A game of futures: the strategy of scenarios in a Danish medical company

ABSTRACT

While the future has gained increasing attention in organizational research, the minutiae and intricacies of how organizational actors produce and enact the future remain little explored. In this article, we present an ethnographic study of a future-making practice called ‘the strategy of scenarios’ in a Danish medical company. We propose the concept of technologies of prefiguration to capture how such practices prefigure the future so as to make it actionable. Our study shows that this unfolds as a ‘game of futures’ in which prefiguration depends not only on an outward orientation towards societal developments, but equally on an inward orientation towards the political economy of the organization. Although rational reasoning forms part of this game, futures are established and negotiated through arational techniques of enchantment focused on ‘selling futures’. This challenges rationalist ideas of future-making, demonstrating the heterogenous, more-than-rational processes and distinct organizational logics by which futures are shaped.

KEYWORDS:

• Future
• scenarios
• prefiguration
• ethnography
• medical industry

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank everyone in MedTech for sharing their reflections and experiences with us. In particular, we are deeply grateful to the team of anthropologists and the managers who offered Andreas an internship at Tech R&D, and furthermore allowed him to conduct fieldwork in the organization more broadly. We also thank the anonymous reviewers of Culture and Organization and the associated editor, Daniel Ericsson, for critical, constructive, and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The names of MedTech, departments, managers, and employees in this article are all pseudonyms.

2 See Skoglund and Böhm (2020) for a more elaborate review of prefigurative politics in organizational research (1261–1263).

3 As an analytical concept, technologies of prefiguration bears similarities to the concept of ‘technologies of the imagination’, which Sneath, Holbraad, and Pedersen (2009) put forward as a way to capture ‘the social and material means by which particular imaginings are generated’ (6). However, while imagination is part of future-making in organizations (Beckert 2021), technologies of prefiguration designate more organized and purposeful knowledge processes which are intended to foretell and prefigure the future (or futures) by giving it (or them) a specific form and content that allow for exploration, scrutinization, discussion, and decision-making.

4 Such studies include a focus on pandemic preparedness measures (Lakoff 2008; Samimian-Darash 2009), insurance and resilience rebuilding policies against natural hazards (Collier, Cox, and Grove 2016), civil defence planning against nuclear attacks (Collier 2008), and national governments’ enactment of scenario-based exercises to prepare for events ‘whose probability cannot be calculated, but whose consequences are potentially catastrophic’ (Lakoff 2008, 403; Samimian-Darash 2016).

5 ‘In our endeavor to sustain ourselves in the short term’, Fry (2009) writes, ‘we collectively act in destructive ways towards the very things we and all other beings fundamentally depend upon’ (22), thus making such destructive acts essentially ‘defuturing’. Hunt (2011) elaborates that the concept also concerns how all design ‘is an act both of prefiguring a future social milieu but also the erasure of multiple possible alternatives […] It is an ontology of prefigurement that destroys as it creates’ (35, emphasis added).

6 In organization studies, discussions of enchantment have generally aimed to move beyond Weber’s dichotomy between scientific rationality and spiritual enchantment (Hancock 2005). The discussions have, however, been divided by two distinct analytical perspectives, construing enchantment as either a product of human intervention or an expression of an ‘authentic’ search for meaning. See Mauksch (2017, 137–139) for a more detailed discussion of these positions.