Navigating (In)Visibility: Exploring Political Dynamics in Future-Making
Research output: Journal contributions › Conference article in journal › Research › peer-review
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.
Original language | English |
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Journal | Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings |
Volume | 2025 |
Issue number | 1 |
ISSN | 0065-0668 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 01.07.2025 |
Event | 85th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, AOM 2025 - Copenhagen, Denmark Duration: 25.07.2025 → 29.07.2025 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:
© 2025, Academy of Management. All rights reserved.
- Management Information Systems
- Management of Technology and Innovation
- Industrial relations
ASJC Scopus Subject Areas
- Management studies