A Movement Matured: Results of a Co-citation Analysis, and Some Reflections on the Relations Between Social Structure and Ideas in Futures Studies

Abstract

Scholars and practitioners have long criticized the inherent dominance of Western ideas in futures studies and claimed the need for a de-centering or decolonizing of the field. As a process of transforming science, de-centering occurs on at least two levels: at the level of thought and at the level of social structure. Sociologists of science, Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars, and others have conducted research for many years on the interlinkages between social structures and knowledge structures and have developed several concepts to do so. In this article, I discuss some of these concepts and combine these theoretical conceptualizations with a co-citation analysis of recent publications in the futures studies. Based on a sample of futures studies publications that have appeared in the last ten years (n = 500) retrieved from the Web of ScienceTM database, a strongly inter-related network with four clusters can be identified. The works in each these four clusters are related in terms of their subject matter. They concern (1) the politico-intellectual program of futures studies, (2) their epistemological foundations, (3) questions of methodology, and (4) scenarios as the core technique of futures thinking. Both the works and their authors come from a broad variety of cultural backgrounds; they also display a relatively high number of co-citations with works in clusters other than their own. Taken together, these findings indicate that the information space sampled in this study to represent futures studies has already become de-centered to a large degree, both at the level of social structure and at the level of thought.