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1. 126 Book reviews / Futures 36 (2004) 115–129
Americas and Oceania. This also coincided with the peak of western imperialism
and global technological domination. Since the middle of the 20th century, the fer-
tility and formal imperial presence of “whites” has been severely declining while
the fertility and independence of “nonwhites” has significantly increased, for the
most part. The point is, there simply won’t be that many white folks on the globe
within another hundred years, compared to people of color, for westerners to domi-
nant as they have for the past several centuries. While George W. Bush and his
advisors seem bent on having America rule the world by military force for the fore-
seeable future (and they might succeed for a while), time is definitely not on their
side (indeed, the face of the “average American” is also significantly and quickly
darkening as the Empire threatens).
Soon, though perhaps not soon enough, Futures will be filled with myriad visions
of cultural futures unimaginable by many privileged futurists now. Among these will
probably be new and diverse visions of Islamic futures as well.
And when that time comes, then what’s next? Naturally, I think futures visions
of cyborgs, artilects, clones, and assorted extra-terrestrials will be clamoring then to
be heard. But my question is, do you suppose Futures Editor Zia Sardar will be
among the first gladly to welcome them in?
Jim Dator
University of Hawaii, Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, 2424 Maile
Way, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA
E-mail address: dator@hawaii.edu
doi:10.1016/S0016-3287(03)00137-X
Advancing futures: futures studies in higher education
Edited by James A. Dator. Praeger Publishers: Westport, Connecticut, 2002, pp
409, $69.95
Advancing Futures originated as a special issue of the journal American
Behavioral Scientist. In organizing it, Jim Dator requested contributions from futur-
ists who both practice futures research, and teach and train the next generation of
futures thinkers. Contributors were asked to address five questions: 1) what is futures
studies? 2) what is your theory of social change? 3) what methods do you use to
create social change? 4) how do you approach futures research? And 5) how do you
teach futures studies? The resulting twenty-nine essays (including Dator’s own) offer
a wide spectrum of responses from both the first and second generation of academic
futurists, and represent futures teaching in Western and Eastern Europe, North Amer-
ica, Asia, and Oceania. Had each contributor responded punctiliously to the questions
as framed, the resulting survey, in essay form, would have provided an interesting
source of point-by-point comparisons.
But these are futures thinkers, who by definition think—and write—out of the

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Book reviews / Futures 36 (2004) 115–129
box, and by originality of temperament are difficult to wrangle. Consequently, the
resulting essays vary widely in topics covered, in focus—personal, conceptual,
methodological, and philosophical—and in length. Dator’s five questions were some-
thing of a Rorschach test for the futures field. Nonetheless, for scholars interested
in the history and sociology of futures studies, Advancing Futures provides twenty-
nine fascinating examples of scholars linking, merging, or transforming more tra-
ditional disciplines’ concepts and tools into futures research, thus creating the com-
plex, evolving community that is futures studies worldwide. Each of the senior
authors was trained initially in another field, and their essays describe how they built
ethical, conceptual, and methodological bridges to futures studies in their teaching
and research. The essays offered by “second generation” futurists—e.g., Inayatullah,
Mannermaa, Huston, Jones, Serra del Pino, Rubin, and Wildman—show implicitly
how concepts and schools of thought in futures studies have been transmitted from
the founders of futures studies to their students, as for example the repetition of
Dator’s conceptual diagram in Serra del Pino’s essay. So careful study of this collec-
tion rewards the reader not only with a sense of the myriad intellectual paths possible
to the futures field, but also the genealogical interconnections of knowledge develop-
ment and dissemination within it.
Dator sorted the responses into four categories: 1) “Overviews and Histories”
(Bell, Masini, Riner, Wagar, Slaughter, and Inayatullah); 2) “Explaining and Defin-
ing” (Manicas, Bishop, Nováky, Hideg, Mannermaa, Huston, and Yamaguchi); 3)
“Courses and Methods” (Azam, Chen, Sotarauta, May, Cole, Jones, Serra del Pino,
Rubin, Wildman, Hicks, and Markley); and 4) “Concerns and Issues” (Lowe, Shos-
tak, Sternberg, and Halal). Commentary on each of the essays exceeds the scope of
this review, but the examples which follow will indicate the potential usefulness of
the volume.
Wendell Bell has already provided a detailed history of futures studies in Foun-
dations of Futures Studies (vol. I); here he depicts a personal history of efforts to
breach the disciplinary boundaries of sociology in order to address broader issues
of societal futures. Wagar’s essay presents a similar process in reconceptualizing
history to focus on the human timeline and thus logically include present and future
with past. Riner describes an interest in the future that predated his anthropological
training, informed it, and consequently produced a holistic approach to exploring
far-future developments in human societies and infrastructures. Both Mannermaa and
Sotarauta explain how they integrate futures research in their approaches to policy
studies and societal decision-making. Futures studies as a discipline has been
enriched by the perspectives, concepts, and tools of every academic discipline; essays
such as these illuminate that process. Samples of resulting conceptual frameworks
used to teach this evolving multidisciplinarity are offered variously by Dator himself,
by Slaughter in describing critical futures studies and strategic foresight, and by
Yamaguchi in explaining “Future-Oriented Complexity and Adaptive Studies
(FOCAS).”
While this is a very scholarly volume (Advancing Futures is unlikely to be a
vehicle for mass recognition of the field of futures studies), the essays are not limited
to personal intellectual journeys and conceptual definitions; many of the authors offer

3. 128 Book reviews / Futures 36 (2004) 115–129
us useful descriptions of methods as well as descriptions of their applications with
regard to actual issues. Examples of the former include Inayatullah’s description of
causal layered analysis; Cole’s detailed explanation of the Global Issues and Futures
model featuring linked impact analysis, backcasting/forecasting, and scenario build-
ing; and Markley’s presentation of “a virtual time travel method for visionary futures
exploration,” emerging out of his work in guided cognitive imaging. With regard to
examples of applications, Masini’s article—while detailed regarding the development
of futures studies as a field and a global network of scholarship—presents her experi-
ences applying futures methods in developing economies, focusing particularly on
improving conditions for women and children. Yamaguchi’s essay addresses how
futures tools might build sustainability; Riner’s on futures methods as an aid to
community visioning and planning; Chen on participatory workshops exploring alter-
native futures for Taiwan; and Lowe on work using futures studies and foresight in
national goal-setting and policy-making.
Advancing Futures, then, offers resources for several purposes. It adds to our
historical records, documenting the development of the futures field from twenty-
nine quite different perspectives. People looking for introductions or overviews of
core conceptual frameworks will find several among which to choose. Within these
chapters, methodology teachers will find useful descriptions of a few quantitative
and qualitative futures research tools. Researchers focused on particular issues will
find examples of futures tools applied to community development, union dispute
resolution and planning, economic change, and management. And practitioners inter-
ested in the ethics of applied futures work will find critical questions with which to
initiate dialogues on responsibility and accountability in futures praxis.
Weaknesses? In the best of all possible worlds, futures colleagues from every
continent would have responded to Dator’s request for self-reflection, thus providing
the opportunity for more explicit explorations of how futures research and teaching
adapts and evolves in different cultural contexts. We could also wish for a companion
volume on teaching futures studies in elementary and secondary education (Gidley’s
recent edition seems to focus more on young people’s images of the future, rather
than curriculum modules and tools per se.) Finally, the book ends too abruptly with
Halal’s essay: a more satisfying conclusion would be a subsequent essay synthesizing
the advances, and summarizing the gaps remaining, which the futures community
should work to fill. After profiling our progress, the next obvious question is whither
futures now?
That question is raised with increasing frequency by the “third generation” futur-
ists, as witness the February 2003 “Futures of Futures Studies” salon convened by
the Association of Professional Futurists (www.profuturists.com). One outcome of
their scenario-building process was the identification of “union vs. fragmentation”
as a critical uncertainty facing the futures field. We are a small community, globally;
does proliferation of dozens of professional organizations and collaborations enhance
the support available, or scatter and diminish our energies and impacts? An interest-
ing question for a field whose great strength is multidisciplinarity: overcoming terri-
torial boundaries among intellectual disciplines through creative and systemic syn-
thesis in order holistically to address critical issues facing humanity and the planet.

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But such a synthesis requires a foundation of clarity, and so would a global union
of our efforts as teachers of futures studies. In Advancing Futures, Dator provided
a venue for these authors to articulate clearly their personal origins, values, biases,
and goals in teaching futures studies. It is an exercise we would all do well to
complete, so that we understand each other sufficiently to work towards advanc-
ing futures.
Wendy Schultz,
Infinite Futures: foresight training and facilitation, Oxford, UK
E-mail address: wendy@infinitefutures.com
Fax: +44-1865-274-125
doi:10.1016/S0016-3287(03)00138-1