Navigating (In)Visibility: Exploring Political Dynamics in Future-Making
Publikation: Beiträge in Zeitschriften › Konferenzaufsätze in Fachzeitschriften › Forschung › begutachtet
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in: Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings, Jahrgang 2025, Nr. 1, 01.07.2025.
Publikation: Beiträge in Zeitschriften › Konferenzaufsätze in Fachzeitschriften › Forschung › begutachtet
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Navigating (In)Visibility
T2 - 85th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, AOM 2025
AU - Düsterbeck, Johanne
AU - Habersang, Stefanie
AU - Reihlen, Markus
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2025, Academy of Management. All rights reserved.
PY - 2025/7/1
Y1 - 2025/7/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Management studies
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=105009403828&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.5465/AMPROC.2025.349bp
DO - 10.5465/AMPROC.2025.349bp
M3 - Conference article in journal
AN - SCOPUS:105009403828
VL - 2025
JO - Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings
JF - Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings
SN - 0065-0668
IS - 1
Y2 - 25 July 2025 through 29 July 2025
ER -