Strategizing Societal Transformation

This book is dualistic in its nature: it seeks to combine two approaches to the analysis and assessment of societal development prospects and to strengthen the capacity of each. The book describes the strategic development of regional economies as well as worldwide trends. The theory and methodology of strategy should extend much further and deeper than what is obvious to everyone. Strategy is aimed at the effective movement of the object of strategizing to the reality that does not exist and will only begin to form within a certain period of time, which is determined by long-term prospects.

One approach has at its core managing the information and technological development of society—its social and economic transformation—through developing and implementing a particular strategy with a concept or doctrine of the planned guidelines as its first stage. Strategizing the information-technological transformation of society is proved to be most effective when it covers long-term development periods, which will lead to significant and even fundamental changes in the values and priorities of socio-economic development. Another approach described in this volume, which is implemented in conjunction with strategizing, is connected to the conceptual understanding of long-term development. The concept of noonomy represents a complex theory of transformation based on technological change and the resulting shifts in social organization. It demonstrates not only trends but also qualitative social shifts to which these transformations lead. In this way, the approach put forward in the theory of noonomy makes it possible to anticipate and evaluate distant horizons of social development and to grasp the transitions from one stage to the next. Employing the concept of noonomy in the processes of strategy is a prognostic phase, immediately preceding the processes of strategy and creating a reference point for them.

This book represents the unique strategy concepts (V. L. Kvint) and noonomy (S. D. Bodrunov) have been brought together. The idea of uniting the authors’ views on the problems of civilizational development has a common scientific platform: the definition of long-term goals and the choice of economic and strategic tools to achieve them. This book summarizes the authors’ main approaches to the issues at hand to facilitate the applied problem set by the authors, which is to demonstrate the productivity of synthesizing these approaches to the study of societal development patterns for subsequent use in their theoretical and practical implementation.