An agenda for futures research

Abstract

Is there an identity crisis in futures research ? The author reviews the character of the discipline in the light of its ten years of development and maintains that futures research is empirical, “pre-scientific” and in the category of operations research. The scope for a scientific approach is therefore in forming a coherent methodological body of principles. The author identifies specific tasks in 21 areas, related to data collection, model construction, experimentation, systems analysis, exploratory and normative applications, which seem to him to be particularly in need of such attention.