Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Organizational scholars are increasingly directing their attention toward the future – not simply as a distant horizon, but as a temporal category filled with potential and actively shaped by present-day practices. This growing focus is evident in the expanding field of future-making studies (Wenzel et al., 2020), which calls for deeper exploration of the socio-material practices (Wenzel et al., 2025) and other ways (e.g., emancipatory inquiries, see Comi et al., 2025) through which organizational actors imagine, enact, and perform (desirable) futures.
 
At the same time, the growing integration of artificial intelligence and generally post-human technologies – “technologies that blur or displace features deemed characteristic of our common humanity” (Al-Amoudi, 2023, p. 1238) – is a crucial dimension of these futures. In response, organizational scholarship is increasingly engaging with questions about how these technologies mediate, disrupt, or transform organizational life and processes (Bailey et al., 2022; Scott & Orlikowski, 2025).
 
With this sub-theme, we seek to spark dialogue between these two vibrant streams of research – future-making and organizing with post-human technologies – within our EGOSian community, and to explore how their intersection might offer new insights into how futures are imagined, contested, and enacted in organizational settings and beyond.
 
Some promising (but certainly not all of the) themes that submissions may engage with include (1) the role of imagination and social imaginaries, in organizing the future (2); critical explorations of the intersection between imagination, future-making, and post-human technologies.
 

1. The role of imagination and social imaginaries in organizing the future

A growing body of work highlights the crucial role of imagination in future-making processes (Beckert, 2021; Feuls et al., 2025; Rindova & Martins, 2022, 2023, 2024; Thompson & Byrne, 2022), along with other forms of imaginative thinking such as “magical thinking”, intuition (Ganzin et al., 2020; Meziani & Cabantous, 2020) and more. Imaginative thinking allows actors to construct compelling visions of (desirable) future worlds, which in turn inform and guide present-day actions. Alongside this emphasis on imagination – often considered as an individual faculty – organizational scholars have also drawn attention to the performative power of broader social imaginaries (Augustine et al., 2019; Kuk & Giamporcaro, 2024) and socio-technical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009) in constructing the future. Yet, much remains to be explored about how these diverse forms of imaginative thought and practice – ranging from personal imagination to shared social and socio-technical imaginaries – play a performative role in actively shaping present strategies and actions through the creation of powerful visions of what the future could be. Hence, we welcome papers that shed light on how the future is imagined and how imagined futures are communicated and performed.
 
Beyond these questions about the role of “imagination” in future-making practices we are also interested in papers that explore the intersection between imagination and post-human technologies. While the development of such technologies influence what we imagine our future to be (e.g., our social imaginaries of a dystopian or utopian future), they may also reshape how we imagine our future. AI and post-human technologies are becoming co-actors in organizing, capable of augmenting, automating, and even collaborating in human work. For example, generative AI is emerging not just as a passive assistant but as a potential creative partner. Further, extent organizational research suggests that some these technologies are taking on roles in creative tasks once thought to be uniquely human (Amabile, 2020; Jia et al., 2024). In this context, our imaginative capacities may not remain untouched – they may be influenced, shaped, and even transformed, through the use of such technologies. Therefore, there is a need to investigate the impact of these technologies on a broader spectrum of human capabilities associated to creativity such as imagination, intuition, insights, and our capacity for mental time travel and future projection.
 

2.  Critical perspectives on imagination and post-human technologies

In exploring the intersection of imagination and post-human technologies, we are also inviting critical contributions that reflect on different imaginaries surrounding AI and post-human technologies as well as their performative consequences. Al Amoudi (2023), for example, calls for steering these technologies in more democratic and inclusive directions, warning of risks such as corporate domination, the erosion of social cohesion, the reinforcement of unequal imaginaries, and the narrowing of life-worlds shaped by an obsession with instrumental efficiency. Similarly, Vesa & Tienari (2022) critique the ideological assumptions underpinning intelligent agent systems. Dries et al. (2023) challenge the often-repeated claim that visions of AI-driven futures fall neatly into three categories – utopian, dystopian, or sceptical – revealing instead a broader and more complex set of competing narratives about the future of work, particularly as they unfold in media discourse.
 
These works (and others) lay the ground of a growing stream of critical research on the intersection of post-human technologies, future-making and imagination. We believe it is crucial to complement existing research on the impact of AI and post-human technologies on organizational processes, by producing research that critically reflects on how these technologies transform – or conversely, reinforce – dynamics of power and domination. While future-making is inherently a collective social practice, and by no means limited to elites, it is evident that, in the age of AI, certain economically and financially powerful actors – such as the so-called tech billionaires – are actively seeking to shape our collective future (and the way we imagine it), through dominant narratives, including those of transhumanism. In parallel, influential organizations are playing a central role not only in the development of these technologies, but also in shaping their governance.
 
Last but not least, as AI and post-human technologies begin to replicate – and in some case supplant – capabilities long considered uniquely human, there is also an urgent need to critically examine how these developments are reshaping our understanding of humanness. This concern is echoed for instance, in a recent call for papers in Human Relations titled “Rethinking Humanness: Human Relations in the Age of AI and Technological Transformation” (den Hond et al., 2025). In this context, fundamental questions about what it means to be human become ever more pressing. These post-human technologies, by mimicking human capabilities hold up a mirror that compels us to reflect deeply on the very nature of our humanity.
 
To facilitate broad discussions across multiple perspectives, we welcome both conceptual and empirical submissions, including a variety of approaches and methods. Some of the questions that the submissions may address include:

• Communicating and performing imagined futures: How do organizational actors imagine, communicate and make present possible futures? What practices, narratives, and discursive tactics enable certain futures to be communicatively performed? How do various types of socio-material, discursive, embodied, and other practices help actors perform their (desirable) futures?

• Imagined futures shaping the present: How do we imagine our future and our organizational life (e.g., leadership, types of management, forms of organization, etc.), particularly in a world with post-human technologies? How do imagined or anticipated futures “organize” our present (e.g., present-day decision-making, organizational life) and how do we organize to perform those futures? In what ways do "magical thinking" and other forms of imaginative thinking about the yet-to-come commit actors to courses of action in the present?

• Exploring the intersection between imagination and post-human technologies: How do AI and post-human technologies participate in, enable, or reshape the process of imagining the future? How are traditional “future-making” practices (e.g., scenario planning) evolving in response to the rise of these technologies? How do emerging technologies mediate or transform organizational imagination, our ability to travel through time, and action?

• Critical inquiries on a possible post-human future: What are the various (e.g., utopian and dystopian) narratives surrounding technological futures, and how do they influence present-day organizing? What social imaginaries, but also ideologies are driving the race to build artificial general intelligence?

• Critical exploration of powerful “future-makers” in the age of AI: Who are the people empowered to imagine our post-human future and to communicate it, especially in the media? For example, what are the dominant (social, socio-technical, political) imaginaries of a post-human world and who is proposing them? Are there marginal voices and narratives that run counter to these dominant imaginaries of a post-human future? Or are imaginings of the post-human world (and discourses on our future) the preserve of a small community (e.g., techno billionaires, transhumanist libertarians, etc.)? What are the performative effects of the dominant visions (imaginaries) of post-human worlds on organizations, governance of post-human technologies, and more broadly economies?

• Humanness in a post-human future: In what ways can post-human technologies – and how they are imagined and enacted – help us understand humanness?

References

• Al-Amoudi, I. (2023): “The politics of post-human technologies: Human enhancements, artificial intelligence and virtual reality.” Organization, 30 (6), 1238–1245.

• Amabile, T.M. (2020): “Creativity, artificial intelligence, and a world of surprises.” Academy of Management Discoveries, 6 (3), 351–354.

• Augustine, G., Soderstrom, S., Milner, D., & Weber, K. (2019): “Constructing a distant future: Imaginaries in geoengineering.” Academy of Management Journal, 62 (6), 1930–1960.

• Bailey, D.E., Faraj, S., Hinds, P.J., Leonardi, P.M., & von Krogh, G. (2022): “We are all theorists of technology now: A relational perspective on emerging technology and organizing.” Organization Science, 33 (1), 1–18.

• Beckert, J. (2021): “The Firm as an Engine of Imagination: Organizational prospection and the making of economic futures.” Organization Theory, 2 (2), https://doi.org/10.1177/26317877211005773.

• Comi, A., Mosca, L., & Whyte, J. (2025): “Future Making as Emancipatory Inquiry: A Value-Based Exploration of Desirable Futures.” Journal of Management Studies, First published online on March 29, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13227.

• den Hond, F., Einola, K., Khoreva, V., Malik, A., Moisander, J., & Ogbonnaya, C (2025): Human Relations Special Issue Call for Papers: “Rethinking humanness: Human relations in the age of AI and technological transformation”, https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/hum/CfP-SI-Humanness-HumRels-1743592165.pdf.

• Dries, N., Luyckx, J., & Rogiers, P. (2024): “Imagining the (distant) future of work.” Academy of Management Discoveries, 10 (3), 319–350.

• Feuls, M., Hernes, T., & Schultz, M. (2025): “Putting Distant Futures into Action: How Actors Sustain a Course of Action toward Distant-Future Goals through Path Enactment.” Academy of Management Journal, (68 (2), 297–325.

• Ganzin, M., Islam, G., & Suddaby, R. (2020): “Spirituality and Entrepreneurship: The Role of Magical Thinking in Future-Oriented Sensemaking.” Organization Studies, 41 (1), 77–102.

• Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.H. (2009): “Containing the atom: Sociotechnical imaginaries and nuclear power in the United States and South Korea.” Minerva, 47, 119–146.

• Jia, N., Luo, X., Fang, Z., & Liao, C. (2024): “When and how artificial intelligence augments employee creativity.” Academy of Management Journal, 67 (1), 5–32.

• Kuk, G., & Giamporcaro, S. (2024): “Prefigurative imaginaries: Giving the unbanked in Kenyan informal settlements the power to issue their own currency.” Human Relations, 77 (7), 965–1002.

• Meziani, N., & Cabantous, L. (2020): “Acting intuition into sense: How film crew make sense with embodied ways of knowing.” Journal of Management Studies, 57 (7), 1384–1419.

• Rindova, V.P., & Martins, L.L. (2022): “Futurescapes: Imagination and temporal reorganization in the design of strategic narratives.” Strategic Organization, 20 (1), 200–224.

• Rindova, V.P., & Martins, L.L. (2023): “Moral imagination, the collective desirable, and strategic purpose.” Strategy Science, 8 (2), 170–181.

• Rindova, V.P., & Martins, L.L. (2024): “The imagination advantage: Why and how strategists combine knowledge and imagination in developing theories.” Strategy Science, 9 (4), 499–514.

• Scott, S.V., & Orlikowski, W.J. (2025): “Exploring AI-in-the-making: Sociomaterial genealogies of AI performativity.” Information and Organization, 35 (1), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2025.100558.

• Thompson, N.A., & Byrne, O. (2022): “Imagining Futures: Theorizing the Practical Knowledge of Future-making.” Organization Studies, 43 (2), 247–268.

• Vesa, M., & Tienari, J. (2022): “Artificial Intelligence and rationalized unaccountability: Ideology of the elites?” Organization, 29 (6), 1133–1145.

• Wenzel, M. (2022): “Taking the future more seriously: From corporate foresight to ‘future-making’.” Academy of Management Perspectives, 36 (2), 845–850.

• Wenzel, M., Cabantous, L., & Koch, J. (2025): “Future Making: Towards a Practice Perspective.” Journal of Management Studies, first published online on March 20, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13222.

• Wenzel, M., Krämer, H., Koch, J., & Reckwitz, A. (2020): “Future and Organization Studies: On the rediscovery of a problematic temporal category in organizations.” Organization Studies, 41 (10), 1441–1455.

• Whyte, J., Comi, A., & Mosca, L. (2022): “Making futures that matter: Future making, online working and organizing remotely.” Organization Theory, 3 (1), https://doi.org/10.1177/26317877211069138.

• Wright, A. (2025): “Back to the Future? A Caution.” Journal of Management Studies, first published online on March 26, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13226.