Futures Thinking

This book starts from the assumption that futures thinking is difficult, yet of existential necessity. We live in times where the future of humanity is at stake. Thus, it is important to understand where the images of the future that currently circulate in our cultures and societies come from. This book is about two fields in the social sciences that explicitly concentrate on: futures studies and the sociology of the future. Informed by sociological theories, it applies bibliometric methods to describe these two fields as epistemic tribes and territories. After reflecting on the historical reasons for this bipartite academic institutionalization, the book explores how the two fields could achieve a diligent division of labor that encourages forms of futures thinking that speak to the societal and civilizational needs of our times.

Christian Dayé is a sociologist of knowledge, science, and technology at Graz University of Technology in Austria. A prolific author, he received the 2022 Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award of the Section History of Sociology & Social Thought of the American Sociological Association for his monography Experts, Social Scientists, and Techniques of Prognosis in Cold War America (2020, Palgrave Macmillan). With Mark Solovey, he co-edited the widely acclaimed volume Cold War Social Science: Transnational Entanglements (2021, Palgrave Macmillan).

Chapter 1 Introduction. - Chapter 2 A short history of futures studies, and its relations to sociology. - Chapter 3 The sociology of scientific collectives: A conceptual overview. - Chapter 4 Researching scientific attention spaces: Epistemic tribes and territories. - Chapter 5 Epistemic tribes and territories in futures studies. - Chapter 6 Epistemic tribes and territories in the sociology of the future. - Chapter 7 Conclusion: The future of futures thinking in the social sciences.