about

In recent times, calls abound for organization scholars to assume a more engaged societal role and contribute to solving grand challenges.

Scholars have critiqued that dominant organizational research is making trivial additions that are only meaningful to “tiny research micro-tribes”, rather than illuminating a social phenomenon in an original, impactful and insightful way. Nevertheless, research with societal impact is also often underpinned by strong and innovative methodologies and approaches to creating knowledge on desirable futures.

The future, however, poses one peculiar problem: By definition, it is not here yet. The quest to contribute to the construction of a future social reality thus raises some fundamental questions: Do we need to wait until something exists before we can theorize it? How can we then study, conceptualize, and theorize what is not (yet) observable and does not (yet) exist? Relatedly, how can we build valid theories based on acts of imagination?

Aims & Objectives

The Desirable Futures SWG is a platform for scholars interested in developing future-oriented organizational theory to tackle societal grand challenges. The group mobilizes the EGOS community to jointly work on new ways of knowing, and offer new approaches to theorizing that can lead to desirable futures. We aim to:

Stimulate methodological and theoretical innovation for the elaboration, critical reflection, and theorizing of desirable futures.
Foster a research agenda towards impactful scholarship, and how organization scholars can create societal impact and contribute to the development of desirable futures.
Create an international community of scholars that unites various streams of research on desirable futures from different research traditions.

We will explore the role of research in thinking about and shaping the future via four sub-themes:

2023: Shaping desirable futures – imagining (real) utopias

Exploring the possibilities of disciplined imagination as a research topic, this sub-theme reflects on how we can prefiguratively organize for both “real” and imaginary utopias, which involves developing visions of future alternatives that are rooted in the potentialities of the present. How would we then get to realizing imagined utopias?

2024: Grand challenges, impactful scholarship & scientivism.

Exploring the possibilities of helping to address grand challenges through impactful scholarship, this sub-theme inquires on the pathways to impact, and the role of theory as well as the scholar in creating those pathways. How can we reflect on the changing role of academia in society, and the role of organization theory in particular?

2025: Purposeful theorizing: Fostering desirable futures by developing theories

Valuing the importance of theories for practitioners to understand the world, this sub-theme reflects on how theories can be developed to influence the social construction of organizations, fields, and markets, and thereby foster desirable futures. Moreover, how can theories be made more relevant for practioners, and connected with problems that they face?

2026: Methodological innovation for (un)disciplined imagination.

Focusing on methodological innovations to study distant and/or desirable futures, this sub-theme inquires on how research can move beyond scenarios, and introduce new methodological approaches to theorize what does not (yet) exist. How can we map the field and present bold arguments and reflections for a future research agenda for theory and methodology?

Sub-Theme Activities

For each of the sub-themes, the SWG will issue a call for papers, for both empirical and conceptual work from diverse methodologies. Across the pool of submissions, we hope to convene a diversity of scholars with different experiences in fruitful discussions.