Future and Organization Studies: On the rediscovery of a problematic temporal category in organizations

Even though organizational activities have always been future-oriented, actors’ fascination with the future is not a universal phenomenon of organizational life. Human experience of the future is a rather young product of modernity, in which actors discovered the indeterminacy of the future, as well...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Organization studies Vol. 41; no. 10; pp. 1441 - 1455
Main Authors: Wenzel, Matthias, Krämer, Hannes, Koch, Jochen, Reckwitz, Andreas
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.10.2020
Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects:
Classification
Climate change
Discourses
Future
Modernity
Organization studies
Organizational culture
Planners
Politics
Transformation
Truth
planning
practice theory
future-making practices
temporality
future
modernity
ISSN:0170-8406, 1741-3044
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Even though organizational activities have always been future-oriented, actors’ fascination with the future is not a universal phenomenon of organizational life. Human experience of the future is a rather young product of modernity, in which actors discovered the indeterminacy of the future, as well as their abilities to ‘make’ and, in part, even control and de-problematize it through ever-more sophisticated planning practices. In this essay, we argue that actors have recently ‘rediscovered’ the future as a problematic, open-ended category in organizational life, one that they cannot delineate through planning practices alone. This, we suggest, has been produced through a pluralization of what we refer to as ‘future-making practices’, a set of practices through which actors produce and enact the future. Based on illustrations of the experienced problematic open-endedness of the future in prevalent discourses such as climate change, digital transformation and post-truth politics, we invite scholars to explore future-making practices as an important but under-appreciated organizational phenomenon.
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ISSN:0170-8406
1741-3044
DOI:10.1177/0170840620912977