ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Futures Studies in the European Ex-socialist Countries FUTURES STUDIES IN ESTONIA Erik Terk Institutes and futures research activities in years 1960-1990 It is quite hard to speak about futures studies in modern term at Soviet time in Estonia.

There were some work related to long-term planning process, so-called predplanovoje razrabotki in Russian language (but without serious intention to originality from Estonian researchers engaged) and also some attempts of traditional economic prognostics by the initiative of individual academic researchers. Dr. Kaljo Kask’s work in building industry prognostics and Dr. Raul Renter’s in printing industry prognostics may be mentioned in the last field.

From institutions Estonian Institute of Economics (of Academy of Sciences), Institute (before it laboratory) of Estonian State Planning Committee and Estonian branch of Central (All-union) Economic-Mathematical Institute’s Tallinn branch must be mentioned.

Some materials for students about economic prognostics were published by Economic Faculty of Tallinn Technical University (=Tallinn Politechnical Institute), but in general prognostics was not among main research fields of Estonian universities. Dr. Raul Renter published with his colleague Aleksander Schipai a book in Estonian, called “Economic and Social Prognostics”(1977) and defended doctoral theses on the topic of methods of prognostics in Moscow.

But there were two quite interesting fields more. In chair of Organization and Management of Economic Faculty of Tallinn Technical University some young researchers and consultants (Endel Oja, Ain Ivalo, Erik Terk) started to study modern western company level planning and corporate strategy building methodology and techniques, this job was continued later (after year 1978) in Estonian Management Institute.

This field was partly connected with planning, partly with theory of decision-making (research of Dr. Madis Habakuk may be mentioned in this field) partly with futures studies. For example publications by French strategic planning theorists and Pentti Malaska were studied by Estonian researchers of this field at 1980s. New methodology of thinking (for example scenario-building) was used in consulting of companies, Later started some experiments of using this methodology on sectoral level topics.

Other example is connected with scientific interests of some Estonian philosophers.