, brothels, and monasteries can be used as spaces to unleash inner evil. Conveyed within de Sade's writings are ways in which characters actively change their settings in order to create these heterotopias – or spaces that are separate from normal routines. The role that separate spaces play in maintaining alternative behaviors has not been adequately examined in either de Sade's writings or in heterotopia literature. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the inner workings of a heterotopia frozen in time and space – a small town family business. This query merits exploration because the incestuous, atemporal behaviors that de Sade enacted can manifest themselves in family businesses. To examine this facet of family business, a customized methodology will be introduced – the Sadean duography. This manuscript is beneficial to practitioners in family businesses who seek to understand the hazards of inherting or purchasing new businesses, and to scholars in entrepreneurship and organizational studies seeking a deeper understanding of the role of heterotopias, also known as third spaces.

The following classified, annotated list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the RSR review column, “Recent Reference Books,” by Frances Neel Cheney. “Reference Books in Print” includes all additional books received prior to the inclusion deadline established for this issue. Appearance in this column does not preclude a later review in RSR. Publishers are urged to send a copy of all new reference books directly to RSR as soon as published, for immediate listing in “Reference Books in Print.” Reference books with imprints older than two years will not be included (with the exception of current reprints or older books newly acquired for distribution by another publisher). The column shall also occasionally include library science or other library related publications of other than a reference character.