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Global Transformations and World Futures (Book Info, 2009)

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Global Transformations and World Futures: Knowledge, Economy and Society, Vol 1 and 2 | Edited by Sohail Inayatullah | Oxford, EOLSS Publishers, 2009 | ISBN: 978–1–84826–666–7 (hard copy) | ISBN: 978–1–84826–216–4 (Adobe e-book Reader)

The overall structure of this Book is divided into three areas: (1) Global transformations in Knowledge: Social and Cultural issues. Issues such as the nature of global science, the challenge of building real communities in a virtual world, and the transition from an information economy to a communicative economy are explored. (2) The Global Economy. In this area, alternative definitions of globalization are developed – globalization as if the entire globe mattered – and the role of large players such as multinational are explored. Furthermore, globalization and development are linked, and the prospects for development in the South are evaluated. (3) World Futures. In this area, the theories and methods of the emerging discourse of Futures Studies are explored, particularly as applied to issues of gender and world futures; sustainable education; and, the futures of the United Nations.

The purpose for the development of this book has not changed over the past few years. Indeed, continued global transformation have made the analysis and articulate of world futures even more important. Most of the authors in this Book make the argument that humanity is at a juncture. While there are macro patterns that define what is possible in the next fifty or so years – trends in technology, structure of world power, for example – through human agency, transformations can be steered. Agency is possible and desirable. To discern how and where to influence the world system most wisely, maps of the future are required. My introductory chapter essentially maps the futures of humanity. The map has four dimensions. The first dimension is globalization. The second dimension is focused on foundational transformations in nature, truth, reality and Man. The third dimension develops scenarios of the future. These include the Globalized Artificial Society; the Communicative-Inclusive; The Continued Growth Business as Usual, and the Societal Collapse. The fourth dimension is an exploration of a preferred future – a post-globalization future.

Chapters:

  • Global transformations and world futures : knowledge, economy & society
  • Global transformations in knowledge : social and cultural issues
  • Global science
  • Non-Western science : mining civilizational knowledge
  • Global management of knowledge systems
  • Tranformations of information society
  • From the information era to the communicative era
  • Building “real” and “virtual” human communities in the 21st century
  • Navigating globalization through info-design, an alternative approach to understanding cyberculture
  • The global economy
  • Multinational corporations
  • Global movement of labor
  • The internet and political economy
  • Economics of transition
  • Global business ethics
  • Globalization as if the entire globe mattered : the situation of minority groups
  • Strategies to eradicate poverty : an integral approach to development
  • North-North, North-South, and South-South relations
  • World futures : trends and transformations in state, education and cultural ecology
  • Epistemology and methodology in the study of the future
  • The grand patterns of change and the future
  • Multilayered scenarios, the scientific method and global models
  • The futures of the United Nations and the world system
  • Globalization and information society-increasing complexity and potential chaos
  • Globalization, gender, and world futures
  • Neo-humanism, globalization, and world futures
  • Sustainable education : imperatives for a viable future
  • Financial resources policy and management : world economic order
  • International commodity policy : a new concept for sustainable development
  • Global sustainability : rhetoric and reality, analysis and action : the need for removal of a knowledge-apartheid world
  • Economic assistance to developing countries and sustainable world population
  • Capacity development and sustainable human development.

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UNESCO in partnership with EOLSS [Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems]

 

Alternative Educational Futures: Pedagogies for Emerging Worlds (Book Info, 2008)

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Edited by Marcus Bussey, Sohail Inayatullah & Ivana Milojević

Sense Publishers, Rotterdam

Non-fiction/Academic | ISBN Paperback: 978-90-8790-511-8 | ISBN Hardcover: 9789087905125 | ISBN E-Book: 9789087905132 | 2008 | 324pp

Available from: www.sensepublishers.com

Alternative Educational Futures brings together theoretical and practical work in a challenge to mainstream thinking on the practice and purpose of education. The book promotes multiple futures by presenting works that range from the child-centred, through those that promote a futures oriented critical pedagogy to open ended explorations of the implications of technology for education and the possibilities of rethinking and deepening human potential.

The editors – Bussey, Inayatullah and Milojević – are all educators and describe this book as another small step towards rethinking the present in the light of possible futures. They see that whatever steps we take as a species towards the future – be it a proto-global civilization, a fractal cosmopolitanism, a gaian-technolopoly, or a return to the past – education both as an institution and as a social process is key to how we get there, remembering that the future is created and changes with every step we take.

The book contains chapters on futures strategies, tools and techniques for a range of educational contexts, global education and neohumanism, the futures of universities, the changing shape of textual authority and learning in the face of the internet, access and equity, democracy and learning, Buddhist and Vedantic insights and offering on education, Steiner education, creative pedagogies and a number of case studies on the successes and failures of futures studies in a range of educational and institutional contexts.

Along with chapters by the editors, there are contributions from David Hicks, Jim Dator, Erica McWilliams and Shane Dawson, Patricia Kelly, Julie Matthews, Robert Hattam, Kathleen Kesson, Basil Savitsky, Jennifer Gidley, Gary Hampson, Richard Slaughter, Martin Haigh and Billy Matheson.

All authors in this collection are committed to transformation of assumptions about education and its social function. These chapters bare witness to various manifestations of an emerging global mind set that is marked not by coherence and a single story but by multiple and layered possibility. The authors all see, from often quite different positions, that the future health of society lies in diversity and a social activism that is grounded in the local actions of individuals. Education will play a central role in empowering this activism and it is to this multiple future that this book turns its attention.

Reviews and Comments

Comments on Alternative Educational Futures: Pedagogies for Emergent Worlds

We desperately need the dynamic revolution in education that this book offers us, reflecting the new ways of thinking and being on this planet that will permit us to live in peace as a global family even through massive climate changes. Read it and put these ideas into practice as quickly as possible in any ways you can!  

Elisabet Sahtouris

Evolutionary biologist and futurist

Author of EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution

We have more than enough books that under-estimate what is called for where educational change is needed, that only rearrange deck chairs on the deck of the Titanic. This edited book goes where change must go and its case for alternative pedagogies is exhilarating. Drawing on 18 wide-ranging new essays the editors both challenge conventional educational analysis and forge beyond it to explore a deeper transformative potential of self and culture. The book promotes visions, rather than roadmaps, and pioneers thereby a fresh agenda for a new type of lifelong schooling that honours spirituality, sustainability, and empowerment. Bold, eclectic, and original, it leaves a reader eager to get on with a major overhaul of education, from birth throughout life, the better to replace the dominant enervating education narrative with one that soars. Distinctive and revealing, the book will reward a close reading by all eager to help education finally achieve what has always been possible, but needed the creative jumpstart this book offers.

Arthur B. Shostak

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Drexel University
Author of Anticipate the School You Want: Futurizing K-12 Education

This collection provides an insightful, panoramic view of this precarious moment in the history of humankind. These uncommonly perceptive essays consider the "range of alternative futures" before us and describe how we might work and educate toward a future that offers more humane, nourishing, and genuinely sustainable ways of living. These are stirring, provocative, exciting writings that explore the most vital questions of our time.

Dr. Ron Miller

Holistic education theorist

Editor of Education Revolution magazine.

Alternative Educational Futures is a daring attempt to break out of the endless cycle of school/university reform. This volume offers a rare combination of imagination and rigor, pointing towards the possibility that what is happening in the world around us today is the end of education and the rebirth of learning.

Dr. Riel Miller

UNESCO

Fasten your seatbelts before you enter this collection of provocative, sometimes brilliant, essays, because it will take you at warp speed on a journey to many places you have not conceived of before, places where your past understandings and current beliefs may be shaken up. Basing their work on theory, imaginative thinking, empirical social research, or case studies, the authors map, create, explore, and evaluate alternative futures for education, from grade schools to universities and beyond. Every educator—indeed every citizen—ought to read this book as an inspiration and guide to making teaching and learning more effective, appropriate, equitable, and flexible in a rapidly changing world.

Wendell Bell

Professor Emeritus

Yale University

Author of Foundations of Futures Studies Volumes 1 & 2

Alternative Educational Futures challenges mechanistic models of curriculum and pedagogy predicated on linear thinking, control and predictability. Both individually and collectively, the editors and contributing authors generate multifaceted understandings of futures in and for education that are open, recursive, organic and emergent. This is a text that performs what it represents by questioning its assumptions, permitting contradictions, tolerating ambiguities, and resisting the pernicious and pervasive politics of complexity reduction in education and society. These adventures in thinking should be an invaluable resource – and source of inspiration – for all who care about the quality of education for immanent yet unpredictable futures.

Noel Gough

Professor of Outdoor and Environmental Education

Director, Centre for Excellence in Outdoor and Environmental Education

President, Australian Association for Research in Education

 

 

Using the Future to Explore Visions of Globalization (2008)

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By Sohail Inayatullah

This essay reviews globalization and its alternative futures. It does this drawing from the epistemological and methodological focus of futures studies. Thus the futures is visited in a disciplined fashion the hope of moving away from idiosyncratic “how I see the future” discourses. This means seeing the future not only in temporal space as forward time, that is, we are unable to remember the future, as we can the past, but to see the future as an asset, a resource.

Youth Futures (Book Info, 2002)

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Youth Futures: Comparative Research and Transformative Visions
Edited by Jennifer Gidley and Sohail Inayatullah
Praeger Publishers. Westport, Conn. September, 2002.

ISBN 0-275-97414-6. C7414

Contributing Authors:

Bilal Aslam, Paul Brunstad, Sandra Burchsted, Marcus Bussey, Richard Eckersley, Riane Eisler, Michael Guanco, Shane Hart, Sabina Head, Eva Hideg, Cathie Holden, Raina Hunter, Francis Hutchinson, Seth Itzkan, Cole Jackson, Erzsebet Novaky, Alfred Oehlers, Anita Rubin, Richard Slaughter, Carmen Stewart, David Wright.

 

Description
Generally, youth are considered immature, irresponsible toward the future, cliquish, impressionistic, and dangerous toward self and others. They are considered as a mass market–two billion strong–the passive recipients of globalization. Most recently in OECD nations, youth have become fodder for political speeches–they are the problem that reflects both the failure of the welfare state (dependence on the state), the failure of globalization (unemployment), and postmodernism (loss of meaning and the crisis of the spirit). In the Third World, youth are seen not only as the problem, but equally as the force that can topple a regime (as in Yugoslavia). However, youth can also be seen as carriers of a new worldview, a new ideology.

These and other views concerning youth are examined in this volume of comparative empirical research. Studies from around the world provide intriguing answers to questions about how youth see the future and their future roles. This book will be of particular interest to scholars, students, researchers, and policymakers involved with youth issues and future studies.

 

Table of Contents

Preface: Youth Futures: The Terrain by Jennifer Gidley and Sohail Inayatullah
Mapping Youth Futures

  • Global Youth Culture: A Transdisciplinary Perspective by Jennifer Gidley
  • Youth Dissent: Multiple Perspectives on Youth Futures by Sohail Inayatullah
  • Future Visions, Social Realities, and Personal Lives: by Richard Eckersley
  • Partnership Education for the 21st Century by Riane Eisler
  • Cultural Mapping and Our Children’s Futures by Francis Hutchinson
  • From Youth Futures to Futures for All: Reclaiming the Human Story by Marcus Bussey

Youth Essay 1: Optimistic Visions from Australia by Raina Hunter

Comparative Research from Around the Globe

  • Japanese Youth: Rewriting Futures in the “No Taboos” Post-Bubble Millennium by David Wright
  • Reflections upon the Late-Modern Transition as Seen in the Images of the Future Held by Young Finns by Anita Rubin
  • Imagining the Future: Youth in Singapore by Alfred Oehlers
  • The Future Orientation of Hungarian Youth in the Years of the Transformation by Eva Hideg and Erzsebet Novaky
  • Citizens of the New Century: Perspectives from the UK by Cathie Holden
  • Longing for Belonging: Youth Culture in Norway by Paul Otto Brunstad
  • Holistic Education and Visions of Rehumanized Futures by Jennifer Gidley

Youth Essay 2: Voice of the Future from Pakistan by Bilal Aslam

Case Studies: Teaching Futures in Educational Settings

  • From Rhetoric to Reality: The Emergence of Futures into the Educational Mainstreamby Richard Slaughter
  • Re-Imagining your Neighborhood–A Model of Futures Education by Carmen Stewart
  • Learning with an Active Voice: Children and Youth Creating Preferred Futuresby Cole Jackson, Sandra Burchsted, and Seth Itzkan
  • I Don’t Care About the Future (if I Can’t Influence it) by Sabina Head
  • Rural Visions of the Future: Futures in a Social Science Class by Shane Hart
  • Youth, Scenarios, and Metaphors of the Future by Sohail Inayatullah

Youth Essay 3: Shared Futures from the Philippines by Michael Guanco

Concluding Reflections by Sohail Inayatullah and Jennifer Gidley

Endorsements of Youth Futures

“This book is astounding. In a time of rapid, world-wide transformation dealing with globalization, genomics, terrorism and much else, constructive and creative views of possible futures are essential. This book makes a monumental contribution on youth futures. While we are accustomed to hearing universal rhetoric on the importance of youth to the future, it seldom goes beyond platitudes. In 20 essays the authors present extensive theory and practice, including up to date trans-disciplinary research from around the world. This remarkable book will be a lasting resource for educators, policy makers, youth workers and all people committed to creating a better, brighter and wiser future for future generations.”

Professor David K. Scott, Former Chancellor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

“Young people are increasingly viewed by scholars, practitioners, and policy makers as vital assets in the development of civil society. This book both gives voice to this positive conception of youth, and documents the power of young people to be active agents in actualizing their own healthy futures and in contributing to social justice and equity across the global community. This book is an impressive resource for all people concerned with understanding and enhancing the strengths of youth to build, sustain, and extend the quality of life in all nations of the world.”

Professor Richard M. Lerner, Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science
Tufts University, USA

“This exciting and timely book is a milestone, bringing together for the first time international research on youth as both inheritors and creators of the future. Their hopes and fears for tomorrow, as reported here, are central to the future well-being of society – we would do well to listen to them. Essential reading for all those involved with young people, whether in formal or informal contexts, at home, in education or at work.”

Professor David Hicks, School of Education, Bath Spa University College, UK

“The Youth Futures book by Gidley and Inayatullah is a very important contribution because there is so little cross cultural material on adolescence. It is a much needed antidote to our ethnocentric presentation of adolescence here in the States”.

Professor David Elkind, Professor and Chair, Elliott Pearson Department of Child Development,
Tufts University, Medford. Author of Best-selling Book: The Hurried Child

Transforming Communication (Book Info, 2002)

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Transforming Communication: Technology, Sustainability and Future Generations

Edited by Sohail Inayatullah and Susan Leggett | Praeger Studies on the 21st Century, Vol. No. 39, 2002 | 200 pages.

Library of Congress Catalog Card No.: 2001036702 | ISBN: 0-275-96944-4

Contributing authors: Anthony Judge, Richard Neville, Darren Schmidt, Jérôme Bindé, Tony Stevenson, Sohail Inayatullah, Levi Obijiofor, Rakesh Kapoor, Paul Wildman, Bilyana Blomeley, Ivana Milojevic, Vuokko Jarva, Margaret Grace, June Lennie, Frances Parker, Rahmi Sofiarini, Alan Fricker, Mark Mahoney, Caroline Smith and Geoff Holland.

About the Book

Thus far, the communications revolution has been largely limited to the merely technological feat of converging telecommunications with personal computing. But does it hold a higher promise – to transform communication as a human act of sharing meaning about values, attitudes, and experiences? Or will it allow capitalism to pursue ever-greater economic efficiencies among the wealthy nations of the world, while ignoring the persistent and growing gap between rich and poor?

Will “empowerment” come to mean the creation of an alternative model of development communication or will wiring the world continue to mean sending computers to Africa without providing adequate training, software and servicing? Worse, will informatics create a communication flatland, where positive silence, and other ways of knowing in non-western cultures, and among women, are lost, such that we travel at the speed of information-light … to nowhere?

The contributors argue that to create sustainable futures, new ways must be found to make communication inclusive, participatory, and mindful of future generations. They present powerful transformative scenarios of web futures that they argue can lead to a more communicative future – a “gaia of civilizations”. This new means of communication must also emerge authentically from humanity’s diverse cultures, be more concerned with the quality of information shared, and be transformed from its technocratic bias. This book will be of interest to scholars in a variety of fields concerned with issues of communication, culture, and globalization.

Table of Contents

Introduction

  • Transforming Communication for Future Generations, Sohail Inayatullah

Part I – Future Generations

  • Future Generation through Global Conversation¾In Quest of Collective Wellbeing through Conversation in the Present Moment, Anthony Judge
  • Seizing the Moment for Future Generations, Richard Neville
  • Conversations with the Ghosts of the Future—Some Theoretical Problems and Practical Opportunities, Darren Schmidt
  • The Ethics of Future Generations, Jérôme Bindé

Part II – Communication Futures

  • The Net and Our Social Futures, Tony Stevenson
  • From the Information Era to a Gaia of Civilisations, Sohail Inayatullah
  • The Telephone—Africa’s Future in the Age of Technology, Levi Obijiofor
  • The Techno-brahmins and the Futures of Communication, Rakesh Kapoor
  • Magani Whirlpools: An Indigenous Metaphor and Process to Reconcile the Past for the Future, by Paul Wildman and Bilyana Blomely

Part III – Technology, Women and Power

  • Creating Communication Spaces for Not Yet So Virtual People, by Ivana Milojevic
  • Rural Women’s Futures and Cooperative Solutions, by Vuokko Jarva
  • Voices from Elsewhere: Empowering Electronic Conversations among Women, by Margaret Grace and June Lennie
  • Landless Rural Women Creating Sustainable Futures, by Frances Parker and Rahmi Sofiarini

Part IV – Sustainability and Future Generations

  • The Legacy of Technology, by Alan Fricker
  • Global Food Policy: Like Winning a Game of Poker on the Titanic?, by Mary Mahoney
  • Permaculture: Hope and Empowerment for a Sustainable Future, by Caroline Smith
  • Why Consider Future Generations?—And How to Consider Them More Fully, by Geoff Holland
  • Index

Comments on Transforming Communication

Communication is a tired imperative and by now an old academic discipline. Transforming communication is, therefore, something worth doing. This is an interesting book because whilst it is a critical work it is also optimistic. The optimism resides in its rediscovery of that part of communication often neglected – listening. Listening to voices often neglected in mainstream academia, the book allows spaces for contributors from non-western perspectives, from spiritual perspectives and from the future. The optimism also flows from the action oriented perspective of many of the contributors. Although optimistic the book makes no rash promises… the transforming of the title suggests a process in progress. In my view it is a process moving in the right direction.

Greg Hearn

Associate Professor of Media and Communication

Faculty of Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology

Insightful, compelling, multi-perspectival, and replete with un-conventional wisdom, this eclectic book, the compilation of a distinguished body of leading trans-disciplinary scholars, may serve as a bifurcation-point, signaling the under-recognized transformative/ transcendent potential of communication, communication technologies and more importantly communicativeness, for the betterment of human interactions, social re-design, and environmental rejuvenation.

David Lindsay Wright, Futures Researcher

The Communication Centre, Queensland University of Technology

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The University in Transformation (Book Info, 2000)

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The University in Transformation: Global Perspectives on the Futures of the University

Edited by Sohail Inayatullah and Jennifer Gidley

Bergin & Garvey. Westport, Conn. 2000. 280 pages

LC 99-16061. ISBN 0-89789-718-8. H718

 

Contributing Authors:

Tom Abeles, Marcus Bussey, James Dator, James Grant, Anne Hickling-Hudson, Greg Hearn, Patricia Kelly, Peter Manicas, Ivana Milojevic, Shahrzad Mojab, Ashis Nandy, Deane Neubauer, Patricia Nicholson, David Rooney, Tariq Rahman, Michael Skolnik, Philip Spies and Paul Wildman.

 

Book Summary

Taking a long-term historical and future perspective on the university is critical at this time. The university is being refashioned, often by forces out of the control of academics, students, and even administrators. However, there remain possibilities for informed action, for steering the directions that the university can take. This book maps both the historical factors and the alternative futures of the university. Whereas most books on the university remain focused on the European model, this volume explores models and issues from non-Western perspectives as well.

Inayatullah and Gidley draw together essays by leading academics from a variety of disciples and nations on the futures of the university, weaving historical factors with emerging issues and trends such as globalism, virtualization, multiculturalism, and politicization. They attempt to get beyond superficial debate on how globalism and the Internet as well as multiculturalism are changing the nature of the university, and they thoughtfully assess these changes.

 

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Forces Shaping University Futures by Sohail Inayatullah and Jennifer Gidley

WESTERN PERSPECTIVES ON THE FUTURES OF THE UNIVERSITY

University Traditions and the Challenge of Global Transformation by Philip Spies

Higher Education at the Brink by Peter Manicas

Will the Future Include Us? Reflections of a Practitioner of Higher Education by Deane   Neubauer

The Virtual University and the Professoriate by Michael Skolnik

The Futures for Higher Education: From Bricks to Bytes to Fare Thee Well by Jim Dator

Why Pay for a College Education? by Tom Abeles

Of Minds, Markets and Machines: How Universities might transcend the Ideology of Commodification by David Rooney and Greg Hearn

At the Edge of Knowledge-Towards Polyphonic Multiversities by Paul Wildman

NON-WESTERN PERSPECTIVES ON THE FUTURES OF THE UNIVERSITY

Recovery of Indigenous Knowledge and Dissenting Futures of the University by Ashis Nandy

Pakistani Universities: Past, Present, and Future by Tariq Rahman

Civilizing the State: the University in the Middle East by Shahrzad Mojab

Scholar Activism for a New World: The Future of the Caribbean University by Anne Hickling-Hudson

Internationalizing the Curriculum-for Profit or the Planet? by Patricia Kelly

ALTERNATIVE UNIVERSITIES

The Crisis of the University: Feminist Alternatives for the 21st Century and Beyond by Ivana Milojevic

Homo Tantricus: Tantra as an Episteme for Future Generations by Marcus Bussey

Universities Evolving: Advanced Learning Networks and Experience Camps by Patricia Nicholson

Consciousness-Based Education: A Future of Higher Education in the New Millennium by James Grant

TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY

Corporate Networks or Bliss for All: The Politics of the Futures of the University by Sohail Inayatullah

Unveiling the Human Face of University Futures by Jennifer Gidley

Comments On The University In Transformation

This book is admirably comprehensive. Its authors look at the impact on universities of all the major trends of our times. Even better, they go beyond the usual western focus and attempt a genuinely world view. A very stimulating contribution to the debate.

Sir John Daniel, Vice-Chancellor, The Open University

Sohail Inayatullah and Jennifer Gidley have responded to the present crises of higher education by bringing together a must-read collection of papers. Firmly grounding their work on past trends, both the Western and Non-Western authors of these papers challenge conventional thinking as they explore possible, probable, and preferable futures for the university. A first-rate piece of work that might help us avoid a potential coming educational catastrophe.

Professor Wendell Bell, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Yale University

…University in Transformation is highly recommended as an engaging, informative, and visionary text for those concerned with the critical role of universities in personal and national development in the 21st century.

Professor Robert Arnove, Professor of International and Comparative

Education, Indiana University, Bloomington

This book is a `must’ reading for all professionals in higher education and those policy makers who have influence upon the direction of higher education in the U.S. as well as other countries….While thoughtful in insight, it is also practical in ideas. Anyone who reads it will come away with the importance of higher education and its role in building a global society where humanity will ultimately prevail.

Professor Glenn K. Miyataki, President, The Japan-America Institute of

Management Science, Honolulu, Hawaii

A very impressive collection… This book arrives just-in-time for universities that want a future.

Gordon Prestoungrange, Global President, International Management Centers

This is an interesting and thought-provoking book that gives other perspectives to the important debate on the role and effectiveness of the university in modern society.

Professor John Rickard

Vice-Chancellor, Southern Cross University

Gidley and Inayatullah give equal weight to non-Western perspectives and … “alternative universities.”

Warren Osmond

Editor, Campus Review

Editors Inayatullah and Gidley have created a solid collection of     significant if tantalizing essays addressing the basic question:    Can–or should–the university as we have known it continue to exist in view of new forces engulfing the world? They observe an increasingly multicultural, globalized, and politicized world in which the Internet can virtualize a university’s walls. Will technologies reach Third World universities and modernize them, make them more open, less parochial, and more inclusive? As the university becomes more tied to the corporate world in a globally capitalist system, will it abandon its noble purpose as a repository of truth and knowledge and lose its potential to transform society? These are among the questions discussed.

The authors, most of them Futurists, all agree that within the near future universities will be radically transformed. Some predict that in market-driven universities tenure, academic freedom, and commercially nonviable disciplines will evaporate and student-teacher contacts will dwindle in an atmosphere of human redundancy. Others see bright futures for alternative universities in which information technology and virtualization will play major roles. Optimists, they see current trends not as threats but as opportunities for professors, administrators, and policy shapers. The book, well organized and edited, will be especially valuable for graduate students in postsecondary education.

O. Ulin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Choice Magazine (Current reviews for Academic Libraries, published by the American Library Association) October, 2000

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