Into the Archives: Surveying Futures Research in the UK
Impressions from a brief December dive into the archives
Happy New Year - I hope 2024 has got off to a good start.
Before the holiday break, I briefly returned to the UK for a week to skim through some sources and archives that help give a broad overview of futures research in the UK in the early-mid 1970s.
This is going to be a short report on that trip, highlighting interesting findings that stuck out, rather than an exhaustive analysis of all the sources I looked at. My goal with this post is to leave myself a reminder of what I did and the ideas I had while doing it, and flag some initial findings in case they’re of interest to any readers.
I’m going to focus on sources I looked at in the LSE’s archive and the British Library, which isn’t exactly an archive but has plenty of useful primary sources in its collections. Here’s what I looked at in each of these places.
British Library: The Futures Directory (1977), and some books by Sussex
My main motive for visiting the British Library - which is still useable, despite the recent cyberattack - was to read John and Magda McHale’s The Futures Directory (1977), which is a really useful listing of people and organisations involved in futures studies and long-range planning around the world. It was produced in partnership with the journal Futures and two other people - Laurence Tobias, who I don’t know much about, and Guy Streatfeild, who I do know more about and who I’m certain will pop up again in this project. Streatfeild edited Futures - I believe he also helped found it - and ran it out of an office in Guildford, Surrey, during the early 1970s. I haven’t found much else about the founding of Futures, but the journal is still going and its history will surely give more insight into the futures research landscape in the UK c. 1970 (I’m hoping one of my next few posts will be about the history of futures journals founded in the UK).
Anyway, back to The Futures Directory. If you’re interested in the history of futures research, I’d highly recommend it. It’s a fantastic insight into the field in the 1970s, and for me, has proved helpful in two ways: first, it’s confirmed that some of my cases from the UK were internationally prominent in the 1970s, and second, it’s helped point me in the direction of some new cases that I didn’t know about.
On the first point, the directory lists several cases that I either plan to work on in the future, or have worked on in the past. The Programmes Analysis Unit, a joint unit run between the Ministry of Technology (and later the Department for Trade and Industry) and the Atomic Energy Authority, is in there, as is the Department of the Environment’s Systems Analysis Research Unit and the Science Policy Research Unit, Sussex (more on that below) - all of which I expect will be key parts of my history of science, technology, and futurology in the UK. The directory also lists the British Post Office’s Telecom Long Range Studies Unit, which made me especially glad, given that I’ve already been drawing attention to its importance elsewhere.
The directory also alerted me to some cases that might be relevant, either to this project or for later projects down the line. I think the case with the most potential might be the ‘Joint Unit for Planning Research’, which seems to have been affiliated with the Centre for Environmental Studies. The Centre was set up by Harold Wilson’s Labour government in 1967, but also seems to have received Ford Foundation funding. The Ford Foundation looked into funding futures research in Europe throughout the 1960s (most notably Bertrand de Jouvenel’s Futuribles project), so perhaps this was related. I suspect this planning unit was more interested in regional and urban planning - the CES employed geographers such as Doreen Massey - so it’s perhaps not quite so relevant to my own research on futures research and science policy, but it’s worth looking into.
While I was at the BL, I also briefly looked into a couple books by a group I mentioned above - the Science Policy Research Unit (“SPRU”), Sussex. I was glad to see SPRU mentioned in The Futures Directory, and the books I looked at offer more evidence of their place in futures research during the 1970s. The first I looked at was Progress and Problems in Social Forecasting (1976), edited by Christopher Freeman, Marie Jahoda, and Ian Miles. It contains a series of papers by a range of contributors - notably including Russell Ackoff and Johan Galtung - on futures research, and emerged from a series of seminars run by the UK’s Social Sciences Research Council from 1972 by the council’s Social Forecasting Committee.
The second book was World Futures: The Great Debate (1978), which seems to be more-or-less a cross-sectional magnum opus of futures research from across SPRU in the late 1970s. Contributers include Freeman, Jahoda, Miles, as well as Sam Cole and Keith Pavitt, and covers a wide range of topics, including technical change, war, energy futures, agriculture, mineral resources and images of the future. What sticks out to me is that, in the acknowledgements, Jahoda and Freeman highlight funding from the Social Sciences Research Council for SPRU’s ‘Social and Technological Alternatives for the Future’ programme.
I highlight the SSRC here because these texts both show that the SSRC continued to support futures research in the UK throughout the 1970s. This adds a new dimension to existing histories of futures research in the UK. Lise Butler has written about the SSRC’s Next Thirty Years Committee (which was set up by Michael Young and which Jahoda sat on) as a key site of UK futures research until it was dissolved in 1969. These books show that the SSRC continued to support futures research after the Next Thirty Years Committee, and that SPRU seems to have become the SSRC’s go-to centre for developing futures research in the UK.
I find it interesting that it’s a science studies unit that the SSRC looked to in order to fund futures research. There’s a couple tentative ideas I have about this. The first is that it shows a continuing closeness between the idea of the future and the idea of science. The second, much more tentative idea that I have, is about the relationship between social science and STEM. I wonder whether SPRU was, in part, popular amongst funders and policymakers because, through methods like futures research and tools like Foresight, it offered a way for social scientists to manage and steer the traditional sciences, thus inverting long-standing hierarchies. This is just a suspicion right now, and it might be completely wrong, but it’s something I’m bearing in mind as the project continues.
LSE Archive: Political and Economic Planning
I also visited the papers of Political and Economic Planning at LSE’s archive. Political and Economic Planning has, I think, been called the UK’s first think tank, and was created during debates about national planning during the 1930s. By the 1970s, PEP was on its last legs, especially after the disillusionment with planning that set in after Harold Wilson’s Labour government tried to revitalise economic planning in the 1960s. But, in 1972, PEP published a Survey of Future Studies around the world, pre-empting the McHales’ book mentioned above by 6 years.
The PEP papers at the LSE show the story of how this survey was commissioned. It seems like it initially came out of ambitions at PEP to become the SSRC’s long-term horizon scanning unit. There’s certainly letters between Andrew Shonfield, the SSRC’s director at the time, and John Pinder, PEP’s director, that suggest this. In the end, this never happened, and so it seems like PEP’s research into futures studies was turned into this survey publication instead.
As well as being, like the McHales’ The Futures Directory, a useful window into futures research in the 1970s, its production also included correspondence with various figures in the futures research scene. International heavyweights, such as Bertrand de Jouvenel and Olaf Helmer, feature, but this correspondence also includes familiar figures from the UK, not least Guy Streatfeild and SPRU, both mentioned above. I’m highlighting this not because I find it surprising, but more that I’m glad - and a bit relieved - to continue to find evidence that cements their importance to my wider history of UK futurology.
Next Steps
The next phase of my project is to start nailing down the cases I want to do more detailed archival research on in the second half of 2024. This is going to involve more closely reading these surveys above, but also returning to a (hopefully) exhaustive review of contemporaneous and historical literature on futures research in the UK from the 1960s onwards. Once I’ve nailed down the most promising cases, I can start surveying and visiting archives for primary source material.
So my next post will hopefully follow in the coming weeks with more of an overview of the specific cases that I plan to write about during this project. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and let me know if you have any questions or comments.