This paper draws mainly from the vast amount of qualitative work done for the European Commission since 1986 to provide a better understanding of what Europeans are, how they view Europe and the European Union, and what research reveals more generally about them. Among the studies conducted on behalf of the Commission, this paper refers notably to a recent major piece of research including the 15 member States as well as nine of the EU applicant countries in Central and in Mediterranean Europe. In all 24 partners were involved in the study and all contributed, directly or indirectly, to this paper. The European Commission joined this team of researchers to discuss how the results of qualitative studies are actually used by that institution, including at the highest political level, and what key functions qualitative research serves.
The objective of this seminar is to clarify the key issues that face companies in the Single European Market, to analyze how this perspective influences their strategies, and to determine the new needs for information and consultancy which researchers should be prepared to cope with. We have designed it in the hope that it provides for a four-fold exchange of views : between companies from economic sectors exposed in various mays to 1992 ; between the different company functions the most likely to see their policies affected by 1992 ; between company managers, consultants, and the European Commission.
The programme of this seminar is based on three lines of thought: a) previous business-to-business research seminars had been mainly technique- oriented b) one major change in the last 5 years or so, as far as we are concerned, has been a gradual opening of the "ghetto" in which the then-called industrial market researchers used to live; and, consequently more interchange and less difference between the ways in which research techniques are applied in business-to-business and in consumer research. c) it was high time we began to think of our own market, of our market environment, and of our own role in a changing world.
Over the past ten to fifteen years, decision-makers have gradually turned to scenario-based approaches. In these, rather than try to foretell the future as an extension of the present, they seek more realistically to envisage possible states of the world and to frame strategies capable of adapting to these different eventualities. Naturally, these scenarios need to be based on suitable hypotheses of change. The market researcher can contribute to the formulation of plausible scenarios. In other words, although he does not claim to predict the future, he can investigate a number of hypotheses of change, help to narrow the field and to explore the different possibilities.