Sub-Plenary 2-1

Giving Time to the Future: Rethinking Organizations as Thinking Places

Chairs/Organizers:
Giuseppe Scaratti, Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy
Maddalena Gambirasio, Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy
Armando Toscano, Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy

Panelists:
Silvia Ivaldi, Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy
Lone Hersted, Aalborg University, Denmark
Rafael Alcadipani, São Paulo School of Business Administration, Brazil
 

The symbolic dominance of the present, coupled with the growing individualization of responsibility, has weakened the processes through which societies once cultivated their capacity to imagine and project themselves toward a collective future. Kaës (2007) has highlighted the disintegration of metapsychic guarantors and their institutional correlates–the metasocial guarantors–those anthropological spaces in which shared symbolic elaborations and collective visions could emerge (Augé, 2018).

These dynamics unfold in a broader landscape in which our society, institutions, and organizations are themselves suffering the consequences of the eco-social, psychological, and democratic crises that characterize the present. Breaking with old dysfunctional structures and patterns requires new ways of thinking and new ways of organizing. It also calls for researchers, practitioners, and organizational actors to create the conditions for fruitful discussion on how more responsible, sustainable, and alternative forms of organizing might develop. This implies asking what methods and forms of inquiry–such as action research, participatory research, appreciative inquiry, and arts-based approaches–can already support these processes, and what still needs to be experimented with to nurture dialogue, idea development, collaborative action, and transformative practices in co-creative and generative ways.

Within this scenario, organizations emerge as crucial spaces where the possibility of collectively thinking the future can be recovered. Their role goes far beyond managing efficiency, productivity, or adaptation to present demands: they can be reimagined as thinking places, where reflexivity, imagination, and shared responsibility are actively cultivated. Thinking about the future also means finding the time and space to connect with one another through lived experience and through the body, recognizing the bodily and affective dimensions as integral to collective thought and to the capacity to generate shared visions. In this sense, the body becomes a site of memory, language, and encounter—an active ground where the future can begin to take shape through relationship and presence.

This symposium invites scholars to explore how organizations can reclaim the responsibility of thinking with people rather than for them. How can they transform individual and collective suffering into a generative form of effort–a fatigue oriented toward the construction of shared and meaningful goals? How can they resist the impulse to dissolve tensions and uncertainties in the name of productivity, and instead engage with them as sources of collective reflection and transformation? How can we nurture organizational imagination, enabling transformative interventions while shaping more sustainable conditions and experiences of work and organizational life?

“Giving time to the future,” therefore, calls for a renewed understanding of organizational life as a reflective, embodied, ethical, and imaginative process—one that restores the plural, relational, and temporal dimensions of organizing, and invites all of us to hold space, as facilitators, researchers, educators, and conversational partners, within multivoiced dialogues for change toward a more sustainable future.