Suchergebnisse

Purpose
This paper aims to present "Bouncecasting," a seminar gaming foresight approach useful for examining "wicked problems" where the path to the future is uncertain and malleable and where major stakeholders may have different preferences for different futures. The approach gets its name because it goes back and forth between forecasting and backcasting, provides for give and take among different groups of stakeholders and creates and compares multiple scenarios depicting plausible futures.


Design/methodology/approach
After defining Bouncecasting, presenting its main features and providing a recommended way of conducting Bouncecasting studies, the approach is illustrated by four Bouncecasting projects conducted between 1998 and 2004.


Findings
The four projects taken together show that Bouncecasting can be used to address a range of wicked problems in a practical way. The projects considered in sequence show the evolution of the method.


Originality/value
Bouncecasting is a way of doing foresight that examines in an integrated way multiple characteristics of a policy problem, thereby providing promising solutions for complex issues. Although there have been over a dozen Bouncecasting studies conducted by the author and different sets of colleagues, this is the first general description of the approach.

Purpose
The science of Foresight differs from the commonplace notion of what a science is because it is a metadiscipline – a logical type of science higher than the logical type of disciplinary sciences. It is practical, uses transdisciplinary processes that combine scientific disciplines and often examines counterfactuals in a scientific manner. This study aims to demonstrate that Foresight is a science, by presenting a number of best practices and potential innovations in higher education that could facilitate obtaining skills for Foresight science.


Design/methodology/approach
The methods of scientific education that have served us well in the past are inadequate for metadisciplinary sciences such as Foresight. The paper discusses what metadisciplinarity is, using a variety of examples, and distinguishes it from disciplines and ways of crossing disciplinary boundaries. Understanding the essential characteristics of Foresight as a metadisciplinary science leads to identifying current best practices and possible educational innovations in undergraduate education that will facilitate obtaining Foresight skills. Throughout the paper, examples are drawn from the education and professional experience of the author in the USA and Europe.


Findings
This paper demonstrates that Foresight is a science and presents a number of best practices and potential innovations in higher education that could facilitate obtaining skills for Foresight science. It identifies barriers to those innovations and approaches to overcome them.


Originality/value
This viewpoint paper clarifies the meaning of the terms interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and metadisciplinarity to identify the essential characteristics of Foresight as a science. Then, it identifies and advocates needed changes in North American higher education to provide earlier and more efficient opportunities for Foresight researchers and users to obtain the skills they need.

Focus groups were formerly associated with market research but have recently gained some measure of social scientific respectability. In this article, I briefly recapitulate the history of focus groups and then examine their role in 4 (2 Dutch, 2 American) policy research projects. In each case, the focus groups provided an understanding of the interests and values of different stakeholder groups and per‐mitted the analysts to predict the groups' reactions to policy alternatives. This served to link the focus groups to the underlying policy problem, to set the policy issues in their appropriate context, to take due account of the technical complexities of the situation, and to orient toward integrating the results of the focus groups with the other tools used in the policy analysis. The four cases shared a "spiral" model approach to focus groups, in which the discussion moves from generic to specific toward the object of focus rather than tackling it directly. This permits both a breadth and depth of perspective and helps avoid posturing. I conclude that focus groups provide a value for policy analysis because they enable participant stakeholders to become part of the process, help uncover misunderstandings that conceal underlying agreements among stakeholders, and uncover potential problems of implementation.

Games of timing constitute a subclass of two-person, zero-sum, infinite games, where the problem facing each player is not what course of action to take, but rather when to take a prespecified action. The present study is an extension of previous research on games of timing with complete information (noisy duels) and equal accuracy functions, to noisy duels with unequal accuracy functions. The game-theoretic solution of this class of games, which has been recently derived, is briefly presented. Ten pairs of male subjects participated in two sessions each in a computer-controlled noisy duel experiment. Each pair played 256 duels in which both the accuracy functions and the starting number of bullets were varied systematically. The results are analyzed and discussed in terms of predictions derived from the game-theoretic solution.