Future Making as Emancipatory Inquiry: A Value‐Based Exploration of Desirable Futures

Alice Comi, Luigi Mosca and Jennifer Whyte

Journal of Management Studies, 2025, vol. 62, issue 6, 2467-2481

Abstract: In their Point, Wenzel, Cabantous, and Koch set out how future making encompasses a broad range of future‐oriented practices, including but not limited to planning, foresight, agile, and design‐driven approaches. In this Counterpoint, we contest that viewing future making as any future‐oriented practice may also encompass unsuitable and detrimental practices, and may blur the concept to the point of hindering, rather than sustaining efforts at theorizing future making. Adopting a Pragmatist perspective, we suggest viewing future making as an emancipatory inquiry aimed at imagining and reifying desirable futures, that is, collective, value‐based judgements of what the future might and should be. This entails a reflective conversation with the social and material world, whereby concerned actors collectively deliberate, based on values, what futures are desirable – for themselves, for future generations, and the natural environment. In advancing this view, we also reject Wright's Counterpoint on future making as a management fad that ignores long‐standing research on scenario planning, and instead, we argue that future making should depart from the managerialism of scenario planning. The main contribution of our Counterpoint is to suggest a theoretical perspective for advancing our understanding of how desirable futures can be crafted in practice.

Date: 2025
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