Speaker: Juliane Reinecke (Oxford)
Time: Thursday, 6 June 10 am (EST) / 3 pm (London). This webinar is scheduled for 90 minutes including the Q&A.
Registration: Please register here to receive a personalized Zoom link and a reminder prior to the event.
With the looming planetary emergency, the future will be anything but an extension of the past. Yet, theorizing the future poses a peculiar problem. By definition, it is not present yet. The conundrum of the future is that it requires conceptualizing and theorizing what is not (yet) observable and does not (yet) exist. While scholars have called for more impactful theories, one powerful avenue to make organizational theories more impactful is to make them more future-oriented. Thus, we call for prospective theorizing, which we define as a future-oriented approach to theorizing that is concerned with imagining desirable futures. First, prospective theorizing involves a shift along two dimensions (onto-epistemological and axiological): from projection to imagination and from values-neutral to values-led theorizing. Second, prospective theorizing practices can enable such shifts. Third, for such prospective theorizing to be scientifically evaluable and rigorous, we develop the notion of speculative rigour and outline criteria of generative potency, process transparency, plausible desirability and speculative plausibility. Overall, prospective theorizing adds to greater plurality in our theorizing towards (re)generative scholarship for imagining desirable futures.
Suggested readings:
- Gümüsay, A.A. and Reinecke, J., 2022. Researching for desirable futures: From real utopias to imagining alternatives. Journal of Management Studies, 59(1), pp.236-242
- Gümüsay, A.A. and Reinecke, J., 2024. Imagining Desirable Futures: A call for prospective theorizing with speculative rigour. Organization Theory, 5(1)
- Reinecke, J., Boxenbaum, E. and Gehman, J., 2022. Impactful theory: Pathways to mattering. Organization Theory, 3(4)
About the speaker:
Juliane Reinecke is a Professor of Management Studies at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Her research draws on insights from organisation theory, political philosophy and process studies to explore, broadly speaking, how transnational governance institutions emerge and evolve as a result of the interactions of multiple stakeholders to promote more just and sustainable forms of globalisation in global supply chains, but also organisations in general.
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Ibrat Djabbarov
Imperial College London
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