Future Making: Towards a Practice Perspective

Wenzel, Matthias; Cabantous, Laure; Koch, Jochen Article — Published Version Future Making: Towards a Practice Perspective Journal of Management Studies Provided in Cooperation with: John Wiley & Sons Suggested Citation: Wenzel, Matthias; Cabantous, Laure; Koch, Jochen (2025) : Future Making: Towards a Practice Perspective, Journal of Management Studies, ISSN 1467-6486, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, Vol. 62, Iss. 6, pp. 2426-2451, https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13222 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/329798 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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Future Making: Towards a Practice Perspective Matthias Wenzela, Laure Cabantousb and Jochen Kochc aLeuphana University of Lüneburg; bESCP Business School; cEuropean University Viadrina ABSTRACT Management scholars are increasingly interested in ‘future making’, observing and theorizing how organizational actors produce and enact the yettocome. However, the rapid growth of the conversation runs the risk of emptying the notion of future making, calling into question its meaning and relevance. In response to these concerns, our Point is that there is value in understanding future making from a practice perspective. A practice perspective, we argue, is empirically sufficiently open to account for the plurality and openendedness of futures and future making amidst the continual emergence of interrelated crises, largescale challenges, and intractable technologies. Thus, it reinforces the relevance of research on future making as a central part of contemporary organizational life. At the same time, the four practicebased dimensions elaborated in this Point provide sufficient conceptual specificity to discern what counts as future making and what does not, thereby providing solid ground for cumulative theorybuilding and research in this area. Our Point extends research on future making in management studies by substantiating the relevance of examining and theorizing future making, and by articulating and clarifying a practice perspective on future making that directs scholarly attention to important areas for future research. Keywords: future making, futures, performativity, practice theory, relationality [These days], we are constantly talking about futures. Evidently, there is a multiplicity of demands for them. (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 7 May 2024) INTRODUCTION Concerns about the future implications of largescale challenges such as climate change (Bansal et al., 2025, p. 2) and intractable technologies such as artificial intelligence (Lindebaum et al., 2024, p. 2725) have given rise to research on future making as an organizational phenomenon (e.g., Comi and Whyte, 2018; Wenzel et al., 2020). By ‘future Journal of Management Studies 62:6 September 2025 doi:10.1111/joms.13222 Address for reprints: Matthias Wenzel, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Universitätsallee 1, 12335 Lüneburg, Germany (matthias[email protected]). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 2427FutureMaking © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. making’, we refer to ways in which organizational actors produce and enact the yettocome. Among other things, management scholars observe and theorize organizational actors’ conventional attempts to predict, plan, preempt, and prepare for the future, as, for instance, manifested in attempts to reach the Sustainable Development Goals formulated at the United Nations (see Lantz et al., 2025). They also explore how organizational actors adopt more or less deliberate alternatives to planning such as agile organizing (Stjerne et al., 2024) as well as experimental ways of imagining (Thompson and Byrne, 2022). In contrast to earlier research on planning and prediction (Wolf and Floyd, 2017), a distinctive feature of research on futuremaking is the idea that organizational actors cannot predict or manage the future as if it were a preexisting, objective category. Instead, organizational actors ‘make’ the future as a socially constructed category in the present. In this view, planning and prediction are no more than two of potentially many other ways through which futures come into being. Notions of future making are now used to discuss a profusion of futures, such as (un)desirable (e.g., Alimadadi et al., 2022; Van Elk et al., 2024), (un)sustainable (e.g., De Cock et al., 2021; Nyberg et al., 2020), actionable and visionary (e.g., Pettit et al., 2023; Rindova and Martins, 2022), as well as utopian and dystopian (e.g., Jarvenpaa and Välikangas, 2020; Rauch, 2025). They have also inspired research into the role of tools and technologies (e.g., Glaser et al., 2021; Wenzel, 2022; Whyte et al., 2022), affects and ethics (Kuepers et al., 2023; Plotnikof and Pors, 2024), frames and knowledge (Munshi et al., 2024; Thompson and Byrne, 2022), paths and events (Feuls et al., 2024; Hernes et al., 2025), expectations and hype (Beckert, 2021; Logue and Grimes, 2022), as well as social movements and alternative economies (Reinecke, 2018; SchillerMerkens, 2024) in turning to the future. Furthermore, wellestablished topic areas such as entrepreneurship (Berglund and Dimov, 2023) and innovation (Spanjol et al., 2024) have been recast as future making. To some extent, the notion of future making even penetrates scholarly practices. Some management scholars are increasingly interested in making futures themselves in the world that they aim to understand and explain (e.g., Bridoux et al., 2024; Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2021, 2024; Muñoz and Dimov, 2023; Rindova and Martins, 2021; Sharma et al., 2022; Wickert, 2024). Given the centrality of the yettocome even in the public sphere (as evidenced by the quote above), we welcome the overall trend in management studies towards engaging with futures. However, we are concerned that the rapid growth of the conversation may dilute this line of inquiry by emptying the notion of future making, calling into question what future making is (not) and whether it is really a relevant phenomenon to be examined and theorized. If future making is everything, in the sense that it can even be used to reframe welltheorized, openended organizational phenomena, it is nothing, a vacuous debate that is doomed to perish. However, management scholarship on future making is too big to fail. Amidst a diagnosed ‘imaginary crisis’ according to which actors in organizations and society could resolve many contemporary largescale challenges by exploring alternative ways of making futures (Mulgan, 2022), the demand for scholarly insights into future making seems stronger than ever, not only from a theoretical but also practical perspective. In fact, as Hilbolling et al. (2022) highlighted, one of the greatest grand challenges in contemporary organizations and society is to 2428 M. Wenzel et al. © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. understand and implement ways of producing futures that mobilize and contribute to the coordination of collective efforts. The field of research on future making affords to deliver these insights. Yet, for the field to stay relevant, it needs more solid conceptual foundations so as to discern what counts as future making and what does not, and why it is relevant to examine and theorize this phenomenon, if at all. In response to these concerns, our Point is that there is value in understanding future making from a practice perspective, namely, as ‘a set of practices through which actors produce and enact the future’ (Wenzel et al., 2020, p. 1441). While fragments of such a perspective have latently appeared in previous management scholarship (e.g., Pettit et al., 2023; Thompson and Byrne, 2022), it has yet to be articulated and clarified in order to decipher its value. Building on the agenda of practice theory (e.g., Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki et al., 2001), the practice perspective that we articulate here draws attention to situated performances of manifold and interconnected streams of activity through which organizational actors bring futures into being. This perspective, we argue, reinforces scholarly attention on future making by doing justice to its importance in contemporary organizational life, while counteracting tendencies to empty future making through its proliferating but undertheorized use. We elaborate our argument in three steps. First, we reconstruct contemporary dynamics that constitute the openendedness of the yettocome as a timely, relevant, and important organizational phenomenon. In doing so, we explain why debates on future making inevitably embrace a plurality of futures, as well as ways of producing and enacting them. Second, by articulating and clarifying key dimensions of a practice perspective on future making, we elaborate on how this perspective is wellpositioned to do justice to this plurality. Specifically, as we argue, this perspective is empirically open to the manifold, interconnected, and partly subtle and mundane streams of activity through which futures come into being on the one side, while providing sufficient conceptual specificity to discern what counts as future making and what does not on the other. The contemporary manifestations of futures and future making, however, have yet to be more systematically substantiated to build, elaborate, and refine theoretical insights into future making. Hence, third, we use the elaborated dimensions of a practice perspective on future making to advance directions for future research. Taken together, our Point underscores the relevance of research on future making in and around organizations while providing conceptual clarity amidst a proliferating but emptying interest in it. That is, from a practice perspective, future making is neither everything nor nothing. It is not nothing because a practice perspective does justice to the contemporary prevalence and plurality of future making in organizational life. And it is not everything because the succinct practicebased conceptual apparatus provides sufficient conceptual clarity to extract specific ways of producing and enacting the yettocome in theory building and research on future making. THE TURN TO FUTURE MAKING IN MANAGEMENT STUDIES Prior work has argued that the future matters in and for contemporary organizations because actors experience it as a problematic, openended temporal category, one that no longer provides guidance for organizational activity (Wenzel et al., 2020). In this 2429FutureMaking © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. section, we justify the growth of management scholarship on future making as an important organizational phenomenon by reconstructing dynamics that constitute this openendedness, as well as the ensuing needs for ‘making’ futures in organizational life (see Figure 1). Specifically, as we argue, the continual emergence of interacting crises, largescale challenges, and intractable technologies undermines planning as a longestablished way of reaching closure about what is to come, thereby contributing to an experienced openendedness of the future. The erosion of planning renders the ‘making’ of the yettocome imperative for restoring the future’s capacity to serve as guide for organizational activity, leading organizational actors to explore, experiment with, and perform alternative ways of producing and enacting futures. Through the largely uncoordinated performance of varying ways in which organizational actors produce and enact the yettocome, a plurality of futures comes to life. This plurality, then, reproduces and intensifies experiences of the openendedness of the yettocome and, again, manifests in emerging and reemerging crises, largescale challenges, and intractable technologies. In this view, the problem with future making is not the Figure 1. The reproduction and intensification of the openendedness of the future as a prevalent feature of contemporary organizational life Continual emergence of interacting crises, large-scale challenges, and intractable technologies Plurality of ways in which organizational actors produce and enact futures Erosion of planning as a way of deproblematizing the future as a manageable category Plurality of futures Lived experience of the open-endedness of the future reproduces intensifies produces invokes opens up gives rise to manifests in 2430 M. Wenzel et al. © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. proliferating interest in a great variety of futures and ways of making them as such, but the need for a theoretical foundation that is empirically open enough to do justice to this plurality on the one side, and conceptual specificity to be selective about what counts as future making and what does not on the other – a tension that, as we will argue below, the practice perspective on futuremaking is well positioned to accommodate. Organizational Actors Devote Growing Attention to the Future Organizations and society have recently been hit by crises of various sorts (Muzio and Doh, 2020; Wenzel et al., 2021). Among others, these include public health crises, as well as financial and economic crises that have put entire nation states at risk; a migration crisis that has revealed the vulnerability of bureaucratic organizing; a climate crisis that, amidst extreme weather conditions, exhorts more sustainable ways of living and working; a war of aggression at the heart of Europe that few would have believed to be possible; and terrorist action and armed conflicts in the Middle East. Simultaneously, evermore salient largescale challenges such as hunger, poverty, and inequality call for muchneeded improvements or even their resolution (George et al., 2016; Voegtlin et al., 2022). In addition, as the digital transformation ventures into intractable technologies such as artificial intelligence, not just certain jobs, but work overall is at stake (Deranty et al., 2023; Dries et al., 2024). What does it mean to ‘work’ if parts of it are augmented or automated by artificial intelligence (Beane and Leonardi, 2022; Raisch and Krakowski, 2021)? While crises, largescale challenges, and artificial intelligence are somewhat difficult to compare, they do have at least one aspect in common: all of them draw organizational actors’ attention to the future as an openended temporal category. For example, financial and economic crises have raised questions about dominant economic systems, as well as alternatives that may replace them in the future. Likewise, attempts to tackle inequality as a largescale challenge question systemic distortions in organizations and society. This, then, raises questions about the regimes and orders that will eventually emerge once these distortions are overcome. In all of these instances, the past is not absent, in that the present, past, and future are always performed simultaneously in any one moment (Hernes, 2014, 2022). Yet, the past seems to enter in a specific way, namely, as breaking with it. Moving on as before, then, becomes just one among many possibilities, and one that is not innately attractive. As a result, the recent emergence of crises, growing attention to largescale challenges in organizations and society, as well as the ramifications of artificial intelligence and other intractable technologies have led organizational actors to engage with the yettocome. Yet, it is not the emergence of these challenges alone that draws organizational actors’ attention to the future. As Kumaraswamy et al. (2018) aptly wrote, ‘It is hard to deny that we are living in an age of continual disruptions’ (p. 1025, emphasis added). In this spirit, the recently popularized notion of ‘polycrisis’ aims to capture that contemporary crises such as armed conflicts as well as resource and energy shortages continually emerge and reemerge, overlap, interact, and reinforce each other, giving rise to evernew crises (Klyver and McMullen, 2025). Likewise, it has become all too evident 2431FutureMaking © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. that largescale challenges such as climate change and social inequality cannot be fully ‘resolved’ precisely because they are wicked and intractable, and that attempts to resolve them may give rise to further largescale challenges (HowardGrenville, 2021). Furthermore, it is the very openendedness of using artificial intelligence and other intractable technologies, such as platforms for coordinating gig work and the ensuing lack of clarity about associated future outcomes, that should raise organizational actors’ scepticism about embracing such technologies in an unchallenged way (Moser et al., 2024). The Erosion of Planning as a Dominant Way of Making Futures The continual emergence and reemergence of crises, largescale challenges, and intractable technologies turn the openendedness of the future from a philosophical idea into a problematic lived experience by actors in and around organizations. Specifically, from a processphilosophical perspective, the future, like other temporal categories, has always played a role at any point in human existence, but has it always mattered in the same way? Wenzel et al. (2020) argue that future making is actually a rather young phenomenon that emerged in modern times. In the late 18th century, humans began to form a will to shape the course of history by making the future. This required the possibility that – in contrast to premodern times – the future could and, in fact, should differ from the past. However, in modernity, when statistical measurement and projection were on the rise (e.g., Cabantous and Gond, 2015; Hacking, 1975), future making was dominated by planning – that is, the formulation and pursuit of goalbased projections – as a central means for efficiently synchronizing many, if not all parts of organizations and society, for example, from assembly work in production facilities to global supply chains. Hence, for the sake of efficiency, actors in and around organizations marched lockstep towards goalbased projections. This lockstep implied that futures described as goalbased projections performatively came into being, at least to a minimally satisfactory extent. For instance, in supply chains, business partners jointly oriented towards and tended to keep agreedupon delivery goals. As such, planning contributed to taming and, in a way, deproblematizing the openendedness of the future (Wenzel, 2022) by reaching closure about what is to come: if partners within supply chains agreed on shared goals and had a legacy of delivering on them, there was no reason to expect the future to differ from goalbased projections. Certainty about the realization of goalbased projections has, however, recently eroded in the light of crises, largescale challenges, and intractable technologies. The proclaimed ‘fall of planning’ (Mintzberg, 1994) implies that it is now risky to rely on goalbased projections alone because planning does not sufficiently allow for the unexpected. This riskiness is also salient in today’s global supply chains, disrupted time and time again by, among others, fleeting parameters in politically unstable regions. Continual disruptions like these, then, erode the sense of certainty about the future that planning might have conveyed. Consequently, futures are problematic in contemporary times. Their openendedness has become part of the ‘new normal’ (Bridoux et al., 2024) experience of actors in and around contemporary organizations, such 2432 M. Wenzel et al. © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. that the yettocome can no longer be taken for granted based on goalbased projections: the yettocome has to be made, and it has to be continually made anew. The Rise of Manifold Ways of Making Futures If organizing and organizations are responses to what may come (Luhmann, 1976), and if planning is not the predominant way of producing and enacting futures anymore, how, then, do actors in and around contemporary organizations make futures? Empirical evidence suggests that organizational actors explore, experiment with, and perform alternative ways of making the yettocome. Some of the trending alternatives are agile (Stjerne et al., 2024), foresight (Wenzel, 2022), lean tools and methods (Leatherbee and Katila, 2020), and approaches inspired by design thinking (Knight et al., 2020). All of these ways of making futures promise to provide alternatives to goalbased projections, while at least partly sustaining the technical and efficiencydriven character of planning. For example, agile’s detailed technical procedures around continually sharpened and revised shortterm targets enable the efficient coordination of work across organizational departments (Stjerne et al., 2024). These ways of making the yettocome are, however, just some of the overt ways in which organizational actors may produce and enact futures. There might also be more subtle and perhaps even mundane ways of making futures that are hidden behind the noise of trending alternatives (Wenzel, 2022), and which may not reproduce the technical and efficiencydriven character of planning in all cases. For example, counterfactual reasoning (Feduzi et al., 2022), heuristics (Atanasiu et al., 2025; Vuori et al., 2024; Wenzel and Stjerne, 2021), effectual approaches (Sarasvathy and Botha, 2022), and judgment (Tsoukas et al., 2024), as well as emotional–cognitive combinations of gut feel and analysis (Baldacchino et al., 2023) in daytoday sensemaking around the yettocome, the bodily crafting of prototypical material artefacts (Bell et al., 2021), the creation of atmospheres that ‘“set the tone” for future interactions’ (Knight et al., 2024, p. 25), narrating the yettocome (Myllykoski and Rantakari, 2022), and perhaps even spiritual sensations (Brandt and Vankilde, 2023; Ganzin et al., 2020; Maclean et al., 2024) are a few of the less overt alternatives to planning, many of which management scholars have not even begun to explore. Hence, nowadays, organizational actors produce and enact the yettocome in a plurality of rather overt or hidden ways, without necessarily building on the logic of goalbased projections. The Emergence of a Plurality of Futures Given the manifold ways in which organizational actors produce and enact the yettocome, futures emerge in the plural. Specifically, as a manifestation of ‘the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous’ (Koselleck, 1988, p. 51), the manifold ways of producing and enacting the yettocome are performed in vastly uncoordinated ways, thereby giving rise to multiple, partly even conflicting futures (Wenzel et al., 2020). For example, foresight’s structured approach to producing and enacting futures (Wenzel, 2022) contradicts observations of futurerelated spiritual encounters (Ganzin et al., 2020). As in agile, structured and spiritual ways of producing and enacting futures even may 2433FutureMaking © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. be enacted side by side (Stjerne et al., 2024). Yet, the futures that come to life through them may diverge significantly, ranging from smaller scale evolutions of ‘what is’ to eurekalike sensations about ‘what might be’. Which futures will, then, prevail? In other words, the plurality of ways of producing and enacting futures and, by implication, the plurality of futures produced through them further erodes actors’ sense of certainty about the yettocome, thus reproducing and perhaps even intensifying the openendedness of the future. This uncertainty, then, partly manifests again in emerging and reemerging crises, largescale challenges, and intractable technologies. Examinations of Future Making Are both Timely and Challenging This dynamic of reproducing and intensifying the openendedness of the future (see Figure 1) offers both an explanation and justification for management scholars’ recent ‘turn to the future’, that is, massive interest in the yettocome and ways of producing and enacting it. If this dynamic does indeed constitute the prevalence of futures in organizational life, engaging with the future is a central area of concern for organizational actors. If it is clear that recipes of the past no longer work, but it is unclear what will work in the future, what do organizational actors decide to do in the present, and how do they enact the yettocome? Amidst a profusion of futures produced through the manifold ways of making them, the yettocome does not provide guidance for organizational activity anymore, rendering the production and enactment of futures a central concern for organizational actors. Hence, insights into ways of producing and enacting futures are timely, important, and relevant. We therefore need a vibrant field of future making in management studies that systematically builds, elaborates, and refines relevant theoretical insights. These reconstructed dynamics also draw attention to the challenges involved in attempts to examine and theorize future making. On the one side, the plurality of futures and ways of producing and enacting them implies that management scholars interested in future making need an approach that is open enough to identify not only the overt ways of producing and enacting futures but also the less overt, emergent, subtle, and perhaps even mundane ones that might fall outside the scope of rigid conceptualizations. On the other side, if engaging with the yettocome is indeed a contemporary problem for organizational actors, it likely permeates many, if not all, parts of organizational life. Empirical openness may, then, create ambiguity about what counts as future making and what does not, thus exhorting greater conceptual specificity. Understandably so, the absence of an approach that enables management scholars to identify and theorize ways of producing and enacting futures more clearly has contributed to the proliferation of debates around future making and concerns about the dilution of these debates as described above. Next, we elaborate on how a practice perspective on future making is wellpositioned to accommodate the tension between empirical openness and conceptual specificity. As we argue, a practice perspective does justice to the plurality of futures and future making in contemporary organizational life by sharpening scholars’ empirical sensitivity to the manifold, interconnected, and partly subtle and mundane streams of activity through which futures come into being. At the same time, the key dimensions 2440 M. Wenzel et al. © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. commitment for collective action. A practice perspective not only displays sensitivity to these ways of producing and enacting futures but also enables scholars to identify and theorize them as ‘future making’. Examining and Theorizing Future Making from a Practice Perspective: Problem Solved? Despite its benefits, we note that the succinct conceptual apparatus provided by practice theory does not altogether eliminate the challenges of examining and theorizing future making. As ways of producing and enacting the yettocome may be enmeshed in webs of practices that are not overtly futurerelated (e.g., as part of meeting practices), identifying futuremaking practices requires that scholars effortfully sift through webs of practices by continually ‘zooming in’ and ‘zooming out’ (see Nicolini, 2009). Furthermore, against the background of practice theory (Schatzki, 2010), one may argue that each and every practice is a futuremaking one, given that all activities are performed before and after others, and given that all performances of practices in the present are interconnected with both pasts and futures (see Figure 2a). For example, performing a meeting practice reproduces an ageold history of organizing social interaction, while also having a bearing on the future of social interaction by bringing certain ways of meeting into being. In other words, if futuremaking practices are indeed a distinctive set of practices, scholars must also be able to discern them as such amidst the totality of observed practices. Yet, against the elaborated simultaneity of process and outcome in the performance of futuremaking practices, we argue that emerging and reemerging futures reveal futuremaking practices in distinctive ways (see Figure 2b). Specifically, the past is not absent within futuremaking practices. Rather, it shows up in these practices in certain ways, namely, by backgrounding or even breaking with the past so as to open up the possibility that the future can differ from it – as, for example, in the case of the climate crisis, in the light of which actors increasingly conclude that unsustainable business practices can no longer be performed. Alternatively, future making may build on the past as a source of inspiration (Hatch and Schultz, 2017; Ravasi et al., 2019) or strategic resource (Suddaby et al., 2010) for futures that differ from the present – as, for example, in family businesses that ‘innovat[e] through tradition’ (De Massis et al., 2016, p. 93; De Massis and Rondi, 2020). Either way, performances of futuremaking practices foreground the yettocome in that they contribute to the emergence and reemergence of futures. Among others, this equally holds true for planning as a quasirational attempt to redirect established courses of action by developing goals to be reached in the future, and spiritual ways of connecting with the yettocome by temporarily letting go of the past (Brandt and Vankilde, 2023). Hence, we argue that the foregrounding of the yettocome in and through futuremaking practices allows management scholars to discern them as a distinctive set of practices. The prevalence of the yettocome in futuremaking practices differs from the more general take on practices in which all situated streams of activity reproduce pasts and futures. It also opens and distinguishes futuremaking practices even more clearly from the rarely considered possibility that the performance of some practices makes no substantial contribution to the emergence of the yettocome, if at all (see 2441FutureMaking © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Figure 2c). Specifically, returning to the distinction between front stage and back stage, some futuremaking practices might be symbolically performed and yet overshadow other practices that make more substantial contributions to the emergence of futures. For example, actors in organizations that have adopted agile may make futures in shorter, iterative cycles while intendedly or unwittingly disguising these dynamics behind planning or foresight practices that make little, if any, difference to the Figure 2. The temporality of (a) practices, (b) futuremaking practices, and (c) nonfuture making Past Future (Re)Production of social life through practices in the present (a) Past Future (Re)Production of social life through practices in the present (b) Past Future (Re)Production of social life through practices in the present (c) 2442 M. Wenzel et al. © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. yettocome (see Stjerne et al., 2024; Wenzel, 2022). Likewise, when refugee entrepreneurs participate in linear new venture creation programs to prepare for a future entrepreneurial career, they may either simultaneously engage in nonlinear futuremaking practices to form their ‘entrepreneurial readiness’ (Fathallah et al., 2024), or amidst repeated setbacks within those linear programs, they come to see no future for their ventures and themselves (Harima and Plak, 2024; Kodeih et al., 2024). AVENUES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH ON FUTURE MAKING In light of the continual emergence of interacting crises, largescale challenges, and intractable technologies, the prevalence of futures and future making in contemporary organizational life renders past, present, and future inquiries into ways of producing and enacting the yettocome both timely, relevant, and important. The practice perspective elaborated in this Point, we argue, provides exciting opportunities for cumulative theorybuilding and research on future making. It offers the minimal structure needed to embrace the multifaceted ways in which organizational actors make futures in contemporary times, while providing four key dimensions – performativity, situationality, heterogeneity, and relationality – as a conceptual basis for discerning what counts as future making and what does not. Furthermore, the elaborated dimensions translate into four interesting areas for future research (see Table I). In each of these areas, research on ways of producing and enacting the yettocome is still at a nascent stage, providing multiple opportunities for the further building, extending, and refining of understandings and explanations of future making. As crises, largescale challenges, and intractable technologies are all drivers and manifestations of the prevalence of futures and future making in contemporary organizational life, we expect that deeper and more systematic insights into future making in these four areas will offer more nuanced guidance on tackling these challenges through ways of producing and enacting the yettocome. Examining the Performativity of FutureMaking Practices The performativity of futuremaking practices draws attention to the limited understanding of performativity in management studies more generally (Gond et al., 2016), as well as in research on topics such as crises, largescale challenges, and intractable technologies in particular (e.g., Marti and Gond, 2018; Wickert, 2024). The ‘bringing into being’ of futures through futuremaking practices is more often assumed than analysed and theorized. How exactly does that happen? Are there qualitative differences between the making of varying futures, for example, near versus distant (see Augustine et al., 2019)? Which futures are made and which ones aren’t? For example, how is it possible that idealized, utopian futures are partly enacted and do gain traction (Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2021) although accomplishing them seems impossible by definition? What implications does striving for such futures have for organizing and management, such as an organization’s identity or strategy? These questions, then, also focus particular attention on the power and politics of future making (Hungnes et al., 2024; see also Simpson et al., 2021). Whose futures are enacted, and whose 2443FutureMaking © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. futures are marginalized (see Skade et al., 2024)? Why are some futures produced and enacted, while others are backgrounded or do not come into being at all (see also Wickert, 2024)? Relatedly, although the world of ‘future work’ (Wenzel et al., 2023) around overt futuremaking practices such as agile and foresight has become a powerful billiondollar business, we know little about this world. How do selfproclaimed experts in the world of future work, such as consultants and ‘futurists’, create a sense of credibility around the futures that they advance so that others buy into them? And how do these actors accomplish positions of expertise relative to the yettocome as a temporal category that is openended and, thus, neither ‘predictable’ nor ‘manageable’ with certainty? Likewise, given that crises, largescale challenges, and intractable technologies are all futurerelated (e.g., Lantz et al., 2025; Moser et al., 2024; Wenzel et al., 2021), which futures come into being as these challenges are enacted, and how does that happen? Examining the Situationality of FutureMaking Practices The situationality of futuremaking practices draws attention to the subtle, daytoday, and partly even mundane sides of producing and enacting the yettocome, many of which we have not even begun to explore. What are the futuremaking practices that organizational actors perform in the shadows of trending futuremaking practices? If disruptions through crises, largescale challenges, and intractable technologies are an inseparable part of organizational life, and if these disruptions constitute the experienced openendedness of the future in contemporary organizational life, how does the momenttomoment performance of futuremaking practices absorb the uncertainties and complexities associated with such experiences so as to allow organizational actors to proceed and, thus, establish a sense of continuity amidst disruptions? How can situated performances of futuremaking practices, themselves, be drivers of disruption (Stjerne et al., 2023)? If flexible performances of a futuremaking practice in response to situations at hand may culminate in changes in that practice, how are futuremaking practices transformed and changed? And if such flexible performances imply that futures can continually be renegotiated, how do such renegotiations occur, and on what grounds? Conversely, are there limits to the extent to which futures can be renegotiated? Can futures even become ‘pathdependent’ (Sydow et al., 2009) in ways that they are continually reproduced anew from moment to moment? If so, how are futures protected and defended? Examining the Heterogeneity of FutureMaking Practices The heterogeneity of futuremaking practices directs attention to the plurality of these practices performed in broader webs of practices. How do these varying practices contribute to the production and enactment of futures? In which ways do they differ, if at all? Does the continual emergence of interacting crises, largescale challenges, and intractable technologies give rise to a new, distinctive web of futuremaking practices? Conversely, given that planning practices have colonized many, if not most parts of modern organizations and societies (Wenzel et al., 2020), one may also find goalbased projections as one persistent theme in examinations of future making –perhaps 2444 M. Wenzel et al. © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. even among futuremaking practices such as agile and foresight that proponents proclaim to be superior to planning (see Wenzel, 2022), as well as within established webs of practices for enacting crises and largescale challenges (Bundy et al., 2017). Hence, despite the heterogeneity of futuremaking practices, are there patterns across such practices that allow us to categorize and distinguish them more broadly as webs of varying futuremaking practices, for example, relative to the ways in which they treat futures? For example, organizational actors performing ‘precaution’ versus ‘preemption’ versus ‘preparedness’ (Anderson, 2010; Lantz et al., 2025) may find themselves with less versus more agency in future making. Relatedly, futuremaking practices may differ in their temporal direction, either as future–present, in which ‘the future is coming upon us’, or as present–future, in which ‘we are moving towards the future’ (Stjerne et al., 2022). Examining the Relationality of FutureMaking Practices Finally, the relationality of futuremaking practices foregrounds the interconnectedness of practices within broader webs of practices, as well as the intertwinement of discursive, bodily, and material parts of practices themselves – which, again, are more often presumed than examined and understood. How do futuremaking practices shape, and how are they shaped by other practices in and through their performances? Given the prevalence of crises, largescale challenges, and intractable technologies, are futuremaking practices associated with these challenges becoming the standard repertoire within all broader webs of practices performed in and around organizations? How so, or why not? How do organizational actors connect and disconnect varying futuremaking and other practices? Do some futuremaking practices mutually reinforce and amplify each other, while others compete and clash with each other? If so, why, and with what effects? How do social movements as carriers of varying interrelated futuremaking practices (see Reinecke, 2018) contribute to these dynamics? In turn, how do the discursive, bodily, and material parts of futuremaking practices implicate each other? How do they jointly contribute to making futures, how do they give rise to affects and emotions (Plotnikof and Pors, 2024) such as hopes and fears, and with what implications for organizing and management? How does the emergent use of technological artefacts such as artificial intelligence, algorithms, and big data (Glaser et al., 2024; Moser et al., 2024) participate in futuremaking practices? Do they reinvigorate hopes for predicting the future (see Lindebaum et al., 2024), or do some of them contribute to shifting from predictive to preventive ways of engaging with futures by helping actors avoid the emergence of undesirable futures? CONCLUSION In response to the proliferation of research on future making, which risks diluting this notion, the objective of our Point was to propose a practice perspective as a conceptual foundation for futuremaking research. We argued that a practicebased approach to future making does justice to contemporary dynamics around future making because it is open enough to account for a plurality of ways in which organizational actors make futures. At the same 2445FutureMaking © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. time, with its four key dimensions – performativity, situationality, heterogeneity, and relationality –, it is conceptually specific enough to discern what counts as future making and what does not, thus providing a solid foundation for cumulative, fruitful debates on future making in management studies. Taken together, we believe that our Point underscores and substantiates the importance of continuing scholarly interest in future making in and around organizations, while helping to counteract the dilution of this notion through a proliferating research interest that puts the field of research on future making at risk. We explain next how our Point extends the burgeoning field of future making in management studies in three ways. Embracing the Proliferating Interest in Future Making First, our Point substantiates the recent ‘turn to future making’ in management studies. That is, while this proliferation constitutes a threat to the field of future making, we argue that the contemporary plurality of futures and future making rightly has to translate into a plurality of futures and future making examined in management studies. Specifically, we do agree with Wright’s (2025) Counterpoint, which motivates a communicative and interactionist approach to futuremaking, among others, by arguing that ‘the future’ is not a new phenomenon per se, and that it is worth reviewing and seeking inspiration from prior work in that area. However, as we argue in this Point, the yettocome has recently turned into a key organizational challenge; and this challenge has encouraged organizational actors to transform, complement, or replace their ways of producing and enacting futures – with planning, including scenario planning, being no more than one among many ways in which organizational actors produce and enact the yettocome. These dynamics, then, rightly exhort management scholars to gain a deeper and more systematic understanding of the plurality of futures and future making in organizational life. Hence, the problem is not the proliferating interest in futuremaking per se. Rather, as we have argued in this Point, the field of future making needs a theoretical foundation that is open enough to embrace the contemporary plurality of futures and future making, while being conceptually specific enough to discern what counts as future making and what does not, without, however, relying on overly rigid and exclusive conceptualizations. Embracing a Practice Perspective on Future Making Second, in response to the elaborated need for a conceptual foundation, our Point advances a practice perspective on future making by articulating and clarifying its key dimensions. In doing so, we do not seek to argue that a practice perspective on future making is innately better than others, given that theoretical perspectives always foreground some aspects of examined phenomena while backgrounding others. In this regard, we also see value in the pragmatic approach developed in Comi et al.’s (2025) Counterpoint. By arguing that a practice perspective on future making is too broad, they make a case for understanding future making more specifically as actors’ engagement with the people, places, and materiality at hand. In a way, our approach somewhat subsumes theirs as one among many possible ways of producing and enacting futures – like 2446 M. Wenzel et al. © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. ‘craft work’ in which the ‘making’ of desirable futures is understood in a very literal sense, rather than, as in our Point, in the performative sense that the performance of any futuremaking practice brings certain futures into being. Our Point is that doing justice to the plurality of futures and future making practices enables us to realize the analytical utility of understanding ways of engaging with futures from a practice perspective. It is the very openness to a plurality of overt, subtle, and partly even mundane ways of producing and enacting futures, as well as the provision of sufficient conceptual specificity, that enables scholars to understand how organizational actors make futures. Methodological Implications Finally, our Point also adds methodological clarity to research on future making. Some management scholars are increasingly interested in prospective, prescriptive, and designled approaches to theorybuilding as futureoriented alternatives to pastbased description and explanation (e.g., Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2024; Hanisch, 2024; Muñoz and Dimov, 2023; Rindova and Martins, 2021; Sharma et al., 2022). These approaches allow for or even demand the explicit pursuit of normative or impactoriented interests in theorybuilding. Specifically, they aim to ensure that our research contributes to the emergence of desirable futures (Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2021) and that these futures are cocreated with and meaningful to those who are affected by them (Sharma et al., 2022). One may presume that attempts to unpack future making as an organizational phenomenon necessarily require futureoriented approaches to theorybuilding and research. However, the perspective that we advance in this article clarifies that this is not the case. From a practice perspective, the future is a phenomenon of the present in that it comes into being as organizational actors perform futuremaking practices. Therefore, the increasingly adopted and partly established approaches to understanding and explaining situated streams of activity – ethnographic inquiries, videobased methods, etc. – are well suited to addressing research questions around future making. Furthermore, though venerable, research on future making does not necessarily pursue prescriptive ambitions, as claimed in Wright’s (2025) Counterpoint. As we see it, the field of research on futuremaking is devoted to understanding ways through which organizational actors produce and enact the yettocome. As Comi et al.’s (2025) Counterpoint rightly highlights, these ways may also include practices through which undesirable or even harmful futures come into being. They criticize this broad scope, arguing that management scholars should rather focus on practices of making ‘better futures’. We, however, argue that insights into practices of making desirable or harmful futures are no less relevant for understanding contemporary organizational life and its partly adverse societal implications. This is because enabling some futures to emerge and working against others to come into being exhorts scholars to understand and explain how that happens (see Wickert, 2024). Practicebased inquiries are particularly useful in this regard. Yet, when deployed with due caution (Horner et al., 2024) and if one’s research interest is indeed normative or impactoriented, we do see merit in the use of futurefocused approaches to theorybuilding and research in the area of future making. In fact, centering the use of these approaches on questions around future making may not only 2447FutureMaking © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. produce futures that participants consider desirable, but also open up pathways for alternative ways of making futures – which, as Mulgan (2022) argued, are desperately needed to tackle many of the largescale challenges of our time. Therefore, we also encourage proponents of futurefocused approaches to theorybuilding and research to pay greater attention to future making as a timely, important, and relevant part of organizational life. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are indebted to Christopher Wickert for his thoughtful feedback and guidance at every stage of the review process. We also thank the authors and coauthors of the Counterpoint essays for our sharp but constructive and fruitful dialogue on future making. Finally, this dialogue would not have come to fruition without the EGOS 2023 subtheme on ‘Performing the Future Communicatively: How What Does Not Yet Exist Already Makes a Difference’ – provided by the SWG 06 on Communication, Performativity, and Organization – where the idea for this dialogue emerged. We thank the participants of this subtheme for inspiring discussions, and the SWG coordinators for generously providing a platform for debates around and related to futuremaking. 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