Risk Management In Uncertain Times.

There is a lot of literature announcing the advent of Information Society; in the meantime, though, we are living in a transitional period that has been labeled as Risk Society (RS). One of the specific traits of RS is the spreading of this perception of risk and the growing wish for higher security. However, this paper argues that risk is poorly treated nowadays and that a new approach is in demand. Futures Studies (FS) can provide this perspective, but only as long as it is able to integrate the inputs of other disciplines such as Chaos Theory, Evolutionary Theory and Kondratieff Waves (KW). KW can have a key role in this endeavor as they can offer ways to surpass one of FS shortcomings, their difficulty to incorporate in a solid way human variables in systemic methods. On the other hand, FS can help KW in several aspects: to improve their capacity to work with inputs from diverse sources, to assimilate with greater ease the normative aspects inherent to risk researches and, finally, a way to get around the not-so-appealing determinism implicit in KW. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]