Causal layered analysis
Tóm tắt
Từ khóa
Tài liệu tham khảo
Slaughter, Rick, Developing and Applying Strategic Foresight, The ABN Report 5(10), 7–15 (December 1997).
Ibid., 11.
See, for example, Linstone, Harold, What I have Learned: The Need for Multiple Perspectives, Futures Research Quarterly, Spring 1985, 47–61. He divides futures into the technical, organizational and personal. Also see, Masini, Eleonora and Gillwald, Karin On Futures Studies and Their Social Context with Particular Focus on West Germany, Technological Forecasting and Social Change 38, 187–199 (1990). They take Linstone's model and apply it historically to Europe and the US, seeing futures as going through technical, organizational and personal phases. See also, Sardar, Zia, Colonizing the future: the 'other' dimension of futures studies, Futures 25(2), 179–187 (March 1993). Sardar argues for a colonization/decolonization dialectic. The classic map of futures studies remains Roy Amara's division into preferred, possible and probable. See his, Amara, Roy, The Futures Field, The Futurist, February, April and June 1981. See also, Bezold, Clement and Hancock, Trevor, An Overview of the Health Futures Field. Institute for Alternative Futures, Washington DC, 1993. 29 pages. Bezold adds the plausible to Amara's three categories. For a compendium with articles on methods by Schultz, Masini, Bezold, Slaughter, Sardar, Boulding, Milojevic and many others, see Inayatullah, Sohail and Wildman, Paul, Futures Studies: Methods, Emerging Issues and Civilisational Visions (A MultiMedia CD-ROM Reader), Prosperity Press, Brisbane, 1998.
Inayatull, Sohail, Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Future: Predictive, Cultural and Critical Epistemologies, Futures, 22(2), 115–141 (March 1990).
Inayatullah, Sohail, From Who am I to When am I?: Framing the Time and Shape of the Future, Futures, 25(3), 235–253 (April 1993).
Caste.
For the classical treatment of this, see Slaughter, Richard, Towards a Critical Futurism, World Future Society Bulletin, July/August and September/October 1984 and Schultz, Wendy, Silences, Shadows, Reflections on Futures. In Who Cares? And How? Futures of Caring Societies, eds Jim Dator and Maria Roulstone. World Futures Studies Federation, Honolulu, 1988. Rick Slaughter writes that critical futures study is itself an approach to futures questions that arises from a deep understanding of the dysfunctions of the Western worldview. This can seem threatening to those whose professional interests are bound up with... the industrial growth ideology. But, in fact, the analysis of dysfunctions at this deep level is only a ground-clearing exercise. Beyond this the task of exploring new domains of cultural possibility and potential. See Richard Slaughter, Developing and Applying Strategic Foresight, The ABN Report, 5(10), 11 (December 1997).
See, Ray, Manas, India, Fifty Years On: Revisiting Modernity, research paper, School of Media and Journalism, Queensland University of Technology, Research paper quoting Kaviraj, Sudipto, Religion and Identity in India, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 20(2), 331 (1997).
For the best discussion, See Shapiro, Michael, Reading the Postmodern Polity, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1992. What makes the poststructural approach to research different is that whereas the general tendency of critical theory is toward a critique of ideology, based on the presumption of an authentic model of intelligibility, the genealogical imagination construes all systems of intelligibility as false arrests, as the arbitrary fixings of the momentary results of struggles among contending forces, struggles that could have produced other possible systems of intelligibility and the orders they support.... Rather than presuming an underlying system of order... [genealogy and other poststructural modes of inquiry] assume[s]... that every interpretation of the order is an arbitrary imposition.... There is no natural limit summoning the process of inquiry.(2) Others take a different approach, removing postmodernism from its Nietzschean traces and asserting that it is post-modern, that is, explicit statements about what can and should occur after modernity. See Griffen, David Ray, The Reenchantment of Science and Spirituality and Society: Postmodern Visions, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1988. In contrast, Zia Sardar takes a critical approach to postmodernity. In Sardar, Zia, Postmodernism and the Other: The New Imperialism of Western Culture, Pluto, London, 1998, Sardar, citing Zygmunt Bauman and Eric Hobsbawm, argues that postmodernism, unlike modernity, embraces, evil, 45. Since moral reality is totally relativised—all judgements are merely expressions of alternative discourses—any particular position carries the weight of any other position. What this perspective misses are the efforts of Michel Foucault and others who have argued that the question of the price of a political position cannot be removed from poststructural inquiry. Moreover, the issue of who gains and loses is not framed only in a limited class sense but also in the sense of which knowledge commitments, which worldviews, which definitions of reality remain naturalised and which are contested. For more on this see, Nandy Ashis, Futures Dissents in Sardar, Zia, Rescuing All Our Futures: The Futures of Futures Studies, Twickenham, Adamantine, 1998. Like Foucault, Shapiro's intention is to reveal the circulation of power, to lay it bare. Causal layered analysis presents a model of inquiry which systematizes such an effort. However, given that postmodernity now comes to us as an extension of modernity, it is not surprising that what is embraced is total relativism and not the unveiling of layers of meaning, of politics.
Postmodernists would reject the idea that deconstruction etc should be seen as a method. It is considered an anti-method, focused on problematizing not on providing recipes for policy. Moreover, there are no practitioners of postmodernity, if at all, the episteme of postmodernity practices on us.
See, for example, the works of Ashis Nandy and Zia Sardar. Short essays by these two can be found in Futures. Ashis Nandy, Bearing Witness to the Future, Futures, 28(6/7) (1996), and Zia Sardar, Natural Born Futurist, Futures, 28(6/7) (1996). Also see the special issue of Futures on Futures generations thinking, which takes a Confucian approach to futures studies, Futures, 29(8) (October 1997).
Emerging issues analysis is a method which identifies issues before they reach the trend or problem phase. It makes the assumption that issues follow an s-pattern growth curve from emerging to trend to problem. For more on this method, see the path breaking work of Graham T.T. Molitor, Public Policy Forecasting, 9208 Wooden Bridge Road, Potomac, Maryland 20854, USA.
See, Sohail Inayatullah, The Futures of Communication, Futures (with Samar Ihsan and Levi Obijiofor), 27(8), 897–904 (October 1995), and Sohail Inayatullah, Futures Visions of Southeast Asia: Some Early Warning Signals, Futures, 27(6), 681–688 (July/August, 1995).
Johan Galtung, Enactment of a Universal Drama-Ethnic Conflicts, New Renaissance, 7(1), 13–15 (1996).
See Richard Slaughter 1989, Probing Beneath the Surface, Futures, 454 (October 1989), (Slaughter offers the brilliant idea of different types of futures studies from the litany-based to the epistemological-based. Indeed, it was Slaughter's presentation at the World Futures Studies Federation conference in Budapest in 1990 that I noticed that his division of futures studies into levels was more than a typology but a potential method). Sarkar, P.R. (Shrii Shrii Anandamurti), Discourses on Tantra–vol. 1 and 2, Ananda Marga Publications, Calcutta, 1992 (Borrowing from Tantra, Sarkar argues that the individual mind is composed of layers. The first layer is the body, then the conscious mind followed by three layers of superconscious mind). Also see, Inayatullah, Sohail Oswald Spengler: The Rise and Fall of Cultures in Galtung, Johan and Inayatullah, Sohail Inayatullah, eds., Macrohistory and Macrohistorians, Praeger, Westport, CT. and London, 1997 (Spengler argues that reality should be seen as deep and shallow, not as truth or false).
The Club of Rome's Limits to Growth and other studies is a modern example of this.
In Pakistan, for example, parking spaces are rare—parking as a regulatory discourse is not active there.
Most policy thus merely reinscribes the modern capitalist worldview. However, by noticing how a particularly litany is shaped by a particularly worldview, this allows us to enter alternative worldviews and articulate different policy statements based on them. At the same time, CLA in itself is part of a worldview—one committed to methodological eclecticism but in the framework of a layered, post-postmodern view of reality. It thus not only challenges the totalizing nature of the empirical paradigm (to use Paul Wildman's phrase) but as well the horizontal relativism of postmodernism.
As a new method, there are limits to the number of case studies that can be drawn upon. I have also used CLA at a World Futures Studies Federation, Centre Catalan de Prospectiva, government of Andorra and UNESCO course on the futures of communication. See, Ihsan Samar, Inayatullah, Sohail and Obijiofor, Levi, The Futures of Communication, Futures, 27(8), 897–903 (1995). Paul Wildman has used the method at workshops for the Singapore Civil Service.
Perhaps: community learning, through more spiritual approaches that revive the ideas of initiation into meaning and culture systems that current educational institutions lack, wherein merely an application form suffices.
Perhaps: Focused on distant learning or interactive learning where boundaries between student and teacher, text and context disappeared.