Futures studies...

Futures studies, according to the mentioned above features of local thinking, help to conceptualise the human cultural activities by watching the production and consumption activities in the contemporary cultural practice of human societies and by the interpretation and prediction of their technological forms and their many-sided impacts on the human life. The watching may not be separated from processes of evaluation of cultural activities.

Therefore the futures studies fill an active role in creating the attitudes and morality of particular men and women by appropriate methodology of the reorganization of their backlogs of knowledge and help them to reshape their value attitudes and understanding the world, which are they living in.

Also the concepts of “deep futurology” and “futurology as a social movement” suits well to the recently manifested concepts of futures studies widespread mainly among members of the civic futurological movement in the Czech Republic. Last fifty years of the futures studies If evaluating the knowledge about the methodology of futures studies, then the Czech practice does not represent different backlog of knowledge in comparison with the world “state of the art”.

Differences originate thanks to peculiar ways of implementation of futures studies in the decision-making and are caused by the local demand for the knowledge about the future. Discrete periods of futures studies can be distinguished from that viewpoint. In the post-war period, the futures studies were stimulated by the technological policy induced by the cold war and arms racing between two contemporary world superpowers.

Futures studies were provided by methods allowing to establish future values of main output characteristics of technological systems and gradually also of those systems, which were used by the state government and by enterprisers for innovation and production of new products and services.

The Czechoslovak Communistic government exploited such practice for whole time, during which the system of centrally planned economy in Czechoslovakia was provided (practically till the end of its political power). That period has brought methodology of technological forecasting by historical trend analyses and by an extrapolation of values of particular output characteristics.

Concept of managing the society according to the state plan allowed to exploit all methods suitable for controlling the behaviour of the society like a behaviour of “determined automaton”.