Suchergebnisse

Growth is a dominant economic driver accounting for the wealth of nations and organizations alike. However, in the face of environmental pressures, widespread social and economic imbalance, and the reigning climate of uncertainty we are experiencing today, there is now a need for a viable interpretation of what growth really means. In this book, the author redefines the limits to economic growth and tackles the issues involved in three parts, in order to study a variety of international issues, including the world economic system, climate change and environmental degradation

Growth is a dominant economic driver accounting for the wealth of nations and organizations alike. However, in the face of environmental pressures, widespread social and economic imbalance, and the reigning climate of uncertainty we are experiencing today, there is now a need for a viable interpretation of what growth really means. In this book, the author redefines the limits to economic growth and tackles the issues involved in three parts, in order to study a variety of international issues, including the world economic system, climate change and environmental degradation.

Developing a theoretical foundation toward establishing a futures science requires reconstructing original roots, whereby this field is conceptualized at higher generality levels. This article aims to provide a unifying framework for expressing any of the futures (from possible to plausible, plausible to undecidable) plus the mechanisms for manipulating these futures, with a view to promoting genuine futures thinking. Despite more than sixty years of studies about "the future," the logical status of future-based conceptualizations still remains, at best, unclear. This article proposes to fill the continuity gap through designing a generative mechanism for expanding futures concepts based on formal theory. We use the well-developed Concept-Knowledge theory from Mines ParisTech, founded on set theory without the axiom of choice. The space K represents known/knowable things (present and past facts, available knowledge, what is known-to-be-known/to-be-not-known). The space C of concepts represents what is undecidable, neither provable nor unprovable at a given time. The C-K operating mechanism logically expands C concepts relatively to K, until they result in a conjunction with K—that is, become possible—possibly requiring extra development work. The article illustrates the approach on a series of field cases, whereby the path to futures robustness starts upstream at undecidable stages, as if to open up vast conceptual reservoirs of "futurabilities"—a foundational step transcending traditional futures studies. Futuring becomes a constructive and generative process, potentially leading to accepting infinities of futures formulations, where generativity is monitored as a design-oriented logic working on knowledge. Such an approach should improve the foresight practice.

Intro -- Table of Contents -- Title -- Copyright -- Note to all Contributors -- Note to the Reader -- List of Acronyms -- Introduction -- PART 1: Sustainability: Toward the Unification of Some Underlying Principles and Mechanisms -- 1: Toward a Sustainability Science -- 1.1. Introduction -- 1.2. What does unification mean? -- 1.3. Coming back to sustainability: how many "sustainabilities"? -- 1.4. Sustainability: what kind of unification? An integration issue? -- 1.5. What kind of paradigm do we have to integrate? -- 1.6. The issue and the implementation of a new dimension -- 1.7. Extensions of the concept -- 2: Sustainability in Complex Systems -- 2.1. Preamble: theories of interconnected systems -- 2.2. Analysis of feedback phenomena in an assembly manufacturing cell -- 2.3. Application to complex systems: quantitative characteristics of a deterministic chaos -- 2.4. General considerations about interactions in networked organizations -- 2.5. Role of feedback in mimicry and ascendancy over others -- 2.6. Network theory: additional characteristics due to their new structure -- 2.7. Simplexification -- 2.8. Convergences in network theory -- 3: Extension: From Complexity to the Code of Thought -- 3.1. The code of thought: effects of cognition and psyche in global sustainability -- 3.2. Is sustainability the only technological and technocratic approach? -- 3.3. The three laws of sustainability: prediction and anticipation in complex systems -- 3.4. Consequence: toward a new dimension -- 3.5. Conclusion -- 3.6. Indicators for monitoring the EU sustainable development strategy -- PART 2: Operationalization: Methods, Techniques and Tools - the Need to Manage the Impact -- 4: From Context to Knowledge: Building Decision-making Systems -- 4.1. Introduction -- 4.2. How about obtaining a sustainable knowledge?.

Models That Can Aspire to be Better Suited to Future Needs -- Disassembling Some Traditional Views / Pierre Massotte, Patrick Corsi -- Is Globalization, or Holism, Really a New Phenomenon / Pierre Massotte, Patrick Corsi -- Underlying Disturbing Processes: Asymmetries, Coriolis and Chirality / Pierre Massotte, Patrick Corsi -- Time and Space Revisited in the Context of Complex Systems / Pierre Massotte, Patrick Corsi -- The Entropy of Systems / Pierre Massotte, Patrick Corsi -- On Competitiveness: Nature as an Obvious Approach in Sustainability -- A Continuous Survival of Species? Crisis and Consciousness Productions / Pierre Massotte, Patrick Corsi -- Aging and Survival: Application to Human Beings, Eusociality and an Inclusive Society / Pierre Massotte, Patrick Corsi -- Evolution of Life Principles: Application to a Corporate Population / Pierre Massotte, Patrick Corsi -- Golden Secrets and Mechanisms -- Technology Totalitarianism in Society, Change Management and Governance Concerns / Pierre Massotte, Patrick Corsi -- Principles and Practical Mechanisms of Self-Organization: In a Worldwide Cooperative Context / Pierre Massotte, Patrick Corsi -- Complex Systems Appraisal: Sustainability and Entropy in a Worldwide Cooperative Context / Pierre Massotte, Patrick Corsi -- Telepathy and Telesympathy / Pierre Massotte, Patrick Corsi

Whilst innovation remains of course an approach, a process, and is still often even reduced to a set of results, it essentially reflects a way of thinking evolution. Time is up for varying the thinking methods according to capacities and learned and available competencies with a view to change… the thinking level. No domain and no sector is immune to this transformation in todays' world Having clarified our ideas through this book, we remain ever more convinced that the leveled maturity approach will lead to real advances in innovation over the 2020 years. Hence the competitive capacities of

Whilst innovation remains of course an approach, a process, and is still often even reduced to a set of results, it essentially reflects a way of thinking evolution. Time is up for varying the thinking methods according to capacities and learned and available competencies with a view to change ... the thinking level. No domain and no sector is immune to this transformation in todays' world Having clarified our ideas through this book, we remain ever more convinced that the leveled maturity approach will lead to real advances in innovation over the 2020 years. Hence the competitive capacities of organizations must evolve. As we strive in our quest for new inspiration sources in business, let us reckon that all is bound to evolving ... including the way to evolve. In that resides the very capacity to innovate. Publisher's note.

This book focuses on the emergence of the science of sustainability and the key concepts in making sustainability operational in an organization. The authors discuss the methods, techniques and tools needed to manage the impact of sustainability and how these can be reformulated into business models and solutions for new growth and applications. They then move onto the reformulation of future thinking processes before ending by looking towards an approach for the measurement of sustainability and competitiveness.