How do future-of-news experts construct accounts of the future of journalism and on what do they base these accounts? What do their methods imply about manifest and latent reasons for constructing these accounts in the first place? This exploratory study adapts a model from the sociology of work, which provides a typology of strategies that guide decision-making in ‘future work’ – that is, work that involves collective and systematic efforts to predict and legitimize predictive claims. We first examine economic literature on uncertainty and risk, which explains the extreme difficulty of making predictions in an environment of high uncertainty. We then situate journalism ‘future work’ within the literature on the social construction of the future, and using Fine’s model, outline strategies pursued in this construction. We conduct an exploratory qualitative content analysis of published predictions written by ‘future of news’ experts, examining the strategies they use to legitimize their predictive claims. Findings show mixed support for Fine’s model and some support for rival strategies for supporting claims about the future, for example, a path-dependence strategy of extending the known present into the future.
BaumJACShipilovAV (2006) Ecological approaches to organizations. In: CleggSet al. (eds) Sage Handbook for Organization Studies. London: SAGE, pp. 55–110.
4.
BeckerHS (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
5.
BellW (1996) The sociology of the future and the future of sociology. Sociological Perspectives39(1): 39–57.
6.
BergerPLLuckmannT (1967) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor Books.
7.
BourdieuP (1993) The Field of Cultural Production (ed R Johnson), New York: Columbia University Press.
8.
ChoJYLeeEH (2014) Reducing confusion about grounded theory and qualitative content analysis: Similarities and differences. The Qualitative Report19: 1–20.
9.
CookTE (2005) Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
10.
DequechD (2011) Uncertainty: A typology and refinements of existing concepts. Journal of Economic Issues45(3): 621–640.
11.
DiMaggioPJPowellWW (1991) Introduction. In: DiMaggioPJPowellWW (eds) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–40.
EspelandWNStevensML (2008) A sociology of quantification. European Journal of Sociology49(3): 401–436.
14.
FineGA (2007) Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
15.
FligsteinNMcAdamD (2012) A Theory of Fields. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
16.
GubaEG (1981) Criteria for assessing the trustworthiness of naturalistic inquiries. Educational Communication and Technology: A Journal of Theory, Research, and Development29(2): 75–91.
17.
HsiehHFShannonSE (2005) Three approaches to qualitative content analysis. Qualitative Health Research15(9): 1277–1288.
18.
HughesEC (1958) Men and Their Work. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
19.
HumbleAM (2009) Technique triangulation for validation in directed content analysis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods8(3): 34–51.
20.
IngersollRM (1993) Loosely coupled organizations revisited. Research in the Sociology of Organizations11: 81–112.
21.
KitchC (2000) ‘A news of feeling as well as fact’: Mourning and memorial in American newsmagazines. Journalism1(2): 171–195.
22.
KnightFH (1921) Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
23.
LevineDN (1985) Flight from Ambiguity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
24.
LewisSC (2012) From journalism to information: The transformation of the knight foundation and news innovation. Mass Communication and Society15(3): 309–334.
25.
ManicasPT (1998) Explaining the past and predicting the future. American Behavioral Scientist42: 398–405.
MitraR (2010) Resisting the spectacle of pride: Queer Indian bloggers as interpretive communities. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media54: 163–178.
29.
MourãoRR (2015) The boys on the timeline: Political journalists’ use of Twitter for building interpretive communities. Journalism16: 1107–1123.
30.
NeigerM (2012) The future is present: The media as an agent of collective vision. In: Paper presented at the annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), Phoenix, AZ, 23–28 May.
