Thinking about the Future, by Andy Hines and Peter Bishop, distills the expertise of three dozen senior foresight professionals into a set of essential guidelines for carrying out successful strategic foresight. Presented in a highly scannable yet personable style, each guideline includes an explanation and rationale, key steps, a case example, and resources for further study. The 115 guidelines are organized into six sequential categories that mirror the phases of a strategic foresight activity: Framing, Scanning, Forecasting, Visioning, Planning, and Acting.
This second edition provided an opportunity to update the examples for the guidelines where they seemed dated. Otherwise, the original guidelines are intact, in the same place and order. The more significant change is the addition of a new section that provides specific how-to process advice to supplement the guidelines. We have been working on our approach to doing and teaching how to do foresight projects for the University of Houston Foresight Program since the book was published in 2007. The resulting framework foresight process is described in Section 7.0 Applying the Framework.
Executives will find both the guidelines and the framework invaluable for understanding what it takes to successfully explore the future, while analysts who actively carry out strategic foresight projects will find the book an indispensable reference that they turn to again and again.
How American universities operate as social and economic engines that shape society beyond their traditional educational roles.
University Keywords gathers, contextualizes, and develops original understandings of 27 key terms that define the study and operation of the American university today. Editor Andy Hines and the book's contributors invite readers to rethink the university beyond its public image as a space of learning and understand how it also operates as a real estate powerhouse, a hedge fund, a debt machine, and even a crisis-producing entity embedded in the broader American economy.
Through essays written by over thirty contributors from a variety of disciplines, this book examines the university's intersecting functions, from its financial entanglements to its often-contradictory roles in society. Contributors illustrate how universities simultaneously link and separate communities--faculty, students, nurses, janitors, and the surrounding public--through administrative processes that promote a sense of isolation and division, even within shared spaces. By defining and expanding the terms that drive public and scholarly conversations about postsecondary education, University Keywords situates what appear to be auxiliary aspects of colleges and universities as directly impacting and at times displacing the central academic mission of these institutions.
In its role as a crucible for societal hierarchies and economic interests, the university both drives and reflects major shifts in social structure, labor practices, and economic power. The book's exploration of key terms like debt, police, and union offers readers a new framework for understanding the university's transformation into an instrument of capital accumulation, as well as its ongoing relevance in the fight for a world where education, labor, and social justice converge.