Modeling of long‐range world trends began in a rigorous way in 1968, when the Club of Rome initiated the Forrester and Meadows studies which resulted in the computer models Worlds…
Abstract
Modeling of long‐range world trends began in a rigorous way in 1968, when the Club of Rome initiated the Forrester and Meadows studies which resulted in the computer models Worlds 1, 2, and 3. Publication of the results in popular form in Limits to Growth catalyzed worldwide discussion of the finiteness of the earth with respect to explosive growth in population and technological civilization. While these first‐generation world models had a profound effect on how many people now view social progress and the future of mankind, they were criticized for being over aggregated and failing to take into account sufficient human factors, such as social and political organization, values, and the force of secular and religious traditions.
More than anything else, the first pictures of our world as a beautiful blue‐green and white globe hanging in the eternal black space of the universe, which the astronauts brought…
Abstract
More than anything else, the first pictures of our world as a beautiful blue‐green and white globe hanging in the eternal black space of the universe, which the astronauts brought back from the first moon mission, have hammered home to everybody the fact that this is really, for better or worse, one world. In the words of Barbara Ward, a “spaceship earth.” People have begun to realize that we live in a period of history which represents, as John R. Platt has put it, a “great world transformation.” We are no longer living in a slowly evolving, steady‐state world, but in a new kind of world where we are witnessing constantly and at an increasing rate quantum‐jump events, or what Kenneth Boulding has called a systems‐break. These shifts in global, social, economic, and technological balance are of the greatest importance to all planners. In our now hopelessly intertwined world economy, these quantum‐jump events not only influence the large multinational giant corporations, as so many still naively believe, but small, local businesses as well.
For their opponents, the Multinational Corporation (MNC) is a rapacious, exploitative, immoral and blatently malevolent institution, the source of most of the socioeconomic…
Many of the problems facing corporations today are the familiar ones: rising costs, reduced profit margins, intensified competition made more keen by the recession and growing…
Abstract
Many of the problems facing corporations today are the familiar ones: rising costs, reduced profit margins, intensified competition made more keen by the recession and growing market saturation, product obsolescence, complex and more stringent government legislative and regulatory requirements. The list goes on. Although we have faced these problems before, there seems to be a new urgency to our search for plans and strategies to deal with them. The problems seem somehow bigger, more refractory today, and more urgent.
The Society is a non‐profit professional and educational association formed in 1966. Today membership exceeds 1,600 individuals interested in improving their competence as…
Abstract
The Society is a non‐profit professional and educational association formed in 1966. Today membership exceeds 1,600 individuals interested in improving their competence as planners and increasing the use of planning in corporations and institutions throughout North America.