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The purpose of this paper is to explain why finding a theory for futures studies is such a demanding task. In particular, the paper paves the way towards a theoretical framework that goes beyond both positivism and anti‐positivism.

The paper discusses a network of mutually interlinked concepts, including: levels of reality; parts and wholes; causation; the multiplicity of times; anticipation; the thick present; and latents.

The paper presents the two main obstructions blocking the way towards a theory for futures studies (namely, the belief that the opposition between positivists and anti‐positivists is exhaustive, and the need for better connections with other sciences such as biology, cognitive science and the social sciences.

The paper discusses only one of the different threads in the elaboration of a theoretical basis for futures studies, namely the components closer to science.

A proper theory for futures studies will contribute to making them more robust and efficient.

The general framework presented by the paper extends well beyond the somewhat restricted field of futures studies and includes social and psychological sciences, together with biology.

This paper aims to analyze documentary planning tools for an everyday life project, the wedding, to study how “document work” is constructed in this setting.

Using Law and Lynch's study of birdwatching guides for novices as a framework, nine commercially‐available wedding planning guides targeted toward the primary planner, almost universally the bride, were analyzed.

As Law and Lynch found, part of a novice's apprenticeship requires learning how to “see” in ways that are socially organized in and through texts. The paper shows how characteristics of birdwatching guides (naturalistic accountability, a picture theory of representation, and the strategic use of texts) are also evident in wedding planners, and how the very features that make these guides usable also occasion troubles for their users. Wedding planning guides treat the bride as a novice and instruct her in seeing wedding‐related tasks and times as amenable to management. However, planning a wedding requires multiple tasks and times that may be intertwined in ways that make both their representation and their execution highly complex.

The need for both temporal and thematic access highlights more general problems of knowledge organization in presenting a complex planning project in a linear and paper format.

As workplace principles of time and project management are increasingly applied to everyday life, this paper provides a needed case study of the ways that everyday recordkeeping contributes to the novice bride's gendered apprenticeship and embeds her work within broader organizational and ideological systems.

This research builds on Jenkins' theory of time, identification and human nature through an empirical study of leaders' experiences in a large UK public sector organisation. By applying Lewis and Weigart's typology of social time to the accounts of the leaders studied within this research, the study finds that the leaders' self‐ identities are constituted through the discourses of self‐time, interaction‐time and organisational‐time which are embedded, stratified and synchronised through social and organisational practices. In the leaders' narratives of career, work, life and family the research identifies dominant discourses of time compression and acceleration, as well as both cyclic and linear discourses of time. Each of these temporal constructs is found to be embedded in and manifested through the continuous construction and shaping of identity. The implications of these findings for our understanding of the contemporary working life of leaders and their careers and identities are discussed.

In this chapter, I investigated how challenges (life events) are negotiated within families according to gender roles and their effect on marriage quality, life satisfaction, and psychological resilience in a nonclinical sample of heterosexual couples (N=159), age 23–78 (M=45.4, SD=11.2), with children (n=127) or childfree (n=32). Specifically, I accounted for the individual’s ability to share “hurt feelings” and foster intimacy within the couple, thus strengthening resilience and improving life satisfaction and hypothesized that the impact of negative life events on both relationship quality and life satisfaction could depend on the resilience levels of each partner and their ratio according to gender roles. Results confirmed the hypothesis and showed significant gender differences in the impact of negative life events on relationship quality, life satisfaction, ability to share hurt feelings, fear of intimacy, and resilience levels. Moreover, the ratio of the partner’s individual resilience affected the dependent variables differently by gender, its level interacted with the age of the couple’s first child (range: 2–54, mean: 21.4, SD: 10.4) and strongly depended on the occupation of the parents.

For decision‐makers, the cognitive limit is one of the most critical factors which determine the quality of decisions, when they do not have enough information about their decision environment, and when they must strike a balance between conflicting objectives within a time limit. In such a situation, their decision‐making is often characterized by satisficing behaviors with multiple objectives under uncertainty. This paper aims to formulate a multiple‐objective satisficing problem and to study its fundamental properties, such as (1) existence of collectively satisficing solutions, (2) relationship among collectively satisficing solutions, Pareto satisficing solutions, weak Pareto satisficing solutions and max‐min solutions, and (3) characterization of Pareto satisficing solutions and of weak Pareto satisficing solutions.

Public procurement provides a fertile ground for corruption in the Nigerian public sector. Reforms to create an effective public procurement system, which have been almost exclusively the governmentʼs affair, seem to be yielding insignificant results. Effective reforms to control corruption in public procurement systems must be sustainably participative and inclusive of all essential stakeholders in the society. Most importantly, the preconditions for achieving a sound public procurement system are integrity and commitment to good governance practices through the provision of welldesigned legislation and supporting regulations and review processes.