Introduction
The question of how to manage the future is an inherent part of organizing. As Luhmann (2000) suggests, organizations of any kind in all areas of commercial, federal and daily life—from large corporations to public administrations to sports clubs—can be considered as structural responses to the question of how to cope with and handle the future, that is, the period that lies ahead. In turn, as Beckert (2016) highlights, these very responses drive contemporary actions and thereby trigger organizational, market and societal developments, thus pointing to a tight interplay of future and organizing. Hence, the author clarifies that ‘the future matters’ (p. 58).
Yet, managing the future is more than just a universal feature of organizing: in contemporary society, the temporal mode of the future is becoming more and more prevalent. Since the beginning of the post-modern period , with its observed increase in uncertainties , the future has become a problem for different social actors (Reckwitz 2016; Rosa 2005, 2016), especially for organizations (Koch et al. 2016): the post-modern insight that the future is unknowable has pointed out the general fallibility of controlling the future through planning techniques (Barry and Elmes 1997; March 1995; Mintzberg 1994). This, we argue, turns the processes and practices through which organizations manage the future into an interesting and relevant contemporary phenomenon that deserves more focused research attention: if conventional planning has lost its omnipotent status as the predominant mode of anticipating and enacting things to come, which alternative ways of managing the future do organizations enact, and how do they do so? As responses to these questions are under-represented in organizational literature, the aim of this short chapter—and this edited collection more broadly—is to foster a research agenda that focuses more thoroughly on how organizations manage the future.
Looking Back, but Not Forward?
Despite the relevance of managing the future, most studies that take the role of time in processes of organizing seriously focus on the temporal mode of the past (for comprehensive overviews see Kipping and Üsdiken 2014; Godfrey et al. 2016; Suddaby and Foster 2017; see also Plourde this volume). These studies highlight the argument that ‘history matters’ by pointing to the enabling and constraining character of organizational legacies. Most notably, theories and concepts like path dependence (Sydow et al. 2009; Wenzel 2015; Wenzel et al. 2017), imprinting (Marquis and Tilcsik 2013; Stinchcombe 1965), escalation of commitment (Sleesman et al. 2012; Staw 1981) and inertia (Gilbert 2005; Hannan and Freeman 1984; Tripsas and Gavetti 2000) describe and explain how organizations can be trapped by their history , thus constraining the scope of actions that organizations can enact in the present . In the light of unpredictable (i.e. future) events and the related need for flexible organizational responses, these works declare the stabilizing effect of past developments as a problem for organizations. Therefore, how organizations actively engage with and overcome the rigidities that the past imposes on them has become a key topic in organization research (Kipping and Üsdiken 2014). Some of the studies that have begun to explore this issue highlight the enabling character of the past, showing how organizations may re-interpret their history to align it with present circumstances (e.g. Gioia et al. 2002; Hjorth and Dawson 2016; Schultz and Hernes 2013), recombine past experiences to engage in innovative activities (De Massis et al. 2016; Foster et al. 2011), use their legacy as a source of sensemaking cues for the interpretation of present challenges (Ravasi and Schultz 2006) and even instrumentalize their history as a source of competitive advantage through rhetorical strategies (Suddaby et al. 2010). Yet, although these studies provide invaluable insights into the important role of history in and for organizing, they tend to accept the future as given, that is, as a context factor that organizations can at best passively sense and forecast through ‘accurate’ planning techniques (Hodgkinson and Wright 2002; see, however, Garud et al. 2010). Due to their focus on the temporal mode of the past, they underplay the management of the future as an important organizational phenomenon as well as its complexity in contemporary organizing.
Yet, the fact that much of the organizational literature has focused on the temporal mode of the past does not imply that the future is overlooked. Quite the contrary, in fact, as a number of streams in organization research display an affinity for things to come. However, ironically, while they highlight the importance of the future in and for organizing, they mostly trivialize the management of things to come—either by converting it into a planning problem or by considering it as a universal aspect of organizing.1
A first line of enquiry draws attention to the management of the future as a planning problem. For example, the renaissance of risk-related research (e.g. Bromiley et al. 2017; Martin and Helfat 2016) reflects the idea that organizational environments are ever more pluralistic and ambiguous. In response, these studies mostly suggest that organizations are required to imagine different possible futures, estimate probabilities of their occurrence and pursue actions that will most likely turn out to be optimal in the envisioned future. From this perspective, organizational survival essentially depends on planning more accurately. This leads us to classical forecasting techniques as described in the early strategic planning literature (e.g. Ansoff 1965; Chandler 1962) which have increasingly been put into question by more recent work in strategy research (e.g. Barry and Elmes 1997; Mintzberg 1994; for an exception see also Hardy and Maguire 2016). Similarly, the recent emergence of the discourse on ‘big data’ (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013) can be interpreted as a resurgence of ‘management science’ from the early days of organization and management research: ever-increasing data availability and computing power spark promises to predict the future (upcoming consumer purchases, the use of emergency brakes by autonomously driven cars in response to predicted hold-ups, etc.) based on algorithms (see Gigerenzer 2014 for a critical response). In turn, the debate on organizational foresight (e.g. Ahuja et al. 2005; Gavetti and M...