Future-making in management and organization studies

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Matthias Wenzel
• Subject Area: Management and Marketing
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 574128093

Management and organization scholars have embraced the contemporary relevance of the future in organizational life through a recent “turn to future-making”. Future-making refers to ways in which organizational actors produce and enact the yet-to-come. While the field of future-making in management and organization studies has established itself within just a few years, the growth of the debate has outpaced theoretical development, leaving an absence of a shared conceptual vocabulary for describing and understanding future-making. Therefore, the aim of this network is to bring together and foster dialogues between scholars with different theoretical perspectives to gain a deeper and more systematic understanding of future-making in management and organization studies. Specifically, the network meetings are structured around three salient perspectives on future-making, namely, the practice, communicative, and pragmatist perspectives. The central outcomes of the scientific network will be (a) a shared conceptual foundation for understanding and theorizing future-making, (b) a vibrant scholarly community around future-making that sustains itself beyond the formal termination of the network, and (c) international visibility of this community.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks