Involving Freight Transport Actors in Production of Knowledge - Experience with Future Workshop Methodology

The freight transport sector plays a major role in the process of globalisation and accounts for a large and increasing share of the economy and workforce. This growth in turn results in a range of societal problems – externally as environmental and health problems, internally as a number of congestion problems. In spite of this, freight transport has been somewhat neglected in qualitative oriented social sciences such as sociology and socio-economy, and thus a lack of analytical understanding as well as problem solving competences prevail. This chapter presents a methodology where the experience and knowledge of actors in the freight transport sector are included directly in a scientific process in order to develop future and strategic studies. Future research is often produced as desktop research and presented as the results of scientists’ forecasting and scenario building. The validation of the research is taken ex post when the results are presented in reports for discussions in public. The effect of the research on practice is seldom evaluated. The research presented in this paper has a quite different aim. Taking our inspiration from modern action research, we have in the format of a future workshop included freight transport stakeholders in the research process in order to produce knowledge meeting scientific quality criteria and at the same time in a form suitable for improving the problem solving capabilities of the participants.