Seeking,Shaping,Becoming: A Scoping Review of the Organizational Futures Literature

Abstract

Across management disciplines, there is growing recognition that understanding organizational futures—that is, how organizations engage with futures—is integral to comprehending contemporary organizing and strategizing processes. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth scoping review aimed at organizing and synthesizing the rapidly expanding and fragmented literature on organizational futures across the strategy, entrepreneurship, innovation, and organization studies disciplines over the past several decades. Our survey identifies several research streams in these areas that we classify into three main categories: future seeking, shaping, and becoming. Furthermore, we identify three subcategories within each main group—anticipating, adapting, and non-adapting under future seeking; enacting, designing, and narrating within future shaping; and perpetuating, making/performing, and wayfinding/improvising inside future becoming—and review the key scholarship associated with each of these. In so doing, we provide a comprehensive and coherent map intended to enable this recently flourishing and perennially vital domain of research to move forward systematically. We also envision our review as a platform that facilitates the development of more prospectively-oriented (i.e., forward-looking) theorizing. Finally, we highlight many frontiers to explore in future work, that include more closely examining the role played by imagination, power and affect in the emergence of organizational futures.