This is basically a re-post from a year ago, but it's that time of year for prognostication and we feel that the tensions outlined here are still relevant and under-discussed in polite company. Happy New Year!
"The arrival of a new year inevitably brings the usual raft of
predictions and Top 10 lists from media outlets attempting to frame the
challenges of the coming year. As professional futurists, our training
is less in making point forecasts for a 12-month period and more about
developing a broader and deeper context for change. Having
said that, we can still offer a forecast concerning the social,
economic, and political contexts that will be evident in 2012 but which
will gain in importance in the coming years.
The following are five key “tensions” that are already evident in
Hawai‘i, and which are likely to become more apparent as the current
decade unfolds. Each of these represents differences in values and
worldviews that, while often unspoken or unexamined, point to the deeper
tensions at work beneath the surface of many community and policy
issues we face today. As always, understanding the deeper motives and
differences that exist among us is key to developing truly effective and
beneficial strategies.
Generations in Transition: There are now three
generations firmly entrenched in the workplace and increasing issues in
institutional leadership with the Reluctant-To-Step-Back Boomers, the
many Yet-To-Succeed-To-Power Generation X’ers, and the Much-Hyped
Millennials. Many Boomers are not happy with the state of things as
they near the latter years of their careers and are not willing to “go
quietly into the night.” GenX has largely been raised to expect
somewhat conventional roles and routes to responsibility but have often
not been groomed for succession and now wait for their Boomer
predecessors. The Millennials variously expect to have equal voice and
recognition as soon as they are invited into the room or are simply
charting their own course outside and around the traditional
institutions and roles.
Education vs. Training: A key tension that becomes
evident in explorations of education in Hawai‘i is the growing
divergence between those who believe formal education should be geared
toward getting students into college versus those who specifically do
not want education to have “college prep” as a formal goal. From
classrooms to boardrooms, there are strong, and growing, differences in
people’s beliefs about the formal goals of our education system related
in no small part to the social priorities of individuals and
communities, expectations about the future of the economy, and
differences in the agendas of business, government, and “community.”
Public vs. Community: In many aspects of society
today there is a growing disconnect between that which is “public” and
that which is “community.” In the age of the nation-state, “public,”
encompassing all citizens of society, was the baseline against which
everything was measured or for which things were planned. Today, in
areas stretching from education to economics, there are increasing
examples of people defining their interests specifically in terms of
community, and sometimes explicitly against the public.
Technology is likely to continue to accelerate this philosophical
divergence, allowing communities to act and organize within or without
the public or the state.
Widening Cultural Divides: Coming out of the 1970s,
people talked about and debated “local” Hawai‘i culture. Today, the
signs point to the continued splintering and hardening of local
identities and loyalties, widening cultural cleavages that may have
always been present but which we may have not recognized. We see, and
expect to continue seeing, increasingly explicit differences in the
cultural outlook and social goals of various Native Hawaiian
communities, fragmenting “local” ethnic populations, and the growing
populations of in-migrants and recent immigrants. While cultural
“balkanization” need not lead to overt conflict or crisis, cultural
differences between groups are important to explore when attempting to
craft policy or strategy that impacts society at large.
Diverging Economic Worldviews: There is a growing
misalignment between the “economic worldviews” of various groups within
the United States and within Hawai‘i. There are those at the far edge
of current thinking, advocating an increasing localization of production
and consumption and often intensely interested in disconnecting from
the global money economy and seeking various forms of self-reliant and
non-money trade economies. Others see the system-wide redress of the
current glaring economic disparities as fundamental to any hope for
continued social stability or prosperity, and often identify “big
business” and neo-liberal economics as both key symptoms and causes.
Finally, there remain those who seek and/or expect a “natural”
rebalancing and recovery of the economic rule set that dominated society
coming out of the 1990s and early 2000s. While those falling in the
last group retain the key positions of influence in education, business,
and policy, today’s global economic situation is driving those in the
former groups to explore and expand their respective worldviews, enabled
in no small part through technology and shifting social consciousness."
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