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The purpose of this paper is to discuss how being led by a young child to unknown destinations without shared language offers an experience of indeterminacy that opens up (re)thinking of political co-existence.

The relational arts project The Walking Neighbourhood hosted by children challenges the social practice of adults chaperoning children through public streets by inviting children to curate and lead unknown adults on walks of local neighbourhoods. This paper focusses on sensory ethnographic research of one encounter of a child-curated walk when this project took place in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The experience is relayed through multilayered sensorial storytelling inter-woven with diffractive analysis informed from a post-humanist agential realist position (Barad, 2007, 2012).

Perceptions, knowings, imaginings, memories and connections are read as explanations of intra-actions in the child-led walk to produce new meaning in the phenomena of political co-existence. Emergent, embodied, sensorial listening produces new awareness and understandings of intra-acting beings in an urban space regardless of age or form.

Application of ethical ontological epistemological practice through emergent, embodied, sensorial listening to others opens affectual ethical ways of being and knowing for justice-to-come in political co-existence.

The concept of child-led walks is innovative as a political act by shifting from vertical adult-child relations to horizontal relations. Post-humanist agential realism is a new and emerging theory that offers possibilities to reconceptualise co-existence with others in public spaces.

This chapter describes the theoretical contributions of Fractal Change Management (FCM) in relation to Quantum Storytelling theory and practice. Building on the application of complexity theory in the hard sciences as well as social contexts, this chapter considers the areas of overlap and difference between FCM and its theoretical fellows, summarizing selected concepts from FCM, considering the strengths and weaknesses of the method in various contexts, as well as its development over time. Prior studies in the yoga and nonprofit communities are briefly discussed along with ongoing work with software developers. Areas for further study are examined in detail, as a way to establish an antenarrative for this line of inquiry that honors its lineage as well as its contributions to the body of knowledge.

One thing which distinguishes people from computers and from one another is variously called creativity, the right brain, or the subconscious. Computers are designed to be fast, almost‐error‐free rule followers. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been based on computers and their rule‐following skills, e.g. expert systems. Yet we do not value Mozart, Einstein, Van Gogh, etc. for their rule following skills. In order to understand our own creativity we must model our subconscious. Once we model it, we can learn more about it by building a computer subconscious. Shows how a multiple‐module Darwinistic model can account for the human subconscious and how such a system can be emulated in a computer. For a quantum computer, perhaps the only technological computer fast enough to make computer creativity interesting, the results are also unpredictable in principle. Computers will differ in personality, skill and interests just as people do even if they start off identical.

This paper aims to discuss at a fundamental level the observation that the world can be seen as grey, or uncertain.

Attention is given first to arguments that suggest that the future should be seen as totally unknown, or black. Reasons are given for dismissing these arguments, and then consideration is given to fundamental causes of uncertainty which prevent the world being white or totally known.

The treatment is at a fundamental level that has little bearing on current practical means of dealing with uncertainty, but it is claimed that consideration of fundamentals is often unexpectedly rewarding and therefore worth pursuing.

There are probably few practical implications, at least in the short term.

The viewpoints appear to have received little previous notice.

The purpose of this chapter is to bring three recent and innovative feminist science and technology studies paradigms into dialogue on the topics of subjectivity and knowledge.

Each of the three frameworks – feminist postcolonial science and technology studies, queer ecologies, and new feminist materialisms – reconceptualizes and expands our understanding of subjectivity and knowledge. As projects invested in identifying and challenging the strategic conferral of subjectivity, they move from subjectivity located in all human life, to subjectivity as indivisible from nature, to a broader notion of subjectivity as both material and discursive. Despite some methodological differences, the three frameworks all broaden feminist conceptions of knowledge production and validation, advocating for increased consideration of scientific practices and material conditions in feminist scholarship.

This chapter examines three feminist science and technology studies paradigms by comparing and contrasting how each addresses notions of subjectivity and knowledge in ways that push us to rethink key epistemological issues.

This chapter identifies similarities and differences in the three frameworks’ discussions of subjectivity and knowledge production. By putting these frameworks into conversation, we identify methodological crossover, capture the coevolution of subjectivity and knowledge production in feminist theory, and emphasize the importance of matter in sociocultural explorations.

The objective of this paper is to make a case for a scenaric stance that holds high road and low road futures in mind at once. Opening with regrets about the total eclipse of Utopian thinking, the paper aims to move on to embrace both aspirational futures and a forthright recognition of the many ways in which things could go wrong. Adopting a scenaric stance amounts to a new, fourth attitude toward historical time and the future. The ancients lived in an ahistorical, cyclical time. Second, modernity embraced a progressive and optimistic approach to the future. Third, post‐modernity turns pessimistic about the future. Fourth, a new scenaric stance vindicates Utopian optimism by pairing it with a forthright recognition of pessimistic possibilities.

This is a reflective, almost philosophical paper that articulates a new attitude toward the future, which demonstrates the significance of scenario planning for attitudes toward the future.

A scenaric stance can restore the liberatory potential of Utopian thinking by yoking optimistic, aspirational futures together with a clear‐eyed recognition of the several ways that plans can misfire.

This is a philosophical, reflective piece that does not rely on any quantitative evidence or rigorous modeling.

The practical implications are major: to the extent that the health of the economy relies on confidence and a willingness to take risks, a lemming‐like race to the bottom will result in a Japan‐like endless recession. A vindication is needed for aspirational scenarios.

Everyone is better off when fewer people are living in crouch.

After three decades of reviewing and contributing to the literature on future studies, the author has seen nothing that remotely resembles the argument of this paper. Its value consists in its potential for lifting people's sights. One stands in danger of a loss of confidence and an endless recession. One needs to restore a sense of possibility and optimism, but can do so responsibly only if one holds on to an honest sense of the real dangers one faces.

Rethinking marketing should start with answers to three questions: Why has our discipline made so few original contributions to the strategy dialogue? Why have we focused on dysfunctional, rather than functional, relationships, i.e. on unsuccessful marketing practice rather than successful practice? Why do qualitative studies lack acceptance in marketing? I suggest that the fact that marketing has viewed itself as an “applied discipline” has significantly contributed to our making so few original contributions to the strategy dialogue. Furthermore, the “applied discipline” view has contributed to our focusing on dysfunctional and unsuccessful, rather than functional and successful, relationships. Finally, the lack of acceptance in marketing for qualitative methods has resulted from advocates of those methods embracing relativism, constructionism and subjectivism. In general, the time for obfuscation and obscurantism masquerading as profundity has passed; the time for reasoned rethinking is just beginning.

The philosophical foundations determine how an academic discipline identifies, understands and analyzes phenomena. The choice of philosophical perspective is vital for both marketing and service research. This paper aims to propose a social and systemic perspective that addresses current challenges in service and marketing research by revisiting the philosophy of science debate.

The paper revisits the philosophy of science debate to address the implications of an emergent, complex and adaptive view of marketing and service research. It draws on critical realism by combining structuration and systemic perspectives.

A recursive perspective, drawing on structures and action, is suggested as it includes multiple actors’ intentions and captures underlying drivers of market exchange as a basis for developing marketing and service strategies in practice. This is aligned with other scholars arguing for a more systemic, adaptive and complex view of markets in light of emerging streams in academic marketing and service research, ranging from value cocreation, effectuation, emergence and open source to empirical phenomena such as digitalization, robotization and the growth of international networks.

The reciprocal dynamic between individuals and the overarching system provides a reflexivity approach intrinsic to the service ecosystem. This creates new avenues for research on marketing and service phenomena.

This paper discusses critics, conflicts and conceptualization in service research. It suggests a possible approach for service research and marketing scholars capable of responding to current complexities and turbulence in economic and societal contexts.

This communication is published in two parts. The author believes that a new domain, emerging from the cybernetics and systems tradition, is defined: complexity research. The study of this subject is motivated by the complexity of problems facing present‐day society, and the availability of new concepts and technologies. A conceptual framework for analysing complexity and self‐organising processes is outlined, and the fundamentals of an appropriate methodology are sketched. It is proposed that researchers working within this domain would associate by creating a network.

Organizational paradoxes must first be recognized by managers before they can respond to them. Yet scholars have adopted different perspectives on how paradoxical tensions become salient and engender management responses. Some approaches have focused on the socially constituted nature of paradoxes, and others on the inherent aspects of paradoxes in the environment. The authors propose an approach that gives ontological meaning to both the socially constituted and inherent nature of organizational paradoxes. Our approach, which is inspired by quantum physics, opens up new opportunities for engaging with the socio-materiality of paradoxes, how they are measured, and the implications this has on the probabilities of managing organizational responses to paradox.