Techniques of futuring: On how imagined futures become socially performative

Oomen, Jeroen; Hoffman, Jesse; Hajer, Maarten

doi:10.1177/1368431020988826

Cited by 170 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…Literature on imagined futures argues that entrepreneurs, managers and workers aim to construct credible images to shape the future through them (Beckert & Bronk, 2018; Beckert & Suckert, 2021). Imagined futures thus become performative in the present (Oomen et al, 2021) by structuring decision-making, relationships and expectations within and between organizations (Beckert, 2016; Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2020). In this sense, organizational and entrepreneurial activities, such as strategic planning, capital budgeting, technology projections, economic forecasting, perceptual maps and business modelling, are ‘instruments of imagination’ (Beckert, 2021) or ‘scopic systems’ (Knorr Cetina, 2006) through which actors create the future and make it visible from a specific perspective in the present.…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Instead, they create and use imagined futures to attend to questions of possibility rather than epistemology (Gartner, Bird, & Starr, 1992; Riles, 2010). If deemed credible more broadly, imagined futures create ‘fictional expectations’ (Beckert, 2016) that performatively structure decisions within organizations, competition between firms, and decisions of crucial stakeholders like investors, consumers, regulators, courts and employees (Beckert, 2021; Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2020; Oomen, Hoffman, & Hajer, 2021). In this regard, the study of future-making has become a topic of keen interest in organization, strategy and entrepreneuring studies given that imagined futures gauge and guide diverse organizational relations and processes (Flyverbom & Garsten, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Imagining Futures: Theorizing the Practical Knowledge of Future-making

Thompson

Byrne

2021

Organization Studies

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The study of future-making – how practitioners make and enact imagined futures – has become a cornerstone for understanding the temporal dynamics of organisation, strategy and entrepreneurship. This article investigates the texture of practical knowledge that enables entrepreneuring practitioners to jointly address the challenges inherent to future-making. We conduct a video ethnography of a business modelling programme producing 79 hours of audio-visual recordings. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we unpack different forms of practical knowledge that simultaneously binds practitioners in a web of mutual expectations and establishes modes of thinking and acting for the creation of imagined futures. This contributes to existing studies by demonstrating that the discursive, embodied and material dimensions of future-making are fundamentally entangled within textures of practical knowledge. Consequently, we shift the mode of theorizing towards non-representationalism, which opens up new frontiers for future research to observe, participate and reflect with practitioners on the textures of practical knowledge constitutive of future-making in different circumstances and contexts.

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Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imagining Futures: Theorizing the Practical Knowledge of Future-making

Thompson

Byrne

2021

Organization Studies

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“…Alternatively, priorities could come from deliberative procedures, e.g., deliberative mini-publics (Curato et al 2021;Farrell et al 2019;Elstub et al 2021) or collective visioning processes (Beck et al 2021;Scoones et al 2020;Beck and Forsyth 2020;Beck and Mahony 2017). Since partnerships are a mechanism to deliver "agreed" goals, regardless of how the goal is actually agreed, a partnership approach can align either with expert-centered ("bring the stakeholders on board" views) or "co-productionist" approaches ("bring the stakeholders together") (Oomen et al 2021;Jasanoff 2004).…”

Section: How Do Priorities Get Selected In Different Contexts?mentioning

confidence: 99%

A framework to harness effective partnerships for the sustainable development goals

Horan

2022

Sustain Sci

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The sustainable development goals (SDGs) offer a broad, holistic framework of interdependent economic, social, and environmental objectives to enable integrated and collaborative approaches to their implementation. A key obstacle for operationalizing such an approach is knowing the right actors to engage on specific challenges. It is acknowledged that linkages across sectors, scales, and actors could provide an evidence base to assess and forge participation in multistakeholder partnerships for implementation. However, technical tools that could help to identify relevant actors and discussions of institutional arrangements to bring these actors on board are notably lacking in the extant literature. To support an evidence-based and systematic approach to coalition building that accounts for synergies and trade-offs across goals and targets, this paper proposes broad-based partnerships and a framework that lead actors can use to help harness collaborative SDG implementation: (1) define the partnership’s scope, (2) identify the main interlinkages, (3) assign responsibilities, (4) select the best available indicators, (5) assess the challenges, and (6) forge a broad-based partnership. After describing key decisions at each step, the article discusses applications of the proposed analytic partnership-building framework to problems that warrant the approach at global, regional, and national levels covering issues such as policy coordination across line ministries, global partnerships for SDG13 implementation in SIDS, energy compacts for SDG7 implementation, and integrated multilateral responses to crises.

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“…While the question of power is central to how contemporary forms of governance emerge, new kinds of scholarship have also started to explore the power of visions of postfossil futures to shape action in the present (e.g., Jasanoff & Kim, 2015;Yusoff & Gabrys, 2011). To grasp the role of imagination in the making of climate politics, a growing group of scholars are turning their attention to the concept of imaginaries (e.g., Hajer & Versteeg, 2019;Oomen et al, 2021;Pelzer & Versteeg, 2019). Overall, however, the process of translating imagined futures into action remains relatively underexplored and should therefore become a focus for future research.…”

Section: Conclusion: the Road Beyond 'Climate Governance Beyond The S...mentioning

confidence: 99%

20 Years of global climate change governance research: taking stock and moving forward

Pattberg

Kaiser

Widerberg

et al. 2022

Int Environ Agreements

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Research on global climate change governance is no longer primarily concerned with the international legal regime, state practice and its outcomes, but rather scrutinizes the intricate interactions between the public and the private in governing climate change. This broad trend has also taken center stage within the pages of INEA. Two decades after its establishment, we sketch the main theoretical debates, conceptual innovations and empirical findings on global climate change governance and survey the new generation of climate governance scholarship. In more detail, we sketch how climate governance research has developed into three innovative sub-debates, building on important conceptualizations and critical inquiries of earlier debates. Our aim is not so much to provide an all-encompassing assessment of global climate change governance scholarship in 2022, but rather to illustrate in what important ways current research is different from research in the early phase of INEA, and what we have learned in the process. First, we discuss scholarship on the bottom-up nature of climate governance, developing from earlier ideas on agency beyond the state and the transnationalization of governance arenas. Second, we review contributions that have more systematically engaged with the concept of governance architectures, resulting in a stimulating new academic debate on the characteristics of complex governance systems and the consequences of governance complexity and fragmentation. Third, we note a distinct normative turn in global environmental scholarship in general and global climate governance in particular, associated with question of access, accountability, allocation, fairness, justice and legitimacy. The assessment of each of these debates is centered around questions of effective and legitimate climate governance to counter the climate emergency. Finally, as a way of concluding, we critically reflect on our own scholarly shortcomings and suggest a modest remedy.

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Techniques of futuring: On how imagined futures become socially performative

Cited by 170 publications

References 62 publications

Imagining Futures: Theorizing the Practical Knowledge of Future-making

Imagining Futures: Theorizing the Practical Knowledge of Future-making

A framework to harness effective partnerships for the sustainable development goals

20 Years of global climate change governance research: taking stock and moving forward

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