Call for papers: Shaping and Managing Desirable Futures in Organizations

2025-05-29

Shaping and Managing Desirable Futures in Organizations

 

Laura Cortellazzo, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (laura.cortellazzo@unive.it)

Sara Sassetti, University of Pisa (sara.sassetti@unipi.it)

Juliane Reinecke, University of Oxford (juliane.reinecke@sbs.ox.ac.uk)

 

In light of global challenges such as climate change, economic instability, and social inequality, organizations are increasingly expected to think beyond short-term goals–such as performance cycles or quarterly targets–and to envision and act upon longer-term futures, balancing immediate demands with a responsibility to shape a more resilient and inclusive world (Bansal et al., 2018; Hernes & Schultz, 2020). This makes the understanding of the temporal assumptions and the patterns by which organizations create and enact futures more critical than ever (Hernes & Schultz, 2020; Wenzel et al., 2020).

Time has been increasingly recognized as a crucial lens for exploring management and organizational dynamics (Bagloev et al., 2024; Gioia, Corley, & Fabbri, 2002; Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013; Flammer & Bansal, 2017). However, to date, most scholarly work on organizational future focuses on short-term and immediate projections (Augustine et al., 2019).

Research focusing on time horizons, distinguishes between short-term and long-term futures, highlighting the benefits of leveraging their complementarities (Chen et al., 2021). However, further exploration is needed to understand how these seemingly divergent perspectives can be reconciled or balanced (Slawinski & Bansal 2015; Wang et al., 2019).

Research considering the onto-epistemological conceptualization of future, distinguishes between projection and imagination (Gümüsay & Reineke 2024). Projection treats the future as a continuation of the present, shaped through modeling, and forecasting (Comi & White, 2017; Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2024). In contrast, imagination views the future as potentially discontinuous from the present, requiring the creation of new imaginaries to grasp what cannot be fully anticipated by current projections (Augustine et al., 2019; Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2024).

The literature on distant and imagined future (Augustine et al., 2019; Gümüsay & Reinecke 2024) expands the scope of future possibilities, encompassing not only what is plausible or possible, but also seemingly preposterous. This opens questions on how alternatives are imagined in the first place, and on what prompts enable the construction of a distant imagined future (Augustine et al., 2019). In this context, the future is open to multiple interpretations (Wenzel et al., 2020), yet the interaction between existing future constructions remains unclear (Alimadadi et al., 2021; Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2021; Blagoev et al., 2024). Additionally, it remains uncertain as to how such hypothetical futures may orient organizational action, and what role different actors play in shaping future-making (Augustine et al., 2019; Blagoev et al., 2024; Wenzel et al., 2020).

These considerations lead to several key questions for further research:

 

  • How can organizations balance between short-term actionable plans and long-term visions when facing transformations? What are the conditions for their sustained interplay?
  • What are the key factors that influence whether organizations adopt a projection-oriented or imagination-oriented approach to future-making?
  • How do organizations balance the tension between projection and imagination of the future?
  • How do organizations manage the future’s openness to multiple interpretations?
  • How do organizational actors legitimize or delegitimize business or organizational practices by leveraging alternative futures?
  • What are the power dynamics in future-making?
  • In what ways do organizational narratives around the future (whether imagined or projected) shape current decision-making processes?

 

We encourage submissions from a wide range of perspectives, including management, organizational studies, sustainability studies, and human resource management, as well as interdisciplinary approaches that offer innovative frameworks for understanding how organizations can contribute to shaping a more equitable and sustainable future.

 

Alimadadi, S., Davies, A., & Tell, F. (2022). A palace fit for the future: Desirability in temporal work. Strategic Organization, 20(1), 20–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/14761270211012021

Augustine, G., Soderstrom, S., Milner, D., & Weber, K. (2019). Constructing a Distant Future: Imaginaries in Geoengineering. Academy of Management Journal, 62(6), 1930-1960. doi: 10.5465/amj.2018.0059

Blagoev, B., Hernes, T., Kunisch, S., & Schultz, M. (2024). Time as a research lens: A conceptual review and research agenda. Journal of Management, 50(6), 2152–2196. https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063231215032

Bansal, T., Crilly, D., Jansen, K., Langley, A., Okhuysen, G., & Shipp, A. J. (2021). Call for papers: Theorizing time in management and organizations. Academy of Management. https://aom.org/events/event-detail/2022/09/01/higher-logic-calendar/amr-special-topic-foru m–theorizing-time-in-management-and-organizations (accessed December 21, 2021).

Bansal, P., Kim, A., & Wood, M. O. (2018). Hidden in plain sight: The importance of scale in organizations’ attention to issues. Academy of Management Review, 43(2), 217–241. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2015.0101

Chen, J. H., Miller, D., & Chen, M. J. (2021). Top management team time horizon blending and organizational ambidexterity. Strategic Organization, 19, 183-206. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476127019883669

Comi, A., & Whyte, J. (2018). Future making and visual artefacts: An ethnographic study of a design project. Organization Studies, 39(8), 1055-1083. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840617717094

Flammer, C., & Bansal, P. (2017). Does a long‐term orientation create value? Evidence from a regression discontinuity. Strategic Management Journal, 38, 1827-1847. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2629

Gioia, D. A., Corley, K. G., & Fabbri, T. (2002). Revising the past (while thinking in the future perfect tense). Journal of Organizational Change Management, 15(6), 622-634. https://doi.org/10.1108/09534810210449532

Gümüsay, A. A., & Reinecke, J. (2024). Imagining desirable futures: A call for prospective theorizing with speculative rigor. Organization Theory, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/26317877241235939

Hernes, T., & Schultz, M. (2020). Translating the distant into the present: How actors address distant past and future events through situated activity. Organization Theory, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2631787719900999

Kaplan, S., & Orlikowski, W. J. (2013). Temporal work in strategy making. Organization Science, 24(4), 965-995. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1120.0792

Slawinski, N., & Bansal, P. (2015). Short on time: Intertemporal tensions in business sustainability. Organization Science 26(2),531-549. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2014.0960

Wang, S.L., Luo, Y., Maksimov, V., Sun, J., & Celly, N. (2019). Achieving temporal ambidexterity in new ventures. Journal of Management Studies, 56(4), 788-822. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12431

Wenzel, M., Krämer, H., Koch, J., & Reckwitz, A. (2020). Future and Organization Studies: On the rediscovery of a problematic temporal category in organizations. Organization Studies, 41(10), 1441-1455. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840620912977

 

Deadline for full paper submission: 1 December 2026