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Prospection: Producing Social Futures

Version 2 2025-04-16, 09:58
Version 1 2024-03-01, 12:09
chapter
posted on 2025-04-16, 09:58 authored by Barbara Bok, Ted FullerTed Fuller

Emerging agendas in social science are developing new methodologies to address significant contemporary challenges. These new approaches are inspiring changes in prospection methodologies that produce the status of knowledge about social futures. We stage prospection as enacting two realities: one about the phenomena being predicted and the other about the prospection enterprise. We consider three examples of current social science methodologies from a prospective stance: postnormal science, anticipation studies and science and technology studies. We illuminate their methodologies relevant to prospection and review Futures Studies / Foresight literature for evidence of the changes they are inspiring. We creatively synthesise four qualities of social prospection methodology from claims by the reviewed methodologies: thickness of relational complexes, degrees of sensitivity to how prospection is performed, openness of ecologies of practice and the extent of distributed engendering of social futures. We conclude there is growing interest in new prospection methodology that are in step with the complexities of the contemporary social world.

History

School affiliated with

  • Lincoln Business School (Research Outputs)

Publication Title

Routledge Handbook of Social Futures

Volume

1

Pages/Article Number

242-251

Publisher

Routledge

ISBN

9781138340336

Date Submitted

2021-11-22

Date Accepted

2021-11-23

Date of First Publication

2021-11-23

Date of Final Publication

2021-11-23

Date Document First Uploaded

2021-11-19

ePrints ID

47366