Social Futuring
Social futuring is the feature of a social entity signifying its capacity, ability and fitness to envision, create and enact changes and so to prepare itself for the beneficial proceeding into and managing of the future. Social futuring is a measure of the creative awareness and intent a social entity (e.g. a family, a community, an organization, a nation, a region, a culture, etc.) needs to rationalize its present and future potentials, set common goals, adapt to and cope with changes and perform its visions while sustaining its orientation towards the future. Social futuring is used to indicate a social entity’s ability, readiness and activity to embrace the future.
What is social futuring?
Social futuring is a term formulated by the Social Futuring Center of Corvinus University Budapest, used in the project CONNEXT 2050 HUNGARY and exploited by the Social Futuring Index to recognize a complex set of skills a social entity can and should obtain in order to manage and lead future demographic, technological, cultural, economic, geopolitical etc. changes without compromising normative social and ethical standards and healthy living conditions. As a character, social futuring exclusively belongs and applied to what is social, that is, to human agents and the net of relations with their material, social, cultural and symbolic environments. Rooted in a multidisciplinary academic framework social futuring creates an innovative synergy of approaches and results of futures studies, demography, philosophy, sociology, psychology, bionics, informatics, economics, political science, environmental studies among other academic and professional fields. Thus, it is semantically penetrated by notions like future-orientation, future proofing, attachment, resilience, coping and sustainability (etc.).
Conditions of social futuring
The necessary conjunctive conditions of the social futuring of any given social entity are that it is able to
- exist permanently and
- operate functionally and
- organize actions to influence its functioning and environment in the future
The sufficient disjunctive conditions of the social futuring of any given social entity are that it is able to
- facilitate/create change(s) or
- prepare itself to manipulate change(s) or
- prepare itself to exploit opportunities brought by future change(s) or
- prepare itself to manage risks brought by future change(s).
Forms of social futuring
Based on the above listed definition and conditions a social entity’s social futuring can either be
- Reactive: if the social entity is prepared to effectively cope with risks entailed by future change(s).
- Active: when the social entity resiliently prepares itself to exploit the opportunities of future change(s) for its betterment.
- Proactive: that is, the social entity and its key agents envision, manipulate and create future change(s) in accordance with consciously cognized and positively deemed opportunities.
Each and all forms of social futuring can improve the social entity’s relative position compared to relevant other entities.
Measuring social futuring
By measuring social futuring the complex of future-oriented workings and way of life of an entity is evaluated, indicated and weighted. The Social Futuring Index (SFI) and ranking is a weighted average of indicators that approximate the elements of social futuring. The SFI measures a ’net result’ as it is detectable based on publicly available data used in its calculation.
References
Researchers of social futuring
- Zoltán Oszkár Szántó, Professor, Head of the Research Center
- János Csák, Honorary Professor, Chief Director of Project ConNext2050
- Péter Szabadhegy, Director of International Affairs of Project ConNext2050
- Balázs Szepesi, Senior Research Fellow
- Petra Katalin Aczél, Professor, Senior Research Fellow
- Eszter Monda, Junior Research Fellow, International Coordinator
- Loránd Ambrus, Senior Research Fellow
- Róbert Iván Gál, Senior Research Fellow
- Márta Radó, Junior Research Fellow
- Tamás Bartus, Senior Research Fellow
- Réka Geambasu, Senior Research Fellow
- Zoltán Ábrahám, Senior Research Fellow
- Szidónia Katalin Nagy, Project Coordinator