Seeking, Shaping, Becoming: A Scoping Review of the Organizational Futures Literature
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Across management disciplines, there is growing recognition that understanding organizational futures-i.e., how organizations engage with futures-is integral to comprehending contemporary organizing and strategizing processes. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth scoping review aimed at organizing and synthesizing the rapidly expanding and fragmented literature on organizational futures across the strategy, entrepreneurship, innovation and organization studies disciplines over the past several decades. Our survey identifies several research streams in these areas that we classify into three main categories: future seeking, shaping and becoming. Furthermore, we identify three subcategories within each main group-anticipating, adapting and non-adapting under future seeking; enacting, designing and narrating within future shaping; and perpetuating, making/performing and wayfinding/improvising inside future becoming-and review the key scholarship associated with each of these. In so doing, we provide a comprehensive and coherent map intended to enable this recently flourishing and perennially vital domain of research to move forward systematically. We also envision our review as a platform that facilitates the development of more prospectively-oriented (i.e., forward-looking) theorizing. Finally, we highlight many frontiers to explore in future work, that include more closely examining the role played by imagination, power and affect in the emergence of organizational futures.
Source: Journal of Management
Language: English
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7154830248