From defuturization to futurization and back again?

a system-theoretical perspective to analyse decision-making

VICTORIA von Groddeck

pp. 25-43

in: Hannes Kramer, Matthias Wenzel (eds), How organizations manage the future, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

This chapter aims to increase our understanding of the ways in which forms of organizing the future can be observed and interpreted. In a first step, it outlines a system-theoretical perspective that provides a starting point to analyse how organizations refer to time by making decisions. Organizing is conceptualized as decision-making and decisions as present operations that split past and future with the ambition to affect the future. In a second step, this theoretical perspective is illustrated by an analysis of the historic discourse on decision-making with the aim to shed light on the modes of how decision-making and the production of time are intertwined in organizations. Whereas at the beginning of the last century, the concentration of past information was important for decision-making, the following decades have been more future-oriented. Today, an extreme concentration on future potential along with a "feel" for the present becomes important.