Abstract
Anticipation is part of organizational attempts to manage their future affairs and shape their surroundings. Still, the ways in which organizations engage in anticipation have not been sufficiently conceptualized in the field of organization and management studies. This article conceptualizes organizational ways of shaping and orchestrating futures by engaging insights from Foucauldian scholarship that highlight the intersection between what we can see, know and govern. We highlight the importance of processes of knowledge production in governance efforts, and articulate how anticipatory governance is crafted through intricate combinations of resources such as narratives, numbers and digital traces. The main contribution is a conceptual typology outlining four different templates for anticipatory governance in organizational settings that we term ‘indicative snapshots’, ‘prognostic correlations’, ‘projected transformations’ and ‘phantasmagoric fictions’. We posit anticipatory governance as a knowledge-based, performative phenomenon that addresses potential and desirable futures in and between organizations. Such anticipatory activities gauge and guide organizational processes and modes of thinking and acting along different temporal orientations, and have governance effects that makes anticipation performative by its very nature. This understanding of anticipatory governance, we suggest, offers both conceptual contributions and empirical avenues for research in organization and management studies.
Highlights
Anticipatory action – foreseeing, foreshadowing, or forecasting future events – has gained increased currency as a way to engage with farreaching societal challenges, such as the anthropocene, climate change, biopolitics and securitization
Investment banks rely on complex metrics and indices to steer their investments; state agencies build their policies on statistical projections into plausible futures; and high-tech corporations gear their innovation strategies towards estimations of future market demands
We consider the focus on resources, assemblages and templates of anticipatory governance to be a valuable starting point for studies of how organizations attempt to see, know and govern future affairs
Summary
Anticipatory action – foreseeing, foreshadowing, or forecasting future events – has gained increased currency as a way to engage with farreaching societal challenges, such as the anthropocene, climate change, biopolitics and securitization. Such mappings and visualizations have become a resource in processes of segmenting, calculating and profiling humans, movements and societal developments, and are used to shape future behaviour and developments Unlike indicative snapshots, such forms of anticipatory knowledge can be said to ‘trade in human futures’ and aim at modifying human behaviour in proactive and hidden ways in what Zuboff (2019) terms ‘surveillance capitalism’. Anticipation via projected transformations ‘Projected transformations’ as templates for anticipatory governance abound in the organizational literature, reflecting the saturation of organizational environs with numbers and narratives as ways of accounting for reality In this category, we find forms of knowledge that provide an interpretive lens to what is going on in the world and to what may come, given certain kinds of decisions and chains of events. The typology of templates is intended as a heuristic and generative source of conceptual and empirical exploration in studies of organizational attempts to account for and shape the future, because only in this way can we begin to understand how templates shape the governance of organizational life
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