be defined [12].
We can go even further. There is a difference between who is a futurist and what
the substantive boundaries of the futures field are. Below, I give some criteria by
which to decide who is a futurist and who isn’t. But the subject matter of futures
studies is a different issue. Futurists, by the very nature of our holistic and integrative
action approach, rely on the knowledges of many different fields. Thus, we frequently
use the work of nonfuturists that we find relevant to our purposes. Although doing
so may appear to make the field’s boundaries fuzzy, it also immunizes futurists from
catching the diseases of intellectual parochialism and overspecialization.
Finally, in any field there is always a struggle between some members who try
to keep the field openended, even as its canon grows, and other members who rush
to achieve early closure and to propose supposedly lasting formulations of the field’s
principles and methods. The former try to incorporate and cope with the puzzles,
obscurities, diversity, and ambiguities of the field, while the latter tend to ignore
them and to accept neat, simple, and often wrong solutions.
Clearly, some balance between the two camps is required. ‘On the one hand,
there is the very real danger that a discipline will dissolve into a kind of mindless
antinomianism where everyone does his own thing and listens only to the sounds of
his own voice. On the other hand, there is the equally real danger that a discipline
will harden into a brittle orthodoxy where ritual, rules and formulae long outlast th