Future-cultures: How future imaginations disseminate throughout the social

Abstract

The futures of humanity and planet Earth are at stake. This is reflected not only in the increasingly dire future imaginations of billions of people around the world but also in an ever-increasing body of future-related literature in the social sciences and humanities. However, despite growing sociological engagement with the future, an astonishing desideratum remains: the dissemination of future imaginations. Although many works imply that future imaginations disseminate, they rarely spell out how the cultural mechanisms of dissemination work. Therefore, in this article, I develop the notion of future-cultures to conceptualize how future imaginations disseminate throughout the social, drawing from cultural sociology and theories of social practices. I conceptualize the future-cultures framework in three steps: (1) how future-cultures generate future-cultural codes, which select and classify (il-)legitimate future imaginations, sites of futuring and futuring practices; (2) how future-cultural codes relate different (futuring) practices and discourses into broader practice-/discourse-complexes, which (3) organize transversally in fields of futuring and modes of futuring, thereby disseminating distinct future imaginations over space and time.

Towards a cultural sociology of imagined futures

That the ‘future matters’ (Adam & Groves, 2007) is an almost conventional claim of a growing body of literature in the social sciences and humanities, dealing with how future imaginations shape the course and coordination of present social actions and societal processes. The growing engagement with future imaginations is mirrored by collectively held sentiments of urgency pervading societies throughout the planet. In the wake of runaway climate change (Engels et al., 2023; Lenton et al., 2019) and biodiversity crises (e.g. Folke et al., 2021), sustainability emerges as a guiding motive for social change in the twenty-first century, informing a variety of sometimes contradictory future imaginations (Adloff & Neckel, 2019). Closely related to the imagined ‘futures of sustainability’ (Adloff & Neckel, 2019) are major material processes such as infrastructural transitions (Degens et al., 2022), the digitalization and ecological modernization of the economy (Lenz, 2022) or geo- and climate engineering (Oomen, 2021). However, environmental transition efforts still face powerful corporate and political incumbencies (Pohlmann et al., 2020). In addition, the spectres of economic crisis, poverty and war are looming on the future horizons of late modern societies, increasing a widespread sense of uncertainty in the everyday lives of billions of people (Altstaedt et al., 2022; Scoones & Stirling, 2020).

Addressing this sense of urgency and related questions, scholars from the social sciences and humanities have, in recent decades, turned their attention towards future imaginations. Historians of the future have investigated how a modern futurity emerged that distinguishes past, present and future as distinct temporal experiences in the first place (Koselleck, 1979, p. 330); how future imaginations shape the genesis of social order in modern societies (Hölscher, 2016); or how, over the course of the post-WWII era, future imaginations have increasingly become enacted through scientific techniques such as scenario analyses and models (Andersson, 2018). Anthropologists have, in the meantime, started to study ‘the future as a cultural fact’ (Appadurai, 2013), showing that hoping for, aspiring to, speculating about or anticipating futures are cultural forms central to the everyday lives of people (Bryant & Knight, 2019). Sociologists, on the other hand, investigate ‘the future as a social fact’ (Beckert & Suckert, 2021) and how future imaginations are both structuring and structured by individual biographies (e.g. Cantó-Milà & Seebach, 2015), collective identities, organizational processes (Wenzel et al., 2020) or economic and societal dynamics (Beckert, 2016; Bronk & Beckert, 2018). Thus, it is a working consensus that future imaginations proliferate throughout modern societies in all aspects of social life.

Although there is a working consensus around future imaginations being shaped by, expressed in and varying with culture, works in this field rarely offer a systematic account of how future imaginations are distinguished and disseminated through particular cultural mechanisms. This lacuna is striking because, since the inception of sociology, the notion of culture has served as a tool to investigate the distinctions between and the dissemination of values, norms, ideas, beliefs, symbols and so on; yet, the sociology of the future has so far not systematically utilized this central sociological concept. Therefore, in this article, I develop the notion of future-cultures from the standpoint of cultural sociology in order to offer a systematic framework for how distinct future imaginations are disseminated.

By future-culture, I mean a web of temporally forward-oriented, projective symbolic orders and orders of knowledge, which is expressed through and embodied in futuring practices and discourses. Drawing on the works of Andreas Reckwitz and other scholars of the concept of practice, I conceptualize how future-cultures organize in futuring practice-/discourse-complexes, which can be differentiated analytically in fields of futuring and modes of futuring. I understand this contribution as a cultural–sociological complement to what Suckert (2022, p. 2) recently coined the ‘sociology of imagined futures’.

Cultural dissemination of future imaginations in sociological theory

Since the second half of the twentieth century, sociological theorizing about the future has been heavily inspired by two concepts: First, Husserlian ‘protention’ as a conscious intention, which – being embedded in an experiential flow of temporal objects – entails an expectation of the immediate future (e.g. Husserl, 2000, p. 71; Soueltzis, 2021, pp. 75–94); and second, the Weberian emphasis on purposive rational action as essentially involving the coordination of ‘ends, as sought after and considered objectives’ (Weber, 2019, p. 101). For example, both Schütz (1967) and Bourdieu (1962, pp. 84 and 105) tried to reconcile these two notions with regard to their different time horizons (Suckert, 2022, pp. 6f.; Tavory & Eliasoph, 2013, p. 911).

Building on Schütz’s (1967) concept of the ‘project’ as the ultimate meaning of social action, pragmatist scholars have introduced the notion of ‘projectivity’ as ‘our cognitive, emotional and practical engagement with future possibilities’ (Mische, 2014, p. 438; see also Mische, 2009). Projectivity in this sense means the fundamental ability of humans to generate ‘expectations about future states of the world’ (Bazzani, 2022, p. 5). Hence, by implication, projectivity represents the cognitive–bodily substrate through which culture can operate in conflating social and material facts with fiction, thereby creating alternative future realities and thus opening up present social realities for potential changes. However, the idea of projectivity as a prerequisite to project futures leaves little conceptual and analytical room for analysing the distinction between different projects and how they disseminate because projectivity pertains to a general quality of being able to generate expectations.

Closely related to this concept of projectivity is the pragmatist notion of expectations, which has informed many sociological endeavours investigating the role of the future in present social action, processes and structures. Originally coined by Alfred Schütz (1967, pp. 57ff.), the concept of expectation was taken up in science and technology studies (STS), emphasizing how visions of the future in science and technology are produced and thereby shape technological developments and their perception (Borup et al., 2006; van Lente, 2012). The notion of expectation also shaped the work of sociologist Jens Beckert (2011, 2016). In his seminal study on the dynamics of capitalist societies, Beckert (2016, pp. 61–94) shows how ‘fictional expectations’ – rather than ‘rational’ expectations – fundamentally shape economic decision-making and motivate economic action in the face of future uncertainties. Expectations in related portrayals are shaped by cultural beliefs, expressed in cultural representations such as narratives and stories and generally vary with different cultural structures and processes (Beckert, 2016, pp. 88ff.; Borup et al., 2006, pp. 291 and 295; Mische, 2014, p. 446; van Lente, 2012, pp. 776f.). Although this shaping holds true, these works rarely, if ever, spell out how exactly the cultural mechanisms work through which future expectations disseminate.

Projectivity and expectations give way to another central concept of sociological theorizing of the future: imaginations and imaginaries. Put broadly yet pointedly, future imaginations are the ‘perceptions and representations of a future that is yet to come’ (Suckert, 2022, p. 2), which shape present societies. Imagination in this sense refers to ‘a wide array of the faculties of the mind’ (Bronk & Beckert, 2018, p. 3), including the ability to be receptive towards new ideas and alternative realities and to visualize them (Bronk & Beckert, 2018, p. 3). In this sense, the terms ‘imagination’ and ‘imaginary’ are often, but not exclusively, used synonymously.

The STS scholars Jasanoff and Kim (2009, 2015) developed the influential framework of sociotechnical imaginaries with a slightly different edge, shedding light on how visions of scientific and technological progress entail normative and contingent ideas of the common good, of public purposes and of collective futures. Sociotechnical imaginaries are ‘collectively held, institutionally stabilized and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of advances in science and technology’ (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015, p. 4), which are attained through heterogeneous, multiscale socio-material assemblages. They ‘describe attainable futures and prescribe futures that states believe ought to be attained’ (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, p. 120). These works show how different national or institutional contexts generate sometimes radically different future imaginaries of the same technologies, thus highlighting the fact that the stabilization of future imaginations is contingent upon political culture. The imagination then is a ‘cultural resource’ that is mobilized to enable and attain national goals (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, p. 122). However, it remains unclear how political culture as a resource is mobilized in order to disseminate the imaginations that ought to be stabilized. Moreover, the concept of future imaginations tends to have an idealist bias, in that it focuses on collective mental constructs but cannot grasp the material aspects of different practices and institutions of imagining the future.

A rather recent literature strand which focuses on performances of imagining futures tries to rid sociological theorizing of the future from this slight idealist bias. Sociologists of this strand generally agree that future imaginations materialize and become performative in every day as well as in professional narratives, calculative techniques and overall in sociomaterial enactments of futures (e.g. Beckert, 2016, p. 256ff.; Mische, 2014, p. 441ff.; Oomen et al., 2022). Performativity here means that how we imagine and what we expect of futures have consequences for how imaginations are enacted today and also that futures imaginations are often staged following dramaturgical logics (Oomen et al., 2022). Oomen et al. (2022, p. 253) show how future imaginations become performative in futuring practices, embodying ‘the identification, creation and dissemination of images of the future shaping the possibility space of action, thus enacting relationships between past, present and future’. Indeed, bodily performances are central cultural mechanisms when it comes to disseminating symbolic forms. However, as of yet, there are almost no systematic accounts that distinguish between culturally distinct performances and how differences in futuring performances affect the creation and dissemination of future imaginations. When climate scientists testify in front of the US congress, or when tech entrepreneurs predict futures in TED talks, how do their respective performances differ and how do these differences affect the dissemination of their distinct future imaginations?

Being closely related to the performance literature, theories of social practices (Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 2002; Shove et al., 2012) have so far made a strong case for future imaginations being not merely idealistic or mental phenomena but embodied in concrete material doings. ‘Anticipatory practices’ (Ahlqvist & Rhisiart, 2015; Anderson, 2007, p. 787; Groves, 2017, p. 34), ‘future-practices’ (‘Zukunftspraktiken’, Krämer, 2019, 2022; Reckwitz, 2016), ‘future-making practices’ (Wenzel et al., 2020) or ‘futuring practices’ (Oomen et al., 2022) – these notions emphasize that future imaginations are often identified and/or created in routinized and conventionalized behaviours, which are explicitly oriented towards experiencing and organizing futures and which involve artefacts, things, know-how, affects, implicit and explicit knowledges and meanings. Theories of social practices rest upon the assumption that culture is expressed in and disseminates through social practices. However, as with almost all current sociological theories of the future, the cultural dissemination of future imaginations remains an understudied terrain in theories of social practices.

Consequently, despite a surge in sociological investigation and theorizing of the future over the past years, a striking absence remains in the sociology of the future: the cultural mechanisms of distinguishing and disseminating future imaginations. I will argue that understanding the dissemination of future imaginations is inseparable from investigating the cultural distinction of future imaginations. In order to find out how a future imagination disseminates you have to know how it was constructed as a culturally distinct object to trace its circulation throughout the social in demarcation to the circulation of other culturally distinct future imaginations. In the following, I will attempt a first step towards closing this gap and develop the notion of future-cultures, drawing from cultural sociology and theories of social practices. The notion of future-cultures is not an attempt in anthropological forecasting of ‘cultures of the future’ (Maruyama & Harkins, 1978). Its aim is to give a framework that is able to grasp and analyse the specific socio-historical forms through which future imaginations disseminate as distinct cultural products throughout social spaces and time periods.

Future-cultures: The webs of projective symbolic orders

It is fair to say that many neoclassical economists imagine the future differently than, for example, young climate activists do. Likewise, evangelical Christians imagine futures which differ from the futures which technological entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley tend to evoke in public. Thus, the forms and contents of future imaginations are shaped by the prevalent beliefs, values and norms of social groups. That is, the ways individuals and groups think about and imagine the future are embedded in and articulated through culture. Along the lines of a ‘strong program in cultural sociology’ (Alexander & Smith, 2019), culture here means a web of symbolic orders and orders of knowledge in and through which individuals and groups construct their social realities as meaningful and which have enabling as well as constraining effects with regard to social action (Alexander, 2003, p. 3f.; Geertz, 1973, p. 89). What is more, culture is expressed through and embodied in social practices (Reckwitz, 2000, p. 84). As laid out in the previous section, culture affects both the actions that make futures intelligible in the first place and the decisions and actions taken to shape those futures. Doing justice to the fact that futures are both cultural facts and the products of futuring practices, the notion of future-cultures aims at conceptualizing how futuring practices form ensembles of practices within the broader ‘practice plenum’ (Schatzki, 2019, p. 27), thereby disseminating future imaginations beyond the confines of the social spaces of their origin. Accordingly, I propose the term future-culture to denote a web of temporally forward-oriented, projective symbolic orders in and through which individuals and groups construct, give meaning to and make sense of their future(s) as a part of their social reality and which finds expression in social practices.

Needless to say, there are many future-cultures each producing culturally distinct future imaginations. The few examples above already indicate that future-cultures are also able to distinguish their respective future imaginations from those of other future-cultures. So, what are the cultural mechanisms behind this distinction? Like all cultures, future-cultures produce cultural codes, pervading the web of symbolic orders as tacit regulating principles, enabling the distinction and classification of ‘relevant meanings, […] forms of their realization, [and] evoking contexts’ (Bernstein, 1981, p. 328; for cultural codes, see e.g. Bourdieu, 1993a, p. 10; Reckwitz, 2012, p. 35ff.). In other words, future-cultural codes provide the means to decipher, often almost intuitively, the meaning of future imaginations. They also provide the means to select and classify what future imaginations are relevant in a given social situation. Thereby legitimacy is ascribed to particular future imaginations, and the illegitimacy of other future imaginations is implied. This allocating is expressed, for example, in classifications of future imaginations as ‘un-/realistic’, ‘im-/plausible’, ‘un-/likely’ or ‘un-/desirable’.

One can easily see these future-cultural classifications play out in conflictual situations where future imaginations take centre stage. Civil disobedience groups like ‘Just Stop Oil’ in Great Britain or ‘The Last Generation’ in Germany, Austria and Italy use their disruptive protests to demand effective climate policies, claiming the implausibility and undesirability of macroeconomic growth forecasts and future imaginations of limitless economic growth. Vice versa one will find many politicians and political commentators to call these groups apocalyptic ‘doomsday cults’, codifying the protesters’ future imaginations and practices as unacceptable (Curzon, 2022; Mace, 2023). Hence, future-cultural codes regulate which futuring practices are deemed legitimate in the construction and mediation of future imaginations and which practices are not.

What is more, one will often find classifications of what are the right or wrong contexts to generate future imaginations. Many people deem it outright outrages to warn of potential climate collapse by throwing tomato soup at iconic paintings in museums. To the contrary, protest groups and their supporters see these kinds of actions as rightful and effective, exactly because of the cultural distinction of art museums and the supposed cultural remoteness of art worlds from the climate futures in question. Consequently, future-cultural codes also guide the classification of which social situations are legitimate contexts for evoking future imaginations, meaning they support the regulation of the relations between different social situations of futuring for any given future-culture. Sticking to the example of climate protests, the ‘climate crisis’ may be conceived of as future-cultural code which relates, for example, climate modelling, school strikes, street blockades, paint attacks and their respective situations into a coherent and distinctive future-cultural ensemble. It is this capacity of future-cultures to distinguish between and relate different relevant and legitimate social situations of futuring that enables and constrains the dissemination of future imaginations. Thus, the distinction of future imaginations becomes empirically evident in the respective codes of future-cultures, rendering the dissemination of these codes an object of cultural analysis.

But where are future-cultures and their respective codes located empirically? According to theories of practice as among the most salient approaches in current social and cultural theory, culture finds articulation through the flow of social practices (Geertz, 1973, p. 17; Swidler, 2001, p. 83; Welch et al., 2020). Apart from webs of meanings, future-cultures then are also ensembles of practices. Thus, future-cultural codes are located in what economists, scientists, tech entrepreneurs or protesters do when they imagine futures. Now, futuring practices are the obvious candidates for articulating future-cultural elements as they are explicitly and intentionally oriented towards constructing futures. Futuring practices specialize in making futures intelligible and imaginable. Through futuring practices, subjects experience and organize futures in a specific way and constitute futures as a meaningful part of social reality (Krämer, 2019, 2022; Oomen, et al. 2022; Reckwitz, 2016). Futuring practices are social practices in that they occur repetitively over time and regularly across various social spaces and localities (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 250). They also represent cultural practices as they embody meanings, knowledges, competences, future images, aspirations and so on.

However, apart from specialized futuring practices, future images can inform a myriad of mundane practices like biking to work, changing utilities, recycling and so on. Consequently, in order to grasp the full extent of future-cultures, we have to look for them also in those situations in which the future is not ‘currently under construction’ – at least not explicitly so – because, in modern societies, future imaginations and future-cultural codes often form tacit elements of various practices in a multitude of social fields. The aim of the future-cultures framework is not to reconstruct a homogenous ‘horizon of expectations’ (Koselleck, 1979, pp. 300ff.) as a quasi-universal ideational phenomenon of modern societies. Rather, it is to sensitize for the fissures and fractures of this horizon and to show the actual heterogeneity of distinctive future imaginations and futuring practices in order to trace their dissemination through space and time. One should always think of future-cultures in the plural, ask for their specific socio-historical situatedness and analyse how the cultural mechanisms work that relate various futuring practices and situations to one another (Graf/Herzog, 2016, pp. 499f.).

So, future-cultures are expressed in both futuring practices and non-futuring practices, which raises even more the question of how future imaginations and other future cultural elements disseminate throughout the practice plenum of modern societies. I have argued above that future-cultural codes both find articulation in (futuring) practices and relate different social practices and situations to one another. Consequently, the question of the dissemination of distinct future imaginations essentially boils down to the ways in which future-cultural codes integrate different futuring practices and other practices over space and time with relative stability and regularity.

Fields and modes of futuring: organizing future-cultures

The German sociologist Krämer (2019, 2022) has outlined a ‘Praxeology of the Future’ (Praxeologie der Zukunft) focusing on futuring practices as bodily routines, often entangling objects such as things and artefacts, and putting the future in actu through these specific relations of bodies and objects. Studying futures in actu, then, commences with investigating these corporeal materializations of futuring practices, for example, in climate protests or corporate planning in companies. Apart from the material aspects, a praxeology of the future is interested in the situatedness of futuring practices. That futuring practices are situated means that, although they form expectable routines within their specific socio-historical contexts, they also always encounter frictions within these circumstances and have to be adjusted accordingly (Krämer, 2019, p. 93; 2022, p. 197).

In addition, a praxeological approach understands futuring practices as ‘relational forms’ (Krämer, 2019, p. 93; 2022, p. 197), emphasizing the fact that futuring practices do not occur as isolated entities but form networks with various other practices and discourses. Borrowing from Reckwitz (2008, 2012, p. 44), Krämer calls these networks ‘practice-/discourse-complexes’ that might form powerful alliances of futuring. The term ‘complex’ here implies the co-dependence between practices and discourses upon shared practice elements, which ‘sustain and are sustained by forms of cross-practice “collaboration”’ (Shove et al., 2012, p. 88f.). So, futuring practices relate to other practices and discourses across different social situations through shared practice elements. Yet, to do just that, these shared elements have to be meaningful across different practices and different situations. That is, shared elements need to be distinctly codified so that they become intelligible as relevant, appropriate, legitimate and so on elements of particular futurings to the subjects of the respective future-culture.

As I argued above, future-cultural codes are regulating principles selecting and classifying meanings in exactly that manner. As such, future-cultural codes can be inscribed in the materiality (things and artefacts), in meanings and knowledges and in affects of futuring practices and their correlates, thereby relating these entities in futuring practice-/discourse-complexes (for affectivity of futuring practices, see Appadurai, 2013, p. 287; Krämer, 2019, p. 94). Thus, through future-cultural codifications of shared practice elements, future-cultures organize in practice-/discourse-complexes. Future-cultural codes allow one to distinguish different situations of futuring and classify the legitimate forms of futuring in these situations. Furthermore, they relate differently situated futuring practices to one another by codifying certain shared elements of meaning, materials or affect in a way that constructs a relatively stable temporally forward-oriented, projective symbolic order/order of knowledge embedded across various practices and discourses, constituting futuring practice-/discourse-complexes.

I will argue that there are two essentially distinct future-cultural mechanisms in the organization of futuring practice-/discourse-complexes and hence in the dissemination of future imaginations. Econometrics and the Fridays For Future (FFF) movement will serve as two examples to emphasize these two different future-cultural mechanisms of dissemination. Econometrics as statistical science of the economy revolves around making predictions about economic phenomena. Bound by technical jargon and a high degree of mathematical formalization, econometric future imaginations hardly impact a broad audience outside the field of econometrics. That is, the future-cultural codes and imaginations of econometrics only pertain to and disseminate through an immensely condensed futuring practice-/discourse-complex, which is codified through highly specialized knowledge. To the contrary, social movements like FFF are able to influence the future imaginations of billions of people around the world through their actions. FFF’s future-cultural codes cut across and relate (futuring) practices and discourses from a myriad of social fields, disseminating their future imaginations widely. In the following, I build on Reckwitz (2012, p. 63) to outline these two ways in which future-cultures organize through practice-/discourse-complexes: (1) fields of futuring denote those futuring practice-/discourse-complexes that are tightly bounded by professionalism and expertise; and (2) modes of futuring describe those futuring practice-/discourse-complexes which organize across social fields through popular future-cultural representations.

Fields of futuring

According to Appadurai (2002, p. 49), the imagination ‘has become an organized field of social practice, a form of work (both in the sense of labor and of culturally organized practice)’. Here, I understand a field as a social space in the practice plenum where specialized social practices concentrate and densify around specific issues and activities, involving and generating distinctive skills, webs of meaning and orders of knowledge that regulate significations, positions, locations and status within the field (Bourdieu, 1993b, pp. 72ff.; Reckwitz, 2012, pp. 51f.; Schatzki, 2002, pp. 145f.). So, social fields represent contexts for organized actions with sets of particular rules such as the economy, science, family life, arts and politics. Professional fields have, for a long time, been the primary social spaces for the organization of future-cultures. Fields of futuring concentrate and densify around, sometimes, highly specialized activities of problematizing the future, producing and disseminating distinct future imaginations.

Econometrics can be considered one such field of futuring. Econometrics is the application of statistical methods to economic data in order to empirically test and quantitatively substantiate economic theory. One of the main aims of established econometric models is to predict future values of economic phenomena, such as gross domestic product (GDP), or inflation. Although econometric models can be intricate and hard to understand, econometrics as a field organizes around statistical inference practices, most commonly multiple linear regressions (Stock & Watson, 2007).

The historical emergence of econometrics shows how fields of futuring organize distinctive future-cultural forms in specialized futuring practice-/discourse-complexes, (re-)producing and incorporating temporally forward-oriented, projective webs of meaning and orders of knowledge. Although today econometrics and its future imaginations are well established, the foundation of econometrics as a statistical science of the economy, resting on probabilistic reasoning, happened rather late at the end of the 1930s. Up until then, ‘economic life was thought of as deterministic exercise’ not involving chance (Morgan, 1990, p. 241). Only in the 1940s econometricians began to regularly treat economic data as probabilistic, reformulating economic phenomena as stochastic processes (involving chance), thus enabling probabilistic statements about economic futures (Morgan, 1990, p. 241).

When one opens an economic journal today, one might read, for example, that with a confidence level of 95 per cent Germany’s GDP will decline by 0.3 per cent during the final quarter of 2023. Although future images like these seem almost natural to many, they obviously rely on the comparatively tardy probabilistic revolution in economics. In other words, growth forecasts and other economic future images are socio-historically situated future-cultural phenomena. Albeit technical, the notion of GDP decline (or ‘negative growth’) stimulates somewhat detrimental future imaginations of rising unemployment, average wage decline and financial instabilities. That is, rather than quantification being opposed to imagination, the example highlights how economic future imaginations unfold through the statistical apparatus of econometrics as a field of futuring (see also ‘imaginative mathematics’ in Deringer, 2018b).

Moreover, econometric inference practices and related probabilistic conceptualizations of economic phenomena entail intricate future-cultural codes informed by stochastics and probability theory. These codes regulate where economic future imaginations are produced (in econometrics), how they are produced (through statistical inference), how they are represented (probabilistically) as well as who and what represents them (econometricians and their models). Put differently, the repeated performances of futuring practices in any field establish an embodied set of future-cultural codes that regulate the legitimate ways of doing, and representing futures, thereby disseminating future imaginations that are typical and distinct of a particular field of futuring. Of course, econometrics also informs popular representations of economic futures, which disseminate far beyond this field of futuring. However, future imaginations often occur, achieve legitimacy and disseminate first in highly specialized futuring practice-/discourse-complexes which are bounded by professionalism. The possibility space for popular future imaginations, which are produced by cross-field future-cultures, opens up only when specialized future-cultural codes from one field of futuring also integrate with practices from other fields.

Sticking to the example, popular future imaginations of endless GDP growth have historically emerged from more than one particular field of futuring. The case of growthist future-culture will be discussed in the next section on modes of futuring, where it will be contrasted to FFF and its growth-critical imaginations. For the moment, I want to stress two more aspects of fields of futuring: (1) the increasing professionalization of fields of futuring over the course of the twentieth century and (2) the need to sociologically distinguish between different futuring practices in order to make sense of particular fields and trace the dissemination of their distinct future imaginations.

Since WWII, fields of futuring have been subject to processes of intense specialization. That is, the production of future imaginations has involved ever more professional expertise, scientific knowledge and techniques, computer technologies, higher mathematics and statistics (Andersson, 2018, pp. 75–97; Hölscher, 2016, pp. 296–302; Seefried, 2015, pp. 49–74). In the wake of this socio-historical development, professional fields of futuring have become one of the most impactful spaces of future-cultural organization and powerful sites of the production of future imaginations. Of course, this is not to neglect that there are fields of futuring beyond specialization and professionalism.

However, this socio-historical trend of future-cultural professionalization seems to have blurred for many observers the distinctiveness of futuring practices in that these practices have often been subsumed in generic terms like ‘quantification’ and ‘scientification’ (see e.g. Hölscher, 2016, pp. 296ff.). In addition, focusing more on the contents of future imaginations, rather than the actual cultural mechanisms of their creation, distinction and dissemination historical and sociological investigations often differentiate merely between quantitative and qualitative approaches to the future. Yet, both quantitative and qualitative procedures of futures production represent rich and heterogenous repertoires of various futuring practices.

On the qualitative side, for example, DELPHI panels, comprising systemized, iterative and consensus-oriented expert deliberations on possible future developments (Grime & Wright, 2016; Helmer-Hirschberg, 1967), differ in practice from future workshops, which assemble lay people around specific problems which they critique in order to envision possible alternatives and their implementation (Jungk & Müllert, 1987). Both these approaches are culturally distinct from scenario analyses which focus on imagining a variety of possible, probable and preferable ‘future histories’ in order to inform strategic decision-making (e.g. Bowman, 2015; Spaniol & Rowland, 2019).

On the quantitative side, for example, econometric modelling utilizes inferential statistics, often constructing the future as a static (meaning it does not change with time) probabilistic relation between estimated parameters drawn from an aggregate of economic data (Morgan, 1990, 2012; see also Desrosières, 2010, pp. 103–146). In contrast, for example, a system dynamics model – like the one underlying the famous Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al., 1972) – is a mathematical expression using differential calculus rather than statistics to express dynamic (meaning it does change with time) system behaviour. Usually, a system dynamics model does not construct the future in probabilistic terms but deterministically as the product of instantaneous rates of change of various interacting parameters, mimicking system behaviour over time. Thus, the implicit and explicit meanings of future imaginations arise to a considerable degree from how distinct quantitative futuring practices (statistical or mathematical) give form to certain ideas about what constitutes the important parameters that influence the future (Morgan, 1990, 2012).

In fact, econometrics and system dynamics as two distinct futuring practice-/discourse-complexes were at the heart of one of the most decisive futures debates in modern history, namely, the Limits to Growth controversies in the 1970s (Blanchard, 2010; Seefried, 2015, pp. 255–292). These debates have often been described as a conflict between different ideologies (Blanchard, 2010, p. 92). However, the actual subjects involved in the modelling have repeatedly expressed that the Limits to Growth controversies were a conflict between system dynamics and econometrics as culturally distinct futuring practice-/discourse-complexes, organizing around different futuring practices (Bardi, 2011, p. 54; Meadows, 1980; Myrtveit, 2005). Consequently, these debates are irreducible to mere conflicting ideologies but essentially boil down to the ‘subtle differences of quantitative interpretation’ (Deringer, 2018a, p. xiii) between two fields of futuring.

Focusing on the actual varieties of futuring practices, then, enables sociological analysis to differentiate between different fields of futuring and how they disseminate their culturally distinct future imaginations. But accounting for variations in futuring practices also opens sociological analysis up for the potential plurality of future-cultures organizing within one field. This means that fields of futuring and future-cultures are not necessarily congruent but there could be diverse future-cultures organizing in the future-cultural parameters of one and the same field (see e.g. ‘epistemic diversity’ Knorr-Cetina, 1999, p. 3; Knorr-Cetina, 2007, p. 367; or ‘cultures of prediction’ Heymann et al., 2017, p. 6; or the literature on ‘styles’ Anderson, 2010, p. 229; Groves, 2017; Williams & Thomas, 2009, pp. 274 and 299).

Consequently, for a sociology of the future, it is of vital importance to unbox the intricacies of distinct futuring practices (qualitative as well as quantitative) in order to understand how fields of futuring create cultural mechanisms of distinguishing and disseminating future imaginations along their often times highly specialized future-cultural codifications and dispositions. In the following section, I will argue that a second cultural mechanism of disseminating future imaginations lies in the capacities of some future-cultures to create popular representations of the future, which are able to overflow the confines of professionalism and specialization.

Modes of futuring

Current environmental movements like FFF create popular future-cultural representations, which – propelled by social media and intense news coverage – traverse through various fields and pervade many aspects of social life (Venghaus et al., 2022). Future-cultural codes like ‘catastrophe’ and ‘collapse’ are powerful mechanisms, which integrate climate modelling practices and related future knowledge with protest practices and the everyday lives of millions of people, for example, through shared affective practice elements (Clot-Garrel, 2023, p. 6). Through these codes, environmental movements effectively become future-cultural nodes, which translate specialized future knowledge from the field of Earth System Science into popular future imaginations (Clot-Garrel, 2023, p. 11; Rödder & Pavenstädt, 2022, pp. 34f.). The environmental movement serves as an example to show that even though fields of futuring (such as climate modelling) can be considered as primary social spaces for organizing future-cultures in modern societies, future-cultures can also organize in practice-/discourse-complexes, which extend into social spaces that cross the confines of specific fields of futuring. I call this second form of future-cultural organization modes of futuring.

Similar to fields of futuring, modes of futuring organize heterogenous practices along fundamental future-cultural codes inscribed in, for example, meanings, knowledges, artefacts, things, affects and so on. However, as shown above, in modes of futuring, future-cultural codes relate practice elements of various social fields into one practice-/discourse-complex and thereby disseminate distinctive future imaginations and future cultural-codes across social fields. This cross-field integration of futuring practice-/discourse-complexes can be observed, for example, in the various subsections that emerged in support of FFF. Engineers for Future, Teachers for Future, Workers for Future, Psychologists for Future, Parents for Future and many more integrate the practices from their respective specialized fields with future-cultural codes such as ‘catastrophe’ or ‘collapse’. Consequently, FFF or the environmental movement in general can be considered a futuring practice-/discourse-complex which disseminates distinct future imaginations by creating future-cultural codes, which become shared elements of diverse social spaces.

This capacity to disseminate distinct future imaginations codified through ‘catastrophe’ and ‘collapse’ has transformed the late modern future horizon from a seemingly limitless space of surplus potential to a comparatively bounded space contained by the biosphere’s pollution absorption capacity (Jonsson & Wennerlind, 2023, pp. 183 and 215). This future-cultural transformation highlights the historicity of future-cultures. Socio-historical processes and structures enable future-cultures and make them specifically situated phenomena. Central elements of FFF’s socio-historical situatedness are, for example, the emergence of the modern environmental movement from the 1940s through the 1970s ‘Environmental Revolution’ to this day; the entanglements of modern environmentalism with the emergence of the Earth System Sciences during the same period; and the constitution of powerful bodies of international governance like the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Radkau, 2014).

Moreover, to understand the dissemination of FFF’s future-imaginations, one should also look for FFF’s future-cultural distinctions towards the ‘fairytales of eternal economic growth’ (Thunberg, 2019) and the socio-historical situatedness of the growth paradigm. Over the course of the twentieth century, endless GDP growth became one of the central future-cultural codes, informing and disseminating future imaginations of possibly infinite economic affluence and technological innovation (Andersson, 2018, pp. 49–74). These future imaginations rely on the statistical construction of macroeconomic objects which can be projected numerically into the future through statistical inference methods or more complex causal models. Growthist future-culture is therefore deeply rooted in statistical practices and probabilistic codifications of the future, which since WWII found application in diverse fields such as operations research and military planning, econometrics, futurology and social forecasting (Hölscher, 2016, pp. 296–302). International organizations such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) played a crucial role in disseminating growthist future-culture and its imaginations throughout the Western hemisphere. Standardizing econometric accounting and data gathering and ensuring that OECD countries followed these standards created a powerful future-cultural matrix that locked institutions and millions of people into growthist future-culture (Schmelzer, 2016, pp. 104–110 and 200–214). Merely touching upon superficialities here, these examples serve nonetheless to emphasize that modes of futuring extend not only into social space but also through historical time.

Of course, historicity holds true for fields of futuring, too. As the examples in this and the previous section show, both fields and modes of futuring are enabled through socio-historically specific processes and structures. The examples also highlight that often fields and modes of futuring relate to each other. Forming cross-field futuring practice-/discourse-complexes, modes of futuring partly participate in various specialized social fields. At the same time, fields of futuring form futuring practice-/discourse-complexes that partly partake in modes of futuring (see also the discussion of fields and forms of life in Reckwitz, 2012, pp. 62ff.). Both modes and fields of futuring coordinate futuring and other practices through their respective future-cultural codes. The point of these analytical categories is to reconstruct the differences in the cultural mechanisms of disseminating distinct future imaginations in order to understand, too, how fields and modes of futuring interlock; that is, how in specific social-historical situations, future-cultures organize in specialized fields and transversally in popular modes of futuring.

Conclusion

How future imaginations disseminate has been a lacuna in sociological theorizing. I introduced the future-cultures framework as a step towards closing this gap. The concept of future-cultures denotes webs of temporally forward-oriented, projective meanings and orders of knowledge, which express through futuring practices. Future-cultural codes serve as regulating principles that facilitate the distinction and dissemination of certain future imaginations. By doing so, future-cultural codes integrate differently situated futuring practices and discourses into futuring practice-/discourse-complexes. Futuring practice-/discourse-complexes can be distinguished in two analytically distinct ways, transversally relating to one another: (1) fields of futuring and (2) modes of futuring. Fields and modes of futuring each represent future-cultural mechanisms of disseminating distinct future imaginations.

The future-cultures framework affords the systematic sociological analysis of the cultural mechanisms which distinguish and disseminate future imaginations in a vast array of social situations. Furthermore, the framework clears the way for still sparse sociological inquiries of the cultural mechanisms of power over and through future imaginations (Suckert, 2022, p. 21). How do some future-cultures attain positions of relative dominance over other future-cultures? Through the future-cultures framework, questions of power boil down to how futuring practice-/discourse-complexes establish a relatively durable dissemination of their distinct future imaginations over space and time. This capacity to durably disseminate distinct future imaginations is likely linked to the ‘cultural capital’ of powerful milieus and classes (Bourdieu, 1984). Mechanisms of future-cultural power could also be conceived in terms of ‘hegemony’ (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, pp. 95ff.) or one could explore them as specific future-cultural constructions of technical apparatuses as attempts to govern the future, for example, through ‘algorithmic regimes’ (Egbert, forthcoming; see also Aykut et al., 2019). Consequently, the future-cultures framework also presents a fruitful perspective for a cultural sociology of imagined futures to investigate the most pressing concern of our age: the future of planet Earth.