Navigating (In)Visibility: Exploring Political Dynamics in Future-Making

Publikation: Beiträge in ZeitschriftenKonferenzaufsätze in FachzeitschriftenForschungbegutachtet

Authors

Future-making has emerged as a pivotal research area exploring how futures are imagined, negotiated, and formed in organizational settings. Despite substantial progress, the literature has yet to fully address the political nature of future-making. More specifically, it remains undertheorized how actors who engage in future-making selectively disclose elements to different audiences, thus exposing these activities to potential contestation. Through a 15-month case study in a large industrial corporation, we explore the future-making activities of middle and lower managers as they pursue two strategic initiatives. Ultimately, the initiatives aim to realize a groundbreaking yet fictional technology that promises sustained market leadership. Our study provides a theoretical model explaining how visibility practices underpin the politics of future-making. Managers engage in concealing, obfuscating, and angle-playing, switching through those practices by performing both reversible and irreversible visibility moves. We introduce a visibility perspective to the research on future-making, affording a nuanced understanding of how organizational actors with limited formal decision-making power engage in political activity to develop and assert preferred futures.

OriginalspracheEnglisch
ZeitschriftAcademy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings
Jahrgang2025
Ausgabenummer1
ISSN0065-0668
DOIs
PublikationsstatusErschienen - 01.07.2025
Veranstaltung85th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management - AOM 2025 - Copenhagen, Dänemark
Dauer: 25.07.202529.07.2025
Konferenznummer: 85

Bibliographische Notiz

Publisher Copyright:
© 2025, Academy of Management. All rights reserved.

DOI

Zuletzt angesehen

Publikationen

  1. Analysis of Cognitively Activating Tasks in Vocational Education and Training of Nursing
  2. Aufgeschoben, nicht aufgehoben
  3. Composing with the terra fluida of interaction: new paths for CCO research as relational practice
  4. The conservation against development paradigm in protected areas
  5. Possible underestimations of risks for the environment due to unregulated emissions of biocides from households to wastewater
  6. Why Emergency? Reflections on the Practice and Rhetoric of Exceptionalism
  7. Powers of Abstraction
  8. Front, Field, Line, Plane
  9. A Kalman estimator for detecting repetitive disturbances
  10. Circularity in Automotive Electronics Design
  11. Effectiveness of an Internet- and App-Based Intervention for College Students With Elevated Stress
  12. Temporal variability in native plant composition clouds impact of increasing non-native richness along elevational gradients in Tenerife
  13. Effects of Soil Properties, Temperature and Disturbance on Diversity and Functional Composition of Plant Communities Along a Steep Elevational Gradient on Tenerife
  14. A cultural approach toward the notion of the instrument
  15. Temporal discrimination as a function of marker duration
  16. Der Strukturgitter-Ansatz
  17. Contributions of Net-Map to sustainability action research
  18. Work Design and Performance
  19. Rechtschreiben unterrichten
  20. Entry, Exit and Productivity
  21. It Matters to Whom You Compare Yourself
  22. 'I Cannot Overreach the Senate': Orienting to the Macro-Context of Legislative Debates of the Nigerian Senate
  23. Psychophysiological Correlates of Flow-Experience
  24. Polarization of Time and Income - A Multidimensional Analysis for Germany
  25. Chagga women´s connections with nature: fostering relationality through arts-based methods
  26. Freiheit in Liebe. Eine Einführung
  27. What Does it Mean when Burma is a Sideshow in World Politics
  28. Coupling stakeholder assessments of ecosystem services with biophysical ecosystem properties reveals importance of social contexts
  29. Special Issue: Embracing Contrarian Thinking
  30. Business model patterns of sustainability pioneers - Analyzing cases across the smartphone life cycle
  31. Einführung in das Buch
  32. Unobtrusive Vital Sign Acquisition in the Domain of AAL