The challenge of the future and the institutionalization of interdisciplinarity: notes on Herman Kahn's legacy

This article is an attempt to explore Herman Kahn's foundational contribution to the development of what he called "broad studies", a combination of futures research and public policy analysis. In Kahn's view, decision making and policy processes pose two crucial problems that the scholarly research is rarely forced to face: (1) the need to have and operate with a broad, multifaceted vision of phenomena and (2) the issue of coping imaginatively and realistically with future circumstances and conditions that can only vaguely be distinguished in the present. Implied in these two is the need to develop new methods and approaches fitted to the charges imposed by them. The paper discusses Kahn's work as an integrated solution to these problems: The definition and advocacy of broad and future-oriented studies, his concept on how these studies should be institutionalized in interdisciplinary organizational systems, and the crucial position scenarios and propaedeutic and heuristic methodologies have in this context. A special attention is given to two methodological approaches he developed to cope with these challenges: Scenario Building and the Method of Classes of Variables. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.