Future Studies

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Freyre, Gilberto (1900–87)

Peter Burke, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
(Second Edition), 2015

Theory
Freyre's late essays on futurology, urbanization, and other topics of contemporary
interest lack the richness and density of his earlier work. It was in his studies of social
history that he made his most important contribution to theory. A central concept
in Freyre's work was that of equilibrium. However, he imagined this equilibrium not
as static but dynamic, an ‘equilibrium of antagonisms’ (an idea that he learned from
Herbert Spencer and Franklin Giddings). He has often been accused of having too
rosy a picture of Brazil, of overemphasizing harmony. This may well be the case, but
it should be added that he did not deny the existence of conflict. What he suggested
was that conflicts could be and sometimes were harmonized or to use one of his
favorite words, ‘softened.’

Related to this process of softening is the best known theory associated with Freyre:
the theory of hybridity, in the sense of miscegenation and also of what he often called
the ‘interpenetration’ of cultures (Needell, 1995; Cleary, no date). In The Masters
and the Slaves, he argued that this interpenetration was beneficent and that it had
made Brazil what it was, writing that “Every Brazilian, even the light-skinned fair
one, carries about with him on his soul, when not on soul and body alike … the
shadow, or at least the birthmark of the Indian or the African” (1933: p. 278). It was
this argument in particular that made him famous. In the 1930s, the people, or at
least the intellectuals, were anxious about the Brazilian's apparent lack of identity.
Since they were descended from a mixture of the indigenous inhabitants of the
country, European immigrants (mainly Portuguese), and African slaves, what could
they be?

Educated Brazilians tended to believe that interbreeding led to degeneration and

that the only hope for the country lay in its ‘whitening,’ thanks to a new wave of
immigration from Europe. Freyre himself believed this for a time, but he reversed
his position to claim that mixture was not an obstacle to Brazilian identity, it was
the identity. He owed this conversion to his friend Rüdiger Bilden, who had studied
with Franz Boas; to Boas himself, whom he adopted as a ‘master’ (displaying a
photograph of Boas in his study); and to the Brazilian anthropologist Roquette-Pinto
(Pallares-Burke, 2005, 2012).

Freyre saw miscegenation as a key to Brazilian history, associating it with a regime

of slavery that was, in its patriarchal, paternalist way, more gentle than slave regimes
elsewhere. This point was a relative one; he was well aware of the violence built into
the system. On the other hand, he paid little attention to the fact that miscegenation
was generally asymmetrical, the result of relations between upper class white males
and black female slaves. He has also been criticized for his rosy picture of what is
often called ‘racial democracy,’ in other words the lack of racism in Brazil (Guimarães,
2005). Once again, his point was a relative one; Brazilians, he argued, came nearer to
this ideal than most if not all other cultures. Later studies (including one by Fernando
Henrique Cardoso in his days as a sociologist) focused on discrimination in cities in
the south of Brazil and undermined Freyre's argument, although it appeared and
indeed still appears more plausible in the region he knew best, the Northeast, than
it does elsewhere.

The Masters and the Slaves also discussed cultural mixing or hybridization (in Por-
tuguese, mestiçagem) in domains that range from vernacular architecture to lan-
guage, clothes, and cuisine. At a time when sociolinguistics was in its infancy, and
had not yet been christened, Freyre wrote brilliant pages describing the influence of
Africa, and especially of African slave nannies, on the vocabulary and even the accent
of upper class Brazilians (another striking example of reverse acculturation).

In later works, Freyre returned to the concept of mestiçagem, to play with it or as he

might say to dance with it, pushing it to see how far it would go. Thus, he extended
the concept to sport, writing about ‘mulatto football,’ for instance, not only as a game
played by mulattos but also as a sport that mixed English football with the Brazilian
tradition of capoeira. He extended it to literature, describing the novels of his friends
João Lins do Rego and Jorge Amado as hybrids of fiction, social history, and folklore.
He extended the idea to the practice of sociology, which he viewed as a mixture of
art and science, a discipline that was ‘amphibious’ or ‘polytheist.’ He extended the
concept of mestiçagem to politics, especially to Brazilian politics during the transition
from empire to republic, or more exactly, so he suggested, from a republican form
of empire to an imperial form of republic. He even extended the concept to sex,
allowing a character in his ‘seminovel’ Mother and Son to suggest that people of
hybrid gender sometimes realize themselves more fully than the pure do.

The idea of mestiçagem underlies what may well be Freyre's most important contribu-
tion to the social sciences, his frequently reiterated suggestion that their evidential
base, essentially Western Europe and the United States was too narrow, and that
generalizations about human culture and society needed to draw on the experiences
of other parts of the world. In a word, a word that Freyre liked to use, the social
sciences needed to be ‘tropicalized.’ For example, Freyre wanted to see a tropical
sociology on the analogy of tropical medicine, or even an interdisciplinary ‘tropicol-
ogy.’ In short, he advocated what is now called ‘Southern Theory’ long before it was
christened.

Linked to the idea of tropicalization is Freyre's least successful contribution to social

theory, the concept of ‘Luso-Tropicalism,’ according to which the Portuguese were
better adapted than other Europeans to building an empire in the tropics because
they were accustomed to miscegenation and cultural mixture at home, thanks to the
Arab invasion of Iberia in the Middle Ages. This argument appealed to the Salazar
regime in Portugal at a time when their colonies were becoming restive, and Freyre
was invited to pay an official visit to ‘Ultramar,’ in other words the Portuguese
possessions in Africa and Asia, in 1951.

One criticism of the idea of tropicalization is that it offers a binary opposition,

between tropical and temperate, at the expense of many possible nuances. As the
titles of some of his books suggest – The Masters and the Slaves, The Mansions and
the Shanties, Adventure and Routine, and so on – Freyre was fascinated by polarities,
although he also liked to undermine them by examining connections, exchanges,
and hybridization. Two of these polarities reverberate throughout much of his work:
Jekyll and Hyde, and Apollo and Dionysus. He used Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘Dr
Jekyll’ and ‘Mr Hyde’ as a means to move away from a vision of history as a
conflict between heroes and villains, arguing that in the case of Getúlio Vargas, for
instance, this conflict took place within the President's personality and policies. As
for the opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, Freyre borrowed it,
with acknowledgments, from Ruth Benedict (although he had read Nietzsche for
himself ) and made use of it again and again. English football, for instance, was
described as Apollonian, while Brazilian football was Dionysian. Intellectuals, and
more specifically social scientists, were divided in similar fashion, sociological
purists being labeled as Apollonian while Freyre himself was Dionysian.

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The future of collection management
John Kennedy, in Collection Management, 2006

At the end of the fourth edition of Developing library and information center collections,
Evans and Zamosky (2000) devoted less than four pages out of six hundred to
‘The future of collection development’ (pp.573-576). Even this brief gesture in the
direction of futurology is absent from their fifth edition of 2005. They are doubtless
wise to be cautious, for the literature of predicting the future in librarianship has
hardly been crowned with great success. A few prophets have ‘got it wrong’ by
believing that digital resources would remain a minor adjunct to print; far more have
predicted the total triumph of the digital at a far earlier date than has proved to be
the case, and often issued alarmist calls to action to librarians allegedly in imminent
danger of redundancy in a future that belongs to computer technologists. Many
predicted an as yet unrealised golden future for the electronic book, far fewer the
hypertext possibilities of the web.

> Read full chapter

Strategic Futures for Digital Informa-

tion Services
Chris Batt PhD, in Digital Information Strategies, 2016

The Future is not what it used to be

Serious thinking about the future was long blocked by the belief that the future
was unknowable and beyond our control. People who spoke about the future were
regarded as dreamers, charlatans, or just fools, sensible people focused on their
immediate business.(Cornish, 2004)

During the past 50 years futures studies12 has become a recognised academic
discipline with roots in concerns about the growing impact of technological ca-
pabilities and the interplay of national interests following the Second World War
(Kahn, 1960). A range of practical tools are now available to support futures studies,
ranging from the structured consultation of experts on their views of the future
(the Delphi technique), reviewing trends over time to make judgements about their
future effect (trend analysis), environmental scanning and through the application
of such tools the creation of scenarios of possibilities at some stage in the future
(scenario and simulation planning). Today communities across the globe are faced
with unparalleled degrees of uncertainty about their futures caused by a complex
cocktail of economic turbulence, political instability and the rapid diffusion of tech-
nological innovation (Castells, 2010; Johnson, 2009), and futures studies techniques
are increasingly used as the means of judging the possible and the probable. This
section summarises briefly examples offering pointers to futures studies practice and
studies specifically addressing the future of institutions engaged with the delivery
of information services in the digital space.

Foresight,13 produced by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (‘Our

role is to help Government think systematically about the future’), has, for more
than ten years, undertaken evidence-based studies to identify potential trends up
to 50 years into the future. Recent studies have included climate change, obesity,
flooding and sustainable energy. From the evidence available,14 these studies have
acted as catalysts for greater collaboration between government and other interested
agencies and in some cases have supported the development of cross-department
policies.

Beyond Current Horizons15 was a project led by Futurelab to identify key trends and
their implications for education in 2035. It produced six scenarios of possible futures
(Facer, 2009), together with a wide range of reports on educational trends and
predictions.

The Academic Libraries of the Future16 project, a year-long study sponsored by the
British Library, Jisc, the Research Information Network (RIN), Research Libraries
UK (RLUK) and the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL)
engaged with a range of stakeholders, producing three scenarios of society and the
academic sector in 2050 plus guidance on how to use them to stimulate discussion
about possible futures for UK academic libraries.

In relation to public sector institutions engaged with digital information two other
recent future-focused studies should be mentioned. Arts Council England’s Envi-
sioning the Library of the Future17 addresses the future roles of the English public
library service using trend analysis and consultation with practitioners and users to
produce, not a series of scenarios, but a set of key opportunities and challenges
for the future and their fit within the existing service paradigm. The Museums
Association’s Museums 202018 applies similar techniques for the UK’s museums and
galleries, again rooting the results very much within the traditional service models.

In the United States the New Media Consortium19 provides regular environmental
scan reports on trends in digital technologies and their impact on education and
information-related institutions such as museums. A recent book from the American
Library Association, Reflecting on the Future: Academic and Public Libraries (Matthews
and Hernon, 2013), a resource book of approaches to future planning, while not
specifically focused on digital information, contains a range of tools and their
application in case studies.
Finally, an OCLC programme,20 while not focused directly on exploring future
possibilities, presented a new perspective on the relationships between museums,
libraries and archives. Beyond the Silos of the LAMS (Zorich, Waibel & Erway, 2008) was
based in a small number of universities and national museums in Europe and the
US with museum, library and archive collections within their remit. Projects explored
the use of digital technologies to increase user access to an integrated content base
of material within the institution. Alongside project successes, the report offers a
salutary reminder of barriers to be surmounted. It includes a list of some of the
reasons why some potential project institutions decided not to engage:

• The idea was not of great enough importance.

• The idea was premature.

• The idea was not within the purview of libraries, archives and museums.

• The idea was too overwhelming.

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Introduction
Stuart Ferguson, in Libraries in the Twenty-First Century, 2007

Libraries for the moment, then, seem highly relevant to their parent institutions and
communities. This is in stark contrast to the vision of a senior library educator at
Charles Sturt University, who in the early 1990s announced to a startled group of
information technology (IT) lecturers that libraries would be dead by the year 2000,
made redundant by the very ICTs they taught. Nothing could have been further
from the truth. Is this a cause for complacency – yet another poor performance
indicator for the profession of futurology? Library and information professionals are
not rushing to retrain as futurologists but they are not complacent either. There are
significant challenges facing them. The information environment in which they
develop their services is growing ever more complex. They used to enjoy a relatively
privileged position as major intermediaries (some would even say ‘gatekeepers’)
between the individuals, organisations and communities they served and the world
of (largely) print publications. This involved functions such as the following:

• analysing the information needs of clients, organisations and the community,

whether these needs be educational, recreational or purely informational;
• developing collections of publications that meet their clients’ information
needs;
•
assisting clients find publications they may find useful by describing them •
(using elements such as publication details, physical description or subject
descriptors) and developing appropriate resource discovery tools, such as
library catalogues;
assisting clients access publications by developing information services, prod-•
ucts and systems such as reference assistance, document delivery and inter-li-
brary loans;
managing library collections, including their storage, organisation, dissemi- •
nation and preservation;
instructing clients on how they themselves can address their information •
needs and make best use of the resource discovery and delivery systems
developed by the librarians (a function sometimes called information literacy
instruction); and
evaluating the information services, products and systems they have acquired
or developed.

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Handbook of Media Economics

Catherine E. Tucker, in Handbook of Media Economics, 2015

11.8 Conclusion: Future Spheres of Privacy

When thinking about how online privacy issues will develop in the next decade,
it is helpful to think of other spheres of life where digitization will happen on a
broad scale and consequently create privacy issues. To highlight future avenues for
research, this chapter points to three spheres where privacy issues are likely to grow
in the next decade. It is important to emphasize that at the moment these spheres are
somewhat removed from traditional issues of media economics. This chapter does
not attempt to draw tenuous links, as generally futurology and economics are not
the same. However, from the standpoint that media convergence is likely to continue
and that media ubiquity is likely to increase, there are several spheres where we can
expect to see significant privacy discussions occurring.

The first is the so-called Internet of things. As everyday objects such as thermostats,
door locks, webcams, televisions, alarms, garage openers, power outlets, sprinklers,
and scales start generating large amounts of digital data, new privacy issues will
emerge. What is crucial about this is not the items themselves, which are generally
mundane, but instead the idea of hyperconnectivity. By measuring how a user
interacts with each of these “things,” external outsiders and data analysts will be
able to gain a far fuller and more complete picture of the user's behavior. Into
this category of concerns falls also more advanced technologies such as Google
Glass, which undoubtedly will generate huge amounts of both useful and potentially
controversial data.

The second is the digitization of bio-information. There has been substantial re-
search on the effect of privacy regulation and concerns on the digitization of
medicine (Miller and Tucker, 2009, 2011; Westin, 2005). However, so far this arena
has not yet really impinged on media economics. However, the emergence of
genetic testing (Miller and Tucker, 2014) can be considered as a special case of the
infinitely persistent data problem described above. The lack of our ability to change
our genetics is the source of both the exceptional utility of genetic data and its
exceptional potential, when released and interpreted by an outsider, to reduce our
privacy regarding our susceptibility to medical conditions.

The third sphere is in the digitization of location. Xu et al. (2012), Teo et al.
(2012) present some initial research on locational privacy. As we have seen in the
discussion above, retailers’ data on users’ location has grown steeply in complexity.
The development (or re-emergence) of hyperlocal media is an effect of having
geolocation information on users. Your location can be tracked over time using
mobile devices, and the metadata associated with those movements can reveal a
great deal about you, even if largely unintentionally. This has huge implications for
consumer behavior and welfare.

In general, the aim of this chapter has been to highlight some of the research done
on the economics of privacy as it relates to media economics and in some sense to
emphasize the large gaps in our knowledge. There remains remarkable scope for
researchers to grapple with significant privacy questions in this field, and the rapid
pace of technological advance means that this is likely to continue to be true once
our current questions have been answered.

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Cold War: Impact on Social and Behav-

ioral Sciences
Hamilton Cravens, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
(Second Edition), 2015

Impact of the Cold War in the Americas

In the United States, the federal government underwrote much behavioral science
research in economics, political science, area studies, psychology and sociology
and related endeavors through various agencies and departments of defense, in-
telligence, science, and medicine. The number of dollars available for social and
behavioral science research and practice from private philanthropy was perhaps
one-tenth of that available from federal sources in a typical year during the Cold
War.

Within the U.S. social sciences, there was the emergence of the behavioral sciences,
clearly a Cold War product, from its Second World War origins as a kind of engineer-
ing social science to devise methods and approaches to win the global conflict. The
behavioral scientist, as distinct from the social scientist, sought to create rigorous
methods, often informed by high mathematics, for understanding and predicting
the behavior of individuals, of groups, of institutions, and of entire nations; the social
scientist, traditionally, sought to gather information and to explain what happened
or what would happen. Social scientists had used descriptive statistics since the
mid-nineteenth century. Behavioral scientists went further and deployed sophisti-
cated probability techniques and applied methods from inferential statistics. In the
1950s and 1960s, to take one example, political scientists experienced a ‘behavioral
revolution.’ They imitated natural scientists in the sense that they employed formal
classifications, correlations, appeals to synchronic systems and structures, as well as
the formal location and purpose of units within larger political systems. They moved
away from prior developmental historicism and toward a neopositivist empiricism.
They often used one or another modernization scheme when talking about com-
parisons between the developed and the underdeveloped worlds – between political
cultures in the industrialized West and the preindustrial ‘third world.’ Implicit was
often the shopworn assumption of the general superiority of the West over the prein-
dustrial regions. Thus were absolutist patriotism and scientific positivism parallel
underlying assumptions of American social and behavioral science. The domestic
and international tensions of the Cold War simply magnified these attitudes. In the
1950s, American fears of potential Soviet nuclear parity – later proven to be false
– drove Americans, whether social scientists or not, to intensify their opposition to
Soviet aggression on all fronts, real and perceived.

Although the Cold War introduced new issues and inspired new techniques, such as
futures studies or game theoretical nuclear war strategies, basic political attitudes
and cleavages were not so much changed as intensified, especially a heightened
patriotism and a worshipful faith in scientific and engineering rationality – scientific
positivism, that is. Thus American sociology was divided into various camps. The
structural–functional school of Harvard's Department of Social Relations, led by
sociologist Talcott Parsons, emphasized the adjustment of the individual to the
larger social system, and Robert K. Merton, of Columbia, promoted a similar but
more modest version adjustment according to theories of middle range application.
These might well characterize the posture of the postwar liberal in American politics.
More radical were sociologists who followed the social conflict ideas of Lewis Coser,
who insisted that conflict among differing social interests, or groups, constituted
the warp and woof of society. Even more radical were C. Wright Mills, of Columbia,
and his hardy followers, who declared that the social system had been taken over by
powerful oligarchies and elites and that the average ‘mass man’ had little agency in
society. Alvin Gouldner insisted that mainstream sociology simply upheld the status
quo. All were fierce critics of Cold War conservatism, as well as what they believed
was social science that buttressed Cold War conservatism.

Economists were similarly split into several camps. The macroeconomists who
followed John Maynard Keynes had the experience of the 1940s to the 1970s to show
that their aggregate demand economics did lift employment and produce prosper-
ity; World War II and the Cold War sparked such great government spending which,
together with certain tools, such as national income accounting and specific math-
ematical theorems, spelled unparalleled economic growth for the United States. Yet
there was at least one other kind of economics, neoclassical microeconomics, or
the study of the individual agent or firm in a market, which feted a philosophy of
individualism, not the aggregate, whose proponents pushed it into the terrain of
abstract mathematics, and rigorous axiomatic logic, thus laying claim to a higher
level of scientific, positivistic economics. With the problems of ‘stagflation’ of the
1970s in the economy, the neoclassicists bested the Keynesians in their discipline
and in the public arena. Hence partisans of conservative neoclassical economics won
out in the 1980s and early 1990s, as the Reagan Administration scuttled détente
with the Soviets and the Cold War heated up, as it had not since the later 1960s.
There were also ‘heterodox economists’: they included libertarians, who wanted to
wish government away; Marxist economists, who pined for social democracy; and
‘post-Keynesian’ economists, who worked to convince others that Keynes's doctrines
had a rigorous mathematical, as well as a policy basis, and better for all than the
dog-eat-dog ideology they accused the neoclassical economists of peddling. But this
strange assortment of ‘heterodox economists’ could only agree among themselves
that the neoclassical conservatives were wrong; by the 1990s they were split into
warring groups themselves among post-Keynesians, libertarians, feminists, and
Marxists – among others.

Development of the neutral or ‘underdeveloped’ world was also a part of hemispheric

social and behavioral science. The trailblazers were likely the anthropologists, who
during the 1940s and 1950s, turned from the study of man's origins with preliterate
tribes to the study of contemporary peoples in exotic areas of strategic importance
to the United States. The Cold War made such work even more crucial to Ameri-
can policymakers, who believed the nation was engaged in a twilight struggle, as
President Kennedy put it, for the ‘underdeveloped’ world's allegiance against the
Communist menace. According to Walt W. Rostow, sometime economic historian
and presidential adviser, all nations followed certain stages of economic growth to
urbanization and industrialization; this became high policy with which to thwart
Communism and to promote democratic capitalism around the globe. During the
Cold War, the United States' military, intelligence, and international development
agencies funded numerous social science investigations in the ‘underdeveloped
nations’ seeking, in the case of South Viet Nam, to support the Diem dictatorship,
or in the case of Chile, to carry out through ‘Project Camelot,’ a study of how to
design a general systems model to predict and control internal strife and promote
counterinsurgency in peripheral countries. In any given time there were perhaps
several dozen such covert social science operations functioning with governmental
support.

Some social science expertise was indigenous in Latin America. The nineteenth
century independence movements fostered champions of liberal statism, Comtean
positivism, and German historical or institutional economics. Between the Second
World War and the 1970s, as Latin America entered the world economy, its econo-
mists, whether proficient academically or self-trained, wrote much about the eco-
nomics of underdeveloped countries and regions – that is, their region. For example,
the left-liberal Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch developed from the 1940s on a
center–periphery theory of economic underdevelopment that was both theoretical
and historical, that social scientists and governmental apparatchiks throughout Latin
America took up. He also created a network of like-minded economists through
the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), located in Santiago, Chile,
and which nurtured a Latin American economics profession anxious to promote its
region. Certain groups of United States economists, as the neoclassical economists
at the University of Chicago, established rival groups of conservative economists,
as at the Catholic University of Chile, who went on to advise the region's rightist
regimes, such as Pinochet's in Chile. Here the regional stimulus was Fidel Castro's
Cuba, against which both the United States and the rightist regimes reacted, plotted,
and schemed. The Cold War definitely spilled over into the Western Hemisphere.
The social scientists, as retainers of various governments, smartly followed behind
their patrons.

> Read full chapter

The value of competitive intelligence

Charlotte Håkansson, Margareta Nelke, in Competitive Intelligence for Information
Professionals, 2015
Why is the importance of competitive intelligence increasing?
Why should corporations and organisations put effort and resources into strategic
and competitive intelligence? The answer is because the cost of process-oriented,
structural intelligence provides value in many ways.

The importance of intelligence is increasing for businesses. Several factors have an

impact on why, and we will describe some of those mentioned in various research
reports by Bohman (2009) and Lundqvist (2010), as well as some from our own
experience:

• globalisation

• individualisation

• competition

• complexity

• the demand for knowledge

• IT development

• threats

• crises

• a common view.

These factors were defined in the research report from the investigation of 50
national public authorities in Sweden between 2005 and 2007. Interviews were
carried out by the Institute for Futures Studies (Lundqvist, 2010). We found that
these impact factors were applicable and generic for a larger environment than
just the public sector in Sweden when compared with our own experience from
international corporate business and academia.

Globalisation
Changing structures in society and changing organisational cultures make an im-
pact. The world is becoming more global – and it is shrinking. We are working,
travelling and partnering in a growing international context. Country borders are
of less importance in globalisation while the Internet and digital communication
are of greater importance. The demand for smart interactivity increases e-learning,
open innovation, open spaces, open communication, open universities and social
networking.
Research communication is changing – universities are becoming more and more
internationalised while researchers must interact in a global arena and communicate
at international conferences, world-wide seminars and open-space project groups.

Businesses are moving faster and faster around the globe. Developing countries
have undergone quick market growth and major changes are taking place in the
industries of the USA, Europe and Japan.

Globalisation takes place on several levels as well as in our minds. We are becoming
citizens of the world and our knowledge about each other is increasing in fast and
sometimes unpredictable ways as a result of increased migration and both physical
and virtual movement.

Individualisation
On the other hand, the tendency for individualisation in our society is evolving
compared to a few decades ago. This phenomenon probably appears at certain
intervals and frequencies. The reason for our individualistic approach could, of
course, be related to the rapid development of information overflow and the im-
pact of faster and greater stimuli. The outlook for our surrounding environment
becomes even more important if we as individuals have a need to protect ourselves
against information flooding. Society is experiencing an acceleration in production
in research and development within science. On one hand we need to cope with this
as individuals and on another hand we need to be a part of the future development
of the modern society. Nobody wants to be ‘left’ behind.

Competition
Every corporation, organisation and public sector is exposed to increasing compe-
tition – we have to compete in a more differentiated market. We often refer to the
potential of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and now also including
South Africa) – where a fast-growing, very well-educated middle class is competing
in the global arena. This considerable potential must be met and challenged by other
countries. The western hemisphere must adjust to completely new markets and new
relationships.

To do that we have to change from an industrialised society to a community which is

information- and knowledge-based. New demands for changes require completely
new sets of skills and training. Our society has to adjust to new developments
resulting from the demands of these changes.

There are less and less traditional working opportunities – we are competing with
large and well-educated developing markets which also have the means to commu-
nicate skills through faster communication channels. China and India are examples
of countries with a huge growing middle-class which Europe and the USA are
competing with. Scientific publications are flooding scientific databases, open access
and scientific communities and we have to adapt.

From a European perspective there is the challenge of an increasingly elderly pop-

ulation. How does a shrinking population take care of an ageing population which
lives longer and longer? How can we manage to interact with changing international
population streams?

Complexity
The complexity of society is increasing, even though we have simpler ways to
communicate. We are also developing and increasing our knowledge of and our
competence in using these tools. But we also experience the world as being more
complex, even though there are more opportunities available. We do not know how
to fix our cars anymore because they are not only mechanical but include a complex
data system for all the comfortable functionalities we need in order to view our
vehicles as modern. We have to go to a car mechanic to change a light bulb instead
of doing it ourselves. The same complexity exists in the development of education,
working society and daily life. We are unable to see through all systems and processes
at a glance. We need more and more sophisticated learning tools to be able to cope
with the progress of society.

The demand for knowledge

The demand for knowledge is therefore increasing in the world of complexity. We
do not need an immense flood of information. Instead we need analyses and con-
clusions. We need to take care of the information available in a more knowledgeable
way than by just clicking on a mouse or Googling. This includes how we deal with
the sources of knowledge. Filtering, analysing, making available – knowledge must
be accessible since the demand for it grows with the complexity. Somebody has to
take responsibility for the process of making information knowledgeable.

A description of the process flow of information could be like this: data is comprised
of bits and pieces which are turned into information. When we receive information
we process the information in our brains to produce knowledge. The relationship
could be pictured in a sequence of Data → Information → Knowledge → Wisdom
where data is a number of facts that have no meaning until they are interpreted as
information. Information could be any amount of facts but also a form of substantial
messages. In the process of interpreting information the sums are adding up into
knowledge – something more than just the given information – and when we are
using our knowledge we can ennoble this into the application of wisdom.
IT development
The fast pace of IT development has provided us with easy access to information and
also brings about new means for creative solutions which we cannot yet imagine.
This has made a great impact on society; however, there is still work to be done in
our approach to the tools which are creating the solutions to meet the changes in
our daily working habits. We are offered possibilities, but there is also pressure on
us to understand how to handle these new opportunities. We can presently collect
and aggregate more data faster than ever before. But what do we do with all those
facts? It is even more important to find ways to handle and look out for an increase
in information overflow which may arise at any given time.

Threats and crises

A growing number of threats is being experienced by society around the world
and our greater awareness of them has been enabled by faster communication
channels and worldwide accessibility. Climate change, tsunamis, terrorist threats,
other weather catastrophes, nuclear power plant threats, the AIDS epidemic, the
Ebola epidemic, the economic crisis of the euro and so on are just a few examples.
Society must be watchful and prepared for threats and crises in a more organised and
structured manner. Since news flows quickly and spreads widely across the globe, we
also have the responsibility to react on the information and knowledge we receive.
Here we see a clear need for preparedness to meet these kinds of threats and crises
on various levels.

A common view
Competitive intelligence can also be the means by which we create a common view
and a platform in an organisation. Working with values and creating knowledge of
the surrounding world builds a common organisational basis. This is the glue that
holds the organisation together, shortens important communication channels and
prevents the duplication of work processes. Reaching the same goals laid down in
the vision and values can be viewed as a process and a compelling force.

These are some of the impact factors, social structures and organisational devel-
opments in society that make methodical and structural work with competitive
intelligence very important. Society, corporations and academia as well as public
organisations are able to see this growing need.

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