scholarly journals NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: The Future: A Very Short Introduction, by Jennifer M. Gidley

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Gidley
Keyword(s):  
Subject Area ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Extensive Experience ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
The Future ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
To Come ◽  
Professional Practitioners

A shining utopia or our worst fears realised – what does the future have in store for us? From the beginning of time, humans have been driven by both a fear of the unknown and a curiosity to know. We have always yearned to know what lies ahead, whether threat or safety, scarcity or abundance. Throughout human history, our forebears tried to create certainty in the unknown, by seeking to influence outcomes with sacrifices to gods, preparing for the unexpected with advice from oracles, and by reading the stars through astrology. As scientific methods improve and computer technology develops we become ever more confident of our capacity to predict and quantify the future by accumulating and interpreting patterns form the past, yet the truth is there is still no certainty to be had. In this Very Short Introduction Jennifer Gidley considers some of our most burning questions: What is "the future "? Is the future a time yet to come, or is it a utopian place? Does the future have a history? Is there only one future or are there many possible futures? She asks if the future can ever be truly predicted or if we create our own futures - both hoped for and feared - by our thoughts, feelings, and actions, and concludes by analysing how we can learn to study the future. Jennifer Gidley has extensive experience in the futures studies field, combining scholarly research, academic teaching, and leadership of the World Futures Studies Federation (UNESCO Partner). She was re-elected as President in 2013 for a second four-year term to lead 300 expert futures researchers, teachers and professional practitioners from over 60 countries. Jennifer has held academic positions in Australia at Southern Cross (1995-2001); Swinburne (2003-2006); and RMIT (2008-2012); and holds visiting academic posts in Europe. Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. Publication Date: 23rd March 2017 | 9780198735281 | Paperback | £7.99  For more information about this title please contact Katie Stileman (E: [email protected], T: 01865 353344) 

Imbuing Futures and Time with Agency and Urgency: Reframing Concepts for a Planetary Emergency

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 201-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Gidley
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
First Century ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Time Consciousness ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between concepts of time and concepts of futures has been in an ever-changing and dynamic evolution for thousands of years. Yet, time has been relatively underexplored in the futures studies literature until recently. Furthermore, the transdisciplinary fields of “time studies” and “futures studies” have operated in relative isolation within the siloism of twentieth- and twenty-first-century academia. This article draws substantially from my recent book The Future: A Very Short Introduction, which places this piece into the larger historical context of what we humans have done in the past with these deeply interwoven concepts. I discuss here how we relate to them today, and what is emerging regarding new concepts of futures and time in our current era. By understanding how humans in the past have storied and framed both time and the future, we can gain a deeper appreciation of the significance of time consciousness on futures thinking.

scholarly journals DEVELOPING A MEASUREMENT SCALE FOR ASSESSING THE EFFICIENCY OF TAX ADMINISTRATION AMONG OIL AND GAS COMPANIES IN NIGERIA

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abba Ya'u ◽  
Natrah Saad ◽  
Abdulsalam Mas'ud
Keyword(s):  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Reliability And Validity ◽  
Subject Area ◽  
Measurement Scale ◽  
Tax Administration ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Oil Sector ◽  
The Government ◽  
To Come ◽  
Oil And Gas Companies

Inefficient tax system causes the government to lose a huge amount of revenue. Tax administrators are primarily responsible for collecting taxes due from taxpayers following the relevant tax laws and regulation in a way that instils confidence on taxpayers through efficient tax administration. This paper aims at validating relevant and reliable measurement scale for assessing the effectiveness of tax administration efficiency in dealing with oil and gas companies operating in the Nigerian oil sector. Hence, an adapted questionnaire comprising four items was administered on 300 local and multinational oil and gas companies in Nigeria. All the items were subjected to evaluations and validations by eight experts’ reviewers with cognate experience in oil and gas activities. Evaluation of reliability and validity of the measures of tax administration efficiency was performed through Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) using SPSS version 25 and Smart PLS version 3.8. The results provide evidence that the proposed tax administration efficiency scale attained reliability and validity criteria. Consequently, Policymakers, practitioners and researchers can adapt this scale to assess the effectiveness of tax administration efficiency by companies in different jurisdictions across the globe. This study expands existing literature and contributes new ideas to the subject area. By implication, the validated scale will assist oil and gas producing countries to come up with policies that ensures efficiency in tax administration and increase government revenues.

Knowledge Exchange

2018 ◽  
pp. 241-264
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Knowledge Exchange ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
The Future ◽  
Innovative Thinking ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
To Come

This chapter extends and applies the TBMR approach to the workplace directly and it explores the benefits in detail to departments and divisions in an organization. By looking at different organizational structures, their associated communications cultures and isolating where the use of team based games can be most beneficial, markets can be identified as well as new uses pinpointed within those markets. Innovative thinking from the reader is also encouraged to come up with new ideas to implement for the future in any organization they will be, or are, working in. This chapter then proceeds to encourage the marriage of higher education and the workplace through the use of the team based game approach picking up from previous chapters. To follow this, discussion around how personal development training in the workplace can be made attractive to the millennial consumer using TBMR approaches is offered. This leads onto how the same games can be used in recruitment - for instance in assessment centres and interviews and then how they can be used in the development programmes in the organisation to keep staff interested, motivated and retained in their jobs. The chapter includes ideas of how team based games can be used for the Corporate Jolly/Away Day.

scholarly journals Futures studies in Finland

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erzsébet Nováky ◽  
Eszter Monda
Keyword(s):  
Historical Background ◽  
Research Centre ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
Futures Research ◽  
The Future ◽  
Societal Changes ◽  
The Government ◽  
To Come ◽  
Major Emphasis

The development of futures studies and the future-oriented attitude of Finnish institutions and the government can serve as great example for other countries. This attitude appears in education and economy, issues in which Finland is highly competitive in Europe. We introduce the futures studies-related organizations and the foresight system of Finland. An overview of the development of futures studies and the activities, purposes of foresight institutions, with a major emphasis on the Finland Futures Research Centre will be presented. The main question is how could other countries utilize the Finnish example? Societal changes depend on the environment and its historical background, making it quite a challenge to come up with an all-adaptable answer for this question. Thus we will only present guidelines and proposals regarding the development of strategy at the end of this paper.

The Futurists. Experts in World Futures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Images Of The Future ◽  
The Way

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.

Fluxus and the Absurd (1961–62)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin R. Levy
Keyword(s):  
Second Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Major Work ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Impact

After John Cage’s 1958 Darmstadt lectures, many European composers developed an interest in absurdity and artistic provocation. Although Ligeti’s fascination with Cage and his association with the Fluxus group was brief, the impact it had on his composition was palpable and lasting. A set of conceptual works, The Future of Music, Trois Bagatelles, and Poème symphonique for one hundred metronomes, fall clearly into the Fluxus model, even as the last has taken on a second life as a serious work. This spirit, however, can also be seen in the self-satire of Fragment and the drama and irony of Volumina, Aventures, and Nouvelles Aventures. The sketches for Aventures not only show the composer channeling this humor into a major work but also prove to be a fascinating repository of ideas that Ligeti would reuse in the years to come.

scholarly journals Hope against hope: COVID-19 and the space for political imagination

2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942110045
Author(s):  
Jonathan Gross
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Devised Theatre ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
The Future

COVID-19 has loosened neoliberalism’s hegemonic grip on the future. Amid the enormous suffering experienced internationally, there is much discussion of how to ‘Build Back Better’, and hope for a more caring, just and sustainable world. But competing futures are being imagined and planned. Hope is never politically neutral, and the content of collective hope is a key site of political struggle. This is partly a question of space: who has the literal and discursive space in which to develop visions of the future? The following article considers the role that cultural studies can play in this struggle. ‘Conjunctural analysis’ has a key task, making visible the competing futures contained within the present. But cultural studies should go further: combining conjunctural analysis with methods drawn from a range of scholarly and activist traditions – including critical pedagogy, devised theatre and the interdisciplinary field of futures studies – that deliberately create spaces for imagining new futures.

scholarly journals A Sense of Presence: Mediating an American Apocalypse

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Rachel Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sense Of Presence ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come

Here I build upon Robert Orsi’s work by arguing that we can see presence—and the longing for it—at work beyond the obvious spaces of religious practice. Presence, I propose, is alive and well in mediated apocalypticism, in the intense imagination of the future that preoccupies those who consume its narratives in film, games, and role plays. Presence is a way of bringing worlds beyond into tangible form, of touching them and letting them touch you. It is, in this sense, that Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward observe the “re-emergence” of religion with a “new visibility” that is much more than “simple re-emergence of something that has been in decline in the past but is now manifesting itself once more.” I propose that the “new awareness of religion” they posit includes the mediated worlds that enchant and empower us via deeply immersive fandoms. Whereas religious institutions today may be suspicious of presence, it lives on in the thick of media fandoms and their material manifestations, especially those forms that make ultimate promises about the world to come.

scholarly journals A new renaissance for creativity in technology and the arts in the context of virtual worlds

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Earnshaw
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Web Pages ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Diverse Environment ◽  
Research Environments ◽  
Interdisciplinary Collaborations ◽  
The Future ◽  
New Ideas

AbstractWhere do new ideas come from and how are they generated? Which of these ideas will be potentially useful immediately, and which will be more ‘blue sky’? For the latter, their significance may not be known for a number of years, perhaps even generations. The progress of computing and digital media is a relevant and useful case study in this respect. Which visions of the future in the early days of computing have stood the test of time, and which have vanished without trace? Can this be used as guide for current and future areas of research and development? If one Internet year is equivalent to seven calendar years, are virtual worlds being utilized as an effective accelerator for these new ideas and their implementation and evaluation? The nature of digital media and its constituent parts such as electronic devices, sensors, images, audio, games, web pages, social media, e-books, and Internet of Things, provides a diverse environment which can be viewed as a testbed for current and future ideas. Individual disciplines utilise virtual worlds in different ways. As collaboration is often involved in such research environments, does the technology make these collaborations effective? Have the limits of disciplinary approaches been reached? The importance of interdisciplinary collaborations for the future is proposed and evaluated. The current enablers for progressing interdisciplinary collaborations are presented. The possibility for a new Renaissance between technology and the arts is discussed.

The Politics of Proximity: The Italian Response to the Albanian Crisis

1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Perlmutter
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Popular Opinion ◽  
Italian Case ◽  
Humanitarian Mission ◽  
Neighboring Country ◽  
The Future ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
To Come ◽  
First Time

This article focuses on the apparent disjunction between the Italian reluctance to allow Albanians to come as refugees and Italy's enthusiastic leadership of the United Nations military-humanitarian mission. It explains the Italian response both in terms of Italian popular opinion regarding Albanians and Italy's concern for the impression on Europe that its politics would make. Italy's leadership of the mission represents the first time a medium-sized power has assisted a neighboring country with whom it has had deep historical connections. The conclusion argues that such proximate interventions are likely to increase in the future, and spells out the implications of the Italian case.

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