'Beacons & Breadcrumbs': Objects for Making Sense of the Distant Future
Sprache des Vortragstitels:
Englisch
Original Tagungtitel:
39th EGOS Colloqium: Organizing for the good life - Between legacy and imagination
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
At its core, this study explores how participants of an inter-organizational foresight initiative assessed the strategic relevance of an invented emerging technology. Against this backdrop, we investigate how different artifacts that depict the future (e.g., imaginary future worlds, fictional technology concepts, stylized examples, prototypical business cases, or proof-of-concepts) were used and produced during this initiative and on what roles these types of artifacts have as objects (e.g., epistemic-, intermediary-, boundary objects) during future-oriented sensemaking. We find that, depending on which role they take on, objects serve to main purposes in these kinds of settings: to bolster the imagination of distant futures and the reconciliation of distant futures with present realities. In their role as epistemic objects, they primarily function as beacons that enable actors to notice and bracket the previously unknown and to create images of distant futures. As intermediary objects, they primarily function as 'Breadcrumbs' that point the way back from imaginary futures to present realities through constantly repeating processes of articulation and concretization. Finally, as boundary objects, they function as ?Support structures? that allow actors to intersubjectively elaborate, verify and test their imagined futures and present realities. With our study, we contribute to the understanding of how distant futures are made sense of discursively, through multimodal ways of communication that use ?objects? as their medium.
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