Competing over the Future? Competition and Cooperation in Entrepreneurial Futures Studies

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Elke Seefried
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 316001474

The PhD project examines the interaction between competition and cooperation in the recent history of entrepreneurial futures studies from the 1970s to the early 2000s – a topic that has been overlooked in historical scholarship. Derived from the new modes of science-based strategic and technological planning of the Cold War, futures studies received considerable public and scientific attention both in the West and the East during the 1960s, as a new meta-science for creating, forecasting and controlling the future. In the 1970s, futures studies went through tremendous waves of change. One of these was that West European commercial companies set up futures studies groups which coexisted with publicly funded research institutes and free associations. The project compares futures studies and planning groups in (West) German and French corporations. The focus is on (West) Germany and France because, in both of these countries, futures studies received special public and political attention, and the establishment of planning units in companies is comparatively well documented. The project sheds light on the forms of self-representation, organization and the generation of knowledge that were to be found in these corporative planning units. It investigates the epistemic effects that emerged from cooperative and competitive practices, and asks whether the rise of entrepreneurial futures studies indicated an intensified "economization" of the sciences. At the core of the project is an assessment of how cooperation and competition intertwined. This is examined through the investigations mentioned in three areas: amongst future studies groups working for different companies; amongst groups that were corporate and publicly funded; and in the national patterns that developed in West Germany and France.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2553: Cooperation and Competition in the Sciences