Researching for Desirable Futures: From Real Utopias to Imagining Alternatives

Abstract

Moments of crisis may serve as critical junctures for imagining alternatives. As the future has become increasingly volatile and precarious in these unsettled times of pandemic, climate emergency, rising inequality and an ever looming digital (r)evolution, there is a great need and opportunity to develop theory that can guide society towards its future potentialities. But how can we theorize what does not (yet) exist? A central task would be to develop methodological strategies that make the future amenable to empirical study. This is quite ambitious. In this essay we seek to take one of many steps and advocate for such (re-)search for the future, where acts of (disciplined) imagination become input for theory building. Calls abound for us management scholars to assume a more engaged societal role by breaking away from a narrow, paradigm-driven ‘theory fetish’ and instead, contribute to solving grand challenges and societal problems (Biggart, 2016). We do not see this as an either/or. It is time for us as management scholars to use the methodological and theoretical toolkit at our disposal to co-create the future; and to actively feed forward soci(et)al change – not despite theory, but through it. However, the future poses some peculiar problems: By definition, it is not here yet. Thus, the quest to contribute to the construction of a future social reality by theorizing it raises some fundamental questions: Do we actually need to wait until something exists before we can build theories about it? Or can we ex ante theorize a post-COVID-19 world or think through the consequences of a society radically shaped by artificial intelligence? To put it differently, the conundrum we face is the following: As an empirical social science, management scholarship deals with the social world as it exists and came to be; our methodological tools are based on data sourced from observable events that have already occurred. Thus, how can we study, conceptualize, and theorize what is not (yet) observable and does not (yet) exist? Could we indeed build valid theories based on acts of imagination? When management scholars engage with the future, their aim is commonly to anticipate possible futures through predictive analysis. But anticipating or predicting a probable future is not our aim. Instead, we seek to articulate desirable futures, and how they might become reality. There are two reasons for this. First, our analytic capabilities to predict the future will likely be dwarfed by the predictive strength of corporate research. Big technology companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft employ thousands of researchers to analyse masses of data, often routinely harvested as a by-product of digital traces for machine learning. As a result, the methodological innovations needed to describe, analyse, and predict human behaviour are no longer championed by academic scholars but by capitalist institutions whose aim it is to generate profits (Savage and Burrows, 2007). Their increasingly powerful methods turn behavioural data into what Shoshana Zuboff calls ‘prediction products’ that not only predict our behavioural futures but also intervene in them. Outperformed by corporate research, we may find ourselves subjected to profitable but dystopian future developments. Second, predicting the future is not (good) enough. Rather than trying to compete over who can make better predictions and build better models, we need to reclaim our societal relevance by redefining our purpose in engaging with the future altogether. A central aim must be to create more desirable futures. However, the prevailing approaches to predicting or anticipating the future in management studies lack such a critical reflection on their normative orientation. For instance, scenario planning is a popular heuristic tool in strategic management that primarily aims at generating various plausible scenarios for emerging futures. But it is precisely the elaboration, critic