PUTTING DISTANT FUTURES INTO ACTION: HOW ACTORS SUSTAIN A COURSE OF ACTION TOWARD DISTANT-FUTURE GOALS THROUGH PATH ENACTMENT

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Feuls, Miriam; Hernes, Tor; Schultz, Majken
• 署名单位: Copenhagen Business School; University of South-Eastern Norway
• 刊物名称: ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0001-4273
• DOI: 10.5465/amj.2022.0257
• 发表日期: 2025
• 页码: 297-325
• 关键词: GRAND CHALLENGES; CLIMATE-CHANGE; dependence; management; MARKETS; time

摘要

One of the most significant challenges of pursuing distant-future goals is sustaining a course of action toward a future with solutions that do not yet exist. We address this challenge in a real-time study of a sustainability workstream's collective activities to develop a sustainability strategy toward a net-zero carbon future. We observed how the participants in the core team engaged in an iterative three-phase process that we call path enactment. Path enactment evolved from (a) imagining how solutions could connect into paths to (b) integrating emerging paths into configurations, and then (c) stretching these new path configurations toward the company's distant-future goals. We identified three mechanisms, bracketing, narrating, and calculating, which combined in different ways throughout the phases to enable path enactment. Based on our findings, we develop a process model to explain how these paths become increasingly stretched toward distantfuture goals and embedded as a sustained course of action in a sustainability strategy. Our research significantly extends theories of organizational future making by combining imagination and realizability in our model, enriching our understanding of how organizations may put distant-future goals into action.