Futurist Wendell Bell receives Laurel Award

Wendell Bell, professor emeritus of sociology, received a 2011 Laurel Award from the Foresight Network for his outstanding services to futures thinking. He is now a member of the organization’s Hall of Fame, which recognizes the “all-time-best futurists.”

The Foresight Network, which is part of a larger organization known as Shaping Tomorrow, is composed of about 3,000 leading futures thinkers, strategists, change agents, and policy makers devoted to fostering foresight by encouraging people and organizations to adopt futures studies and foresight practices in their decision making. Past Laurel Award winners and members of the organization’s Hall of Fame include Richard Buckminster Fuller, Alvin Toffler, and H.G. Wells.

In addition to many articles on the future, Bell has co-edited “The Sociology of the Future,” authored the two-volume, award-winning “Foundations of Futures Studies” which deals with possible, probable, preventable, and preferable futures for human society, and recently published “Memories of the Future,” a memoir. Bell started teaching courses on social change and the future at Yale in the mid-1960s.