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We are entering a period in human civilisation when we will either act globally to establish a sustainable and sustaining network of world societies or be enmired, for the foreseeable future, in a regressive cycle of ever-deepening global crises. We will need to develop global forms of big picture science that possess institutionalised capacities for carrying out meta-level research and practice. It will be global in that such research cannot be undertaken in isolation from practical global concerns and global social movements. In this paper I propose a general schema, called integral meta-studies, that describes some of the characteristics of this meta-level science. Integral here refers to the long tradition of scientific and philosophic endeavours to develop integrative models and methods. Given the disastrous outcomes of some of the totalising theories of the nineteenth century, the subsequent focus on ideas of the middle-range is entirely understandable. But middle-range theory will not resolve global problems. A more reflexive and wider conceptual vision is required. Global problems of the scale that we currently face require a response that can navigate through theoretical pluralism and not be swallowed up by it. In saying that, twenty-first-century metatheories will need to be different from the monistic, grand theories of the past. They will have to be integrative rather than totalising, pluralistic rather than monistic, based on science and not only on philosophy, methodical rather than idiosyncratic, find inspiration in theories, methods and interpretive frameworks from the edge more than from the centre and provide means for inventing new ways of understanding as much as new technologies. Integrative metastudies describes an open system, inquiry space or clearing that has a place for many forms of scientific inquiry and their respective theories, methods, techniques of analysis and interpretive frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including boundary-crossing research social transformation, and critical realism.

Abstract: The visions we hold of the future, whether they are of utopias or dystopias, are not simply a matter of personal imagination. Our conceptions of the future are mediated to us as much as they are privately created by us. To this point, futures studies have not developed an integrative and broad-based framework for considering the social mediation of futures. Understanding how social mediation impacts on our futures visioning requires an interpretive framework that can cope with the multilayered nature of futures visions, the worldviews that are associated with them and a theory of mediation that can be applied within such a context of ‘depth’. Using theory-building methodology, the current paper attempts this task by describing a theory of social mediation that builds on the integral futures framework. An application of the framework explores the relationship between various scenarios of health care futures, their associated worldviews and the mediational factors that influence our visions of future health care systems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We present the case of a patient with a malignant thymoma associated with a graft-versus-host disease-type colitis, of which there has only been a solitary case report in the world literature. Complete surgical resection of the thymoma was achieved; however, the gastrointestinal symptoms persisted. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]