The British Schools of Futurology

Science, Technology and the Future in the UK, c. 1960 - 2000

At the end of my last post, I outlined a broad chronological arc that I’m seeing in the history of futurology and science and technology policy in the UK from the 1960s to the 1990s. That arc went so: early varied interests in futurology in the 1960s; institutionalisation in the 1970s; de-institutionalisation in the late 1970s and early 1980s; fragmented approaches in the 1980s; and re-institutionalisation in the 1990s.

I’ve since spoken at more length about this at the British Society for the History of Science’s biennial conference, which took place in Aberystwyth last month. What follows is an edited transcript of my presentation there, which outlines this history in more detail. I think this is going to be the skeleton of the book that I write about this research, and I’m going to put a lot more flesh on these bones during my research trip to the UK this autumn. So, part of the reason that I’m publishing this now is to see if anyone can diagnose any fractures in this skeleton, or thinks that this is a different animal for which the bones need rearranging. If so, please let me know in the comments or by emailing me.

Waves of Futures Research

The last ten years has seen a proliferation of writing on the history of futures research, or “futurology”. Two standout works on this topic are Jenny Andersson’s The Future of the World and Elke Seefried’s Zukünfte, and the historiography I’m about to outline broadly follows their insights. Seefried argues that futures research after World War II came in three overlapping waves.

Wave 1 was the 1950s and 1960s transatlantic emergence of futures research, such as the “Delphi” technique and “scenario planning”, initially in the military contexts of wargaming nuclear conflict and then transposed to social contexts. Futurology in this wave was a defence of Western liberal democracy, developing techniques that optimised rational choice over multiple futures.

Wave 2 was the transnational circulation of futures research in the 1960s and 1970s. In this period, a more radical openness to new plural world futures appeared. Futures research was seen as not simply a tool for the Cold War, but as a way to reject the Cold War, a new utopianism that aimed to use futures research as a tool to exit both Western liberal capitalism and Soviet centralised economic and social control.

After the widespread protests of 1968, which undermined the idea of shared predictable futures, and the marginalisation of futures studies by academia, Wave 3 saw a narrowing of futures research. Futures research exited academia, becoming the practice of management and innovation consultancies. It was also replaced by narrower, nationally-focussed substitutes like “technology assessment”, “risk assessment”, and “prognostics” on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

The UK is missing from this historiography of futures research, which I believe is an important and significant gap because the UK’s Foresight programme, created in 1993 and run from the Government Office for Science (now known as “GO-Science”), has been influential in and beyond the UK in promoting “futures thinking” and “foresight” as policy tools for government since the 1990s.

Research Foresight and the Futures Toolkit

In 2017, the UK government published The Futures Toolkit, a methodologies handbook for futures research across government. This toolkit had its origins in the Technology Foresight Programme, attached to the Government Office for Science when it was created in 1993, based on a report by Ben Martin and John Irvine, two science policy scholars at SPRU, Sussex.

The Foresight programme is now entering its fourth decade, which makes it the most durable, long-lasting institution of post-WWII British science policy, and so I want to understand how Foresight entered government, how it’s become so durable, and how that story fits into the wider picture of futures research painted by scholars like Andersson and Seefried.

(At this point I’m skipping a section of the presentation which briefly went though material I’ve covered in my past few posts, i.e. how I went about getting a bird’s eye view of futures research in the UK and what my initial impressions were).

Early Interests in the 1960s

Early interest in futurology in the UK seems to have been very much led by intellectuals who advocated for more futurology – in different ways – in the UK. Three figures show this: Dennis Gabor, Jeremy Bray, and Michael Young.

Dennis Gabor was a Hungarian-British engineer who was prominent in the international futures research community. He wrote Inventing the Future in 1967 and was a member of the Club of Rome, which later published Limits to Growth – an event that becomes important later.

Jeremy Bray was a Labour MP and junior Minister at the Ministry of Technology, as well as another member of the Club of Rome. In the late 1960s, played role in setting up the Society of Long Range Planners, publishing first paper in their first journal issue of LRP, developed fuel forecasting techniques at the Ministry of Technology, and got in trouble with Harold Wilson for publishing a book, Decision in Government, that advocated for a cybernetic approach to managing the economy.

Finally, and perhaps most influentially, the Labour peer and sociologist Michael Young, who was the first chair of Britain’s Social Science Research Council, and who, as Lise Butler has shown, created the SSRC’s Committee on the Next Thirty Years. Young wanted to establish an internationally known community of UK-based futures researchers – he didn’t succeed, but he did leave a legacy of social scientists interested in futures research – notably the Austrian-British social psychologist Marie Jahoda, who will return later in this post.

Institutionalisation c. 1970

From around 1970, there’s an institutionalisation of future research in UK government. I’m going to focus on three government units and one academic hub of futures research that, to this day, remains influential.

The first government unit is the Programmes Analysis Unit, set up by the Ministry of Technology in 1967 with the Atomic Energy Authority to conduct forecasting exercises across a wide range of energy, technology, and industrial issues. Shortly after it was created, one of its members, Derek Medford, published an article in the journal Futures, ‘The new thaumaturgy of government R&D’.

As Medford’s article shows, and as my archival research into the PAU’s reports has found, futures research was here interpreted by MinTech and the AEA as a way to evaluate and direct government R&D funding strategy – i.e. futures for science funding. This is a recurring theme throughout this history.

The PAU also produced some reports that were read at the top levels of UK government, by the Cabinet Office and Harold Wilson (during his second stint as PM after Ted Heath), especially on forecasting energy and resource scarcity during the early to mid-1970s, as part of scarcity debates around The Limits to Growth and the decade's energy crises.

Finally, PAU staff appear to have been quite active in developing the area of "technology assessment". Derek Medford became a prominent writer on Technology Assessment, and visited the West German Bundestag to advise on the creation of a German Office of Technology Assessment.

The second and third government units were both also central to government responses to Limits to Growth. This report, published in 1972, forecasted that overpopulation and resource scarcity would lead to global environmental collapse in the 21st century.

The British government did not agree, and the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, formed a new forecasting group, soon nicknamed the 'limits-to-growth unit', which was actually formed in two parts:

·         An interdepartmental Official Committee on Future World Trends, sited in the Cabinet Office, composed of chief scientists from all government departments, and chaired by Cottrell

·         A modelling group, the Systems Analysis Research Unit, hosted by the Department of the Environment, that would develop a British global model and carry out systems modelling on contract for clients within the British government

The Committee's first duty was to work on "an economic assessment of the effect of market forces on the consumption of scarce resources". Its official report came in 1976 and argued that market prices, which were not taken into account in Limits, would resolve resource scarcity.

So the report argued, if a resource became scarce, this would increase prices, which would then be invested in efforts to discover new quantities of the resource or in technologies that could use the resource more efficiently, etc.

Crucially, however, the report also suggested that the interventionist British state, operating on a typical Western European model of a nationalist mixed economy, had intervened too much, widening the gap between market prices and resource costs.

The conclusion was that the state needed to intervene less. I think it would be easy to read this as a moment in the rise of “neoliberal” economics, arguing for more market approaches and less state funding. But this is not how I read the CFWT’s report – it does not advocate foresaking the mixed economy for the free market, and that the report clearly still saw the future as a time where the state would play a large role in funding R&D that could help resolve scarcity issues.

As part of preparing this report, the Committee had also commissioned a world model from its modelling group, the Systems Analysis Research Unit, in response to the World3 model of Limits.

The model, SARUM, debuted in 1976 and, as the energy historian Tom Turnbull has explored, further embedded market assumptions into its cybernetic model of the world as a system of feedback loops. These feedback loops showed that "technology plus the market" meant that hard limits to growth could be transcended.

But again, I want to caveat this - this was not a hard break with the economics of the time. As Donella Meadows, of the Limits team, noted in a commentary on the SARUM 76 model, these assumptions were conventional neoclassical economics, which showed that it was still possible to imagine a future of abundance, rather than scarcity.

The Committee on Future World Trends also received expert advice and modelling from a third-party academic unit – the Science Policy Research Unit, Sussex, which received funding from the UK government to write a report critiquing Limits. SPRU ran its own model, a counter-model to Limits, on computers provided by the Programmes Analysis Unit at the AEA’s research centre in Harwell, Oxfordshire. SPRU published its report in 1973, a year after Limits, as Thinking about the Future in the UK and Models of Doom in the USA, which might suggest something about their publishers’ opinion of these different audiences…

SPRU was founded in 1966 by the economist Christopher Freeman, who soon turned his attention to futures research – perhaps driven by the fact that one of SPRU’s members, Marie Jahoda, who I mentioned above, had been part of Michael Young’s circle of social scientists interested in futures research, and had sat on Young’s Committee for the Next Thirty Years.

In 1971, Freeman secure funding for a research programme, ‘Social and Technological Alternatives for the Future’, which ran until 1979, and was funded by all the UK Research Councils and Leverhulme Foundation. I might be wrong, but I think this is quite an unusual funding model – I’ve never come across a programme with similar funding set-up, and was the programme itself was quite influential, with SPRU researchers publishing a lot under the umbrella of the STAFF programme.

By end of 1970s, SPRU had established a reputation for itself as a prominent centre of futures research around the world with a diverse portfolio, and adept at securing govt funding and the ear of various govt units – which I’ll come back to later, as SPRU is also the birthplace of GO-Science’s Foresight methodology.

De-Institutionalisation in the late 1970s and early 1980s

The fate of all these units started changing from the late 1970s. The one I know least about is the Programmes Analysis Unit. The PAU was disbanded in 1977 and its staff were dispersed over two new offices - the Department of Industry's “Policy Perspectives Unit”, which seems to have been quickly renamed the “Technology Policy Unit” (and for which I can’t find any archival sources), and the Cabinet Office's Advisory Council on Applied Research and Development. I'd thus like to find out why PAU disbanded, and any influence its staff might have had as they moved to these other units.

The formal end of the Committee for Future World Trends came with the appointment of Michael Heseltine as Secretary of State for the Environment under Margaret Thatcher. Heseltine came to the department with a strong agenda of cutting red tape and making the Civil Service leaner.

Heseltine cut 15,000 jobs at the Department of the Environment, which included the CFWT’s Systems Analysis Research Unit. The department awarded the franchise for its world model to the Technical Change Centre, a new independent academic research unit set up in West London. This is another unit I’d like to find out more about.

By the start of the 1980s, the CFWT was thus well into its terminal years. There's some suggestion that the Committee itself was also displaced by a new Interdepartmental Committee on Climatology. Jon Agar has said more about this in his article ‘Future Forecast’ on early UK govt responses to climate change.

In January 1982, the Committee was thus dissolved. It had no new alarmist futures, like Limits to disrupt, no new models, like SARUM to evaluate, and interdepartmental governmental attention to the question of world resource was being displaced by attention to the question of climate change and climate modelling.

Fragmented Approaches in the 1980s

Futures research didn’t disappear entirely, and there were still sporadic, fragmented approaches throughout the 1980s to integrate futures research into policy.

In 1983, the Advisory Council on Applied Research and Development at the Cabinet Office commissioned ‘Project Foresight’ at SPRU from researchers Ben Marin and John Irvine. Martin and Irvine concluded that UK had most to learn from Japanese Science and Technology Agency 30-year forecasts, which were large-scale exercises involving academic and industrial scientists and managers, running to thousands of participants.

This report received a muted reception, for two reasons, according to Ben Martin – first, because the Japanese example was not deemed transferable and second, the report’s subtitle, ‘Picking the Winners’, allegedly did not persuade Thatcher cabinet. Martin and Irvine, however, kept on working on foresight through 1980s, securing funding from the Dutch government to write further reports on using Foresight in science policy.

While futures research thus seems to have been on the out in the UK in the 1980s, there are two areas that might have kept it on life support and close to the theatre of science policy.

The first is work on IT futures. The Department of Trade and Industry ran the Alvey programme on next-gen IT research in the 1980s, commissioning reports from SPRU and also from the University of Manchester’s research group ‘PREST’: Policy Research in Engineering, Science, and Technology. Ian Miles, who had worked at SPRU as part of the STAFF programme, and then joined PREST in Manchester, was also part of a group that wrote a report called ‘IT Futures’ for the National Economic Development Office. These reports might have drawn on Foresight and other futures research – but might not, and that’s something I want to look into further. I also highlight PREST because PREST researchers, such as Luke Georghiou and Denis Loveridge, seem to have been quite influential on the Foresight programme in the 1990s.

The other area is emerging work on health futures. The Medical Research Council and Department of Health and Social Services both appear to have developed interests in futures research in the 1980s, conducting Delphi Surveys and technology assessment exercises. This follows a 1976 seminar on futurology for the Merrison Commission on the future of the NHS, which might have had an influence, and a connection between health policy and futures research that, in the UK, seems to go back to 1968, when the newly-founded think tank, the Office of Health Economics, conducted a Delphi survey forecasting NHS prescription patterns and expenditure to 1990. Again, this health futures research in the 1980s might be influential, but might not be – that’s something for the archives to help interpret – but I do think it’s an important area to highlight as I’m going to come back to health in the next section.

Re-Institutionalisation in the 1990s

The 1990s is when the infrastructure of contemporary science policy futures was built in British central government.

In 1992, the Cabinet Office commissioned another report from Ben Martin at SPRU on foresight in UK science and technology. In 1993, a government white paper, ‘Realising Our Potential’, surprisingly announced a Technology Foresight programme to improve UK science’s economic impact, particularly emphasising a commitment to greater dialogue between different stakeholders in the commercialisation of scientific research. The Foresight Programme started with fifteen panels for different areas of the economy, including construction, financial services, IT and electronics, health, leisure and learning, retail and distribution, food and drink, amongst others. A sixteenth panel on marine technology was added a year later based on lobbying from the marine industries.

Five years later, another key government futures activity – “horizon scanning” – was institutionalised. The National Horizon Scanning Centre, conducting horizon scanning for health, was established at the University of Birmingham in 1998 and then incorporated into the National Institute of Health Research programme in 2006. It appears to be the first use of "horizon scanning" in a futures context in the UK, and so I want to find out how the concept of "horizon scanning" took hold at this centre, and then how it diffused into UK central government, especially as GO-Science set up a horizon scanning team around 2004 or 2005.

The final development is at the heart of government. In 2000, the Cabinet office set up a Strategic Futures Team within its Performance and Innovation team, created in 1998. The P&I Unit later went on to become the Prime Minister’s Strategy Team. In 2000, the P&I unit was headed by Geoff Mulgan, who’s now a professor in STEaPP, the Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy department at UCL, and Suzy Walton, an occupational psychologist who’d previously worked in the Ministry of Defence and the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, was appointed team leader for Strategic Futures.

In 2000, Walton’s Strategic Futures team published a report, ‘The Future and How To Think about it’ and then, a year later, ‘A Futurist's Toolbox: Methodologies in Futures Work’. This seems to me to be more or less the direct antecedent of GO-Science’s ‘Futures Toolkit’, published in 2017, and so I’m very keen to find out more about the Strategic Futures team’s work, especially to what extent it was influenced by the existing Foresight programme in GO-Science. It’s worth noting that, before joining the Performance and Innovation Unit, Walton had briefly worked in GO-Science as head of Public Understanding of Science, which might have been a channel for this influence.

Working Conclusions

These are by no means firm arguments but hypotheses I have based on what I’ve seen so far, and what I’ll be testing when I go to the archives and do oral histories in the autumn. The first is that Limits was a formative moment, and one that particularly set SPRU up as an institution to go to for advice on science policy. The second is that there seems to be a trough of futures in the 1980s and early 1990s, not just institutionally, but also in terms of vocabulary – for example, it seems fine for the Cabinet Office to have a Committee on Future World Trends in the 1970s, and that doesn’t return until the creation of the Strategic Futures team in 2000, which seems be near the start of a new wave of futuring in government.

The most important question I have for this chronology is – what changed between the 1980s and 1990s? Why did futures research go from on the outs to back in? The most obvious change is the end of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as PM and John Major coming in as PM, along with a new minister responsible for science, William Waldegrave. It’s under Waldegrave that the Cabinet Office commissions a new report on Foresight from Ben Martin and publishes Realising our Potential, the white paper that launches the Technology Foresight programme.

But I wonder if there’s something more going on than simply a change in regime, something that explains Foresight’s longevity, rather than it becoming a flash-in-the-pan PR exercise for a new Cabinet. I wonder if it’s to do with more systemic changes in science funding that had taken place since the late 1980s. Jon Agar has identified a major shift in science policy in 1987 under Thatcher, who had become frustrated with what she saw as failures in the commercial exploitation of academic science, and so cut public science funding to force scientists to become more entrepreneurial.

I’m thus wondering if the Technology Foresight Programme, which ran panels that put policy-makers, scientists, industrialists, and financiers in dialogue in relation to specific areas of economic growth (rather than scientific research), was about finding ways to put different stakeholders in the room without necessitating government funding. Perhaps Foresight offered a way to maintain the existing hands-off funding regime in British science policy, allowing the state to become an intermediary between public science and private finance. But further archival research and oral histories are needed to say one way or the other.

That’s the paper – thanks for taking the time to read this far, and let me know if you have any questions, ideas, suggestions, etc. Next post should hopefully be faster, and I think will go behind-the-scenes to talk about how I’ve gone about finding archives and libraries to consult during my upcoming research trip.