Future Making: Towards a Practice Perspective

Management scholars are increasingly interested in ‘future making’, observing and theorizing how organizational actors produce and enact the yet‐to‐come. However, the rapid growth of the conversation runs the risk of emptying the notion of future making, calling into question its meaning and relevan...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of management studies Vol. 62; no. 6; pp. 2426 - 2451
Main Authors: Wenzel, Matthias, Cabantous, Laure, Koch, Jochen
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Hoboken, NJ Wiley 01.09.2025
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Subjects:
Emptying
Future
future making
futures
Organizational culture
Organizational research
performativity
practice theory
relationality
ISSN:1467-6486, 0022-2380, 1467-6486
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Management scholars are increasingly interested in ‘future making’, observing and theorizing how organizational actors produce and enact the yet‐to‐come. However, the rapid growth of the conversation runs the risk of emptying the notion of future making, calling into question its meaning and relevance. In response to these concerns, our Point is that there is value in understanding future making from a practice perspective. A practice perspective, we argue, is empirically sufficiently open to account for the plurality and open‐endedness of futures and future making amidst the continual emergence of interrelated crises, large‐scale challenges, and intractable technologies. Thus, it reinforces the relevance of research on future making as a central part of contemporary organizational life. At the same time, the four practice‐based dimensions elaborated in this Point provide sufficient conceptual specificity to discern what counts as future making and what does not, thereby providing solid ground for cumulative theory‐building and research in this area. Our Point extends research on future making in management studies by substantiating the relevance of examining and theorizing future making, and by articulating and clarifying a practice perspective on future making that directs scholarly attention to important areas for future research.
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ISSN:1467-6486
0022-2380
1467-6486
DOI:10.1111/joms.13222