Ideologies of time: How elite corporate actors engage the future

Abstract

Our paper deals with how elite corporate actors in a Western capitalist-democratic society conceive of and prepare for the future. Paying attention to how senior officers of ten important Danish companies make sense of the future will help us to identify how particular temporal narratives are ideologically marked. This ideological dimension offers a common sense frame that is structured around a perceived inevitability of capitalism, a market economy as the basic organizational structure of the social and economic order, and an assumption of confident access to the future. Managers envisage their organization's future and make plans for organizational action in a space where 'business as usual' reigns, and there is little engagement with the future as fundamentally open; as a time-yet-to-come. In using a conceptual lens inspired by the work of Fredric Jameson, we first explore the details of this presentism and a particular colonization of the future, and then linger over small disruptions in the narratives of our interviewees which point to what escapes or jars their common sense frame, explore the implicit meanings they assign to their agency, and also find clues and traces of temporal actions and strategies in their narratives that point to a subtly different engagement with time.

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

“…A deeper engagement with post-truth politics, therefore, provides opportunities for organization studies to generate insights into the production of alternative futures as a form of ‘fact-making’ (see Cabantous, Gond, & Johnson-Cramer, 2010), extending the current understanding of engaging with the future beyond well-known planning technologies. Yet, given the production of multiple futures through alternative facts, how is it possible for proclaimed organizational ‘experts’, such as strategists and analysts, to still be able to establish a ‘right to know’ the future based on planning procedures (Berg Johansen & De Cock, 2018; Kornberger, 2013)? As Tsoukas (1999, p. 499) anticipated, actors in ‘organizations do not only compete in the marketplace but, increasingly, in a discursive space in which winning the argument is just as important’.…”

CSR politics of non‐recognition: Justification fallacies marginalising criticism, society, and environment

“…The mention of criticism would mean displaying that we do not live in the best of worlds, as 18th‐century German philosopher Leibniz, [1710] (1969) concept of a pre‐established harmony and more recent liberal conceptions of society and history have professed, but in a society ridden by conflicts and contradictions. This would evoke sentiments of a less business‐friendly ideology, and be incongruent with the optimistic outlook for the future that managers offer (Johansen & De Cock, 2018; Wright & Nyberg, 2017, p. 1649). Most companies accordingly marginalise controversies and criticism.…”

Time and Organization Studies

“…Practices evolve and change because habituated intelligence functions as a future-conscious prefiguring of what to expect: people feel themselves in possession of given facts from the past (sedimented in commonsense narratives) while remaining alive to the inevitability that any immediate expression and experience of these past facts can, in repetition, also be different, but only in a limited way. The organizational skill, say, of senior strategists operating is to embrace continuity without relying on it uncritically (Berg-Johansen & De Cock, 2018). Here time becomes past and future rolled into an unfolding present which proceeds, to quote T.…”