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 - Conference code: 85

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 -