The Research seminar series in history and history of ideas invites you to a seminar with Jenny Andersson, Uppsala University:
My contribution addresses the role of future research in the crucial years between 1967 and 1972, when forms of scenario planning began to proliferate in public administrations, transnational organisations and multinational corporations. I will argue that this turn represented a domestication of future research, which had been experimented in the decades after the second world war as a both military but also deeply utopian undertaking. Before 1972, future research became understood also in organisations like the OECD as an important reflection on the limits of industrial society and the temporal (social, environmental) consequences of growth. But faced with the twin challenge of the Limits to growth-controversy and the OPEC-crisis, the Western world changed its approach to the future, and began to use future research as a way of bypassing ideas of limits. Key to the use of scenarios in the years after 1972 was the idea of inventing other, dynamic and competitive futures and notions of an expanding world market beyond limits.
Jenny Andersson is CNRS Research Professor, and Co-director, Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies, Sciences Po, Paris. She is also a researcher in the Department of History of Ideas and Learning at Uppsala University, and PI on the RJ-funded program, "Neoliberalism in the Nordics: Developing an absent theme."