What makes an imagined future credible?

Jens Beckert

No 24/5, MPIfG Discussion Paper from Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies

Abstract: Narratives of the future are a crucial source of the dynamics of capitalism (Beckert 2016). Since there are no future facts, assessments of the future necessarily need to rely on accounts that cannot be limited to the presentation of facts. This means they cannot be true or false, but they can be credible or non-credible. To trigger decisions, the narrative must convince actors that it is at least sufficiently probable that events will indeed play out as portrayed. But where does this credibility come from? I propose a simple model which consists of three elements. I distinguish first the story-maker or persuader, the person (or institution) that creates specific imagined futures and often wants to convince other actors of the accuracy of the narrative. Second, the story-taker or agent who ultimately makes the decisions through which resources are put at risk and who needs to become convinced of the credibility of the imagined future. The third element in the model is social context, the features of the social and material environment that position the agent in a social network and influence assessments of credibility.

Keywords: credibility; imagined futures; narrative; persuasion; power; social context; story; uncertainty; Erzählung; Geschichten; Glaubwürdigkeit; imaginierte Zukunft; Macht; sozialer Kontext; Überzeugung; Ungewissheit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/300664/1/1897203225.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:mpifgd:300664

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPIfG Discussion Paper from Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().