What Future for the Sociology of Futures? Visions,Concepts and Methods

Shared Framings: What Futures Are Not

The key unifying observation of the articles is a critique of what Adam describes as the dominant approach of interpreting the future based on ‘(past) acts or (present) anticipations’. The orthodoxy of this approach is exemplified by disciplines (such as Economics and Data Science) that seek to project what will come next based on analysis of the trajectories of social phenomena traced from the past, into the present and extending into the future. Modelling, foresight, scenarios and simulations are premised on such linear (temporal) causality of past–present–future. In this framing, ‘the future’ is understood as empty but discoverable, at least in part, through what Adam describes as the analysis of ‘completed acts and present events’. Once ‘discovered’, claims to the future can be, and are, used to mobilise decisions and actions in the present.

In their shared critique of this linear causality, the articles share a recognition that to engage with futures is to consider temporalities. Adam addresses temporalities directly. Her sharp critique (and rejection) of the linear temporal reasoning of past–present–futures, in which futures are presented as knowable only insofar as facts can be extracted from the present and its past, leads her to argue that futures must be analysed as ‘lived’ temporal processes. Futures are knowable through temporal processes that are: generative (e.g. of birth, growth, decay, death); context specific (in events and moments); related to inorganic, organic and human social realities; interactive across networks and systems; and both intangible and material. Presented this way, futures are irreducibly temporal processes that are always in the making but cannot be reduced to a linear logic. Collapsing the logic of linear temporal reasoning is also worked through in other contributions. Adkins et al. argue that the asset economy operates as a time machine that folds together futures and presents. This was illustrated by huge government financial interventions during the Covid pandemic that were necessary to shore up the asset economy’s logic of ‘payments in the present’ to provide the liquidity necessary to maintain asset trajectories. It is these asset trajectories that underpin multiple futures. Here, presents do not simply lead to futures; intervention in futures is happening in the present. Similarly, in their account of Covid disruptions in everyday lives, Coleman and Lyon also demonstrate how the relationship between futures and presents are paused, suspended and recalibrated in ways that invert the logic that futures simply follow on from presents.

From this unevenly articulated but shared starting point, several implications for further enquiry emerge across the contributions. Bazzani explores how the linear logic of past–present–futures is embedded in ‘backward reasoning’, through which the legacy of past theories together with analysis of path dependencies and institutional trajectories dominate. He argues that this is demonstrated in perennial debates around structure and agency and plays out discursively through the notion of ‘progress across generations’. He gives three examples: (a) debates about the acceleration of life trajectories when compared with past generations; (b) dominant framings of intergenerational transmission of inequalities; (c) concepts such as practical consciousness and habitus in which dispositions are accumulated over generations and shape propensities to act in any given (future) situation. For Bazzani, these are cases of backward reasoning because they are each based on an analytical logic of comparing backwards. Relatedly, Tutton explores the consequences when this backward reasoning is disrupted, when the past can no longer be relied on as a source of knowledge or ‘feel for’ the future. Tutton discusses when futures become uncertain, catastrophic or beyond control because the past has created fundamental crises (as with the threat of nuclear war or climate change) that render the future meaningless. Likewise, Ehlers’s reflections on racial biofutures critique Sociological backward reasoning on the grounds that it produces a recursive trap. Looking backwards reveals familiar patterns that become predictable futures in which inequalities are reproduced. She argues that a dominant focus on past acts and present events essentially just repeats the same analytical frames that Sociology can name (as patterns and repetitions) and critique, but which nevertheless remains locked into a recursive past–present–future logic.

This critique of linear temporal reasoning is not a call to dismiss Sociology’s past insights nor engagements with past social phenomena. As the Crow/Scott interview and Strangleman each show, past Sociological enquiries and historical Sociology are significant for situating understandings of futures within the present. Scott reminds us that this is especially important to avoid falling into the trap of claiming that heightened interest in the subject of futures proclaims new directions for Sociology, while implying that past Sociologies are old and no longer relevant. To provide an example, the critique that linear temporal reasoning results in forms of presentism, in which both pasts and futures are considered only with respect to the perspectives, debates and questions of the present is not new. As Scott reminds us, Norbert Elias’s figurational Sociology emerged from his critique of post-war Sociology’s failure to locate the present in its historical context. Adam too is concerned with the presentism of contemporary Sociology, and where futures are considered, it is from the standpoint of, and as an extension from, specific presents. While Elias grounded his response in pasts and Adam sets out an agenda for multiplicities of futures, both do so from a critique of Sociological tendencies to interpret social phenomena only through the lens of the present. Scott also raises the question as to how Sociology has engaged with ideas about futures (whether described as such or not) in the past. This point is taken up by Strangleman in his contribution, who offers at least one fascinating example of just this through his reflections on the influential work of Ray Pahl. In Divisions of Labour, Pahl (1984) asked school children to imagine their histories from the standpoint of 40–50 years in their futures. Futures have been engaged with in past Sociology and, for Strangleman, historical enquiry offers resources that can open up engagements with futures in ways that do not rely singularly on a past–present–future temporal reasoning.

In short, these articles present a rich and distinctively Sociological take on futures, transcending the previous disciplinary settlement that bracketed the future out of Sociology. This provides a suite of loosely allied ways to re-frame the future for Sociology.

Different ‘Futures’

Despite a high degree of consensus among the contributions regarding what futures are not, when it comes to what futures are – or, more precisely, what types of futures are in scope – the articles are diverse. Four forms of future emerge across the papers: concrete; abstract; latent; lost. We present these as conceptually distinct, but each article draws futures out from across these four forms.

Concrete futures are framed as what could or ought to be, and represent what Greenwood describes as a ‘pull to action’ by sketching out coherent imagined and desirable futures towards which actions in the present can be directed. In Greenwood’s contribution, these concrete futures are represented in a re-imagining of the Postal Work Society, together with a completely reconfigured system of communications to include the Post Office Phone (POP) and the national sealing of letter boxes (known as ‘Block the Knock’). Masquelier sets out an intersectional ‘vision of emancipation’ from sexual divisions of labour through a call to focusing on care as labour, practice, collective life and dialogical coordination. The contribution from Adkins et al. presents a less utopian representation of concrete futures in their account of the temporal logic of the asset economy, which collapses futures into the present such that the political economy of asset capitalism simultaneously represents the concrete critical realities of tomorrow and of today. A very different example is the article by Pors, which explores how young women work with the futures presented to them through individualised neo-liberal futures of personal educational and professional success, and the collective uncertainties of climate change faced by their generation. Bazzani’s contribution considers the ways in which (actual) futures are (and can be) projected through expectations, imaginaries and narratives, and what that means for shaping actions in everyday life. Perhaps the most dramatic set of examples of this is revealed in the Mass Observation Directives analysed by Coleman and Lyon, where they find that one mode of everyday engagements with futures, which they describe as ‘reset’, was resolution to concrete actual futures of divorce, selling the family home and job resignation.

Abstract futures, by contrast, set out speculative imaginaries that highlight core principles or conditions necessary for desirable futures, and do so as a means of critically engaging with the present. In these cases, rather than seek to present a coherent representation of possible futures, focus falls instead on fundamental principles that need to be addressed both in the present and for the future. Ending precarity (Greenwood), resisting neo-liberal discourses of individualism (Pors) and empowered communities (Ehlers) are just some of the principles evoked through accounts of abstract futures across the contributions. As such, abstract futures are not a ‘pull to action’ and more a window through which to critically engage with the conditions of contemporary societies. Greenwood’s account of the re-imagined Post Office seeks both to articulate a concrete alternative to represent what ought to be, while also employing that imagined future as a means of critiquing institutional structures of power and inequality in the present. Similarly, Masquelier employs the concrete representations of ‘care futures’ to critique dominant framings of bounded individuality by employing intersectionality to set out abstract futures that embrace ‘radical interrelatedness’. In addition, Ehlers identifies abstract futures in the conditions of care and solidarity found in community initiatives that re-prioritise or challenge the status quo of the present. Another sense in which futures are abstract is found in Tutton’s account of futurelessness, which he argues constitutes a regime of feeling in which the futures that individuals desire is foreclosed, where futures are beyond one’s control, and where the promissory faith invested in those agencies that can affect the future has vanished.

Latent futures, most closely associated with the work of Adam and Groves (2007) and clarified in Adam’s contribution to this Special Issue, refers to futures that are in the making but are yet to materialise. Latent futures draw attention to processes of future-making that are enacted in everyday and institutional practices. For Ehlers, the recursive trap of linear causality found in the logic of past–present–future is an example of how futures are being reproduced in the present. Her analysis of community-based responses in the context of a bio-security threat shows how marginalised groups were able to challenge this recursivity through solidarity practices in pandemic planning. These practices crafted alternative realities in the present and expose latent futures – what she terms ‘futurity’ or the ‘the making all around us’ – through the potential of prefigurative politics. Adkins et al.’s contribution presents the asset economy as an example of latent futures in that paying mortgages or securing assets in the present is done on the basis that assets appreciate value to be realised at some future date. The asset economy is therefore always full of speculations, and while these speculations are ‘not yet’ known they are shaping the present, as demonstrated by Covid responses in housing markets, and will materialise in some form at a time in the future. Pors also evokes latent futures in her account of the ‘future-making work’ that young women do in relation to discourses and practices that close down (neo-liberalism) and open up (climate threats) their futures. Acutely aware that futures are being made in the present, these young women navigate the neo-liberal futures that they are expected to materialise through their studies, while also engaging in collective climate concerns as a form of ‘hopeful waiting’ that other more ‘open’ (or non-prescribed) futures can materialise. A further sense of latent futures is reflected in Johanne’s interview with Prudence Carter. In the context of debates regarding public and policy Sociology, Carter argues that one of the problems with Sociological imaginations of futures is that they depend on conditions that have not yet transpired. To address latent futures Sociological enquiry needs to make explicit the processes through which futures, and claims to the future, are made. She highlights the potential of comparative studies to reveal the multiple processes through which latent futures are being made and claimed. This emphasis on revealing latent future processes is discussed by Adam, while Crow/Scott point to the importance of engaging with past Sociological theories as a means of contextualising past latent futures.

The final form of futures that surface across the contributions are lost futures, in which the promise, hope or speculations that come with the future as an empty void to be filled with possibilities is, in some way, lost. Lost futures are often presented as the failure of modernity and its promise that the lives of each generation will continuously be improved (Bazzani). Strangleman’s contribution looks to historical Sociology to show how the empty futures of post-war generations, futures filled with promised prosperity and equity for the working classes, were lost to processes of deindustrialisation. In this respect, just as nostalgia and its appeal to representations of stable and unproblematic pasts tell us more about anxieties in the present, past futures that did not materialise are instructive about the processes through which we can engage with futures in the present. As Adam reminds us in her contribution, latent futures are ‘not yet’ materialised and, as such, the failure to realise past latent futures is as problematic as the actual futures that emerge. She continues that while we can see the lost futures that Strangleman identifies in ‘past futures’, we must also fully recognise the ‘future presents’ of our successors as it is they who will experience our latent futures. However, it is ‘present futures’ – the futures that we imagine, anticipate, contest and seek to influence today – that most commonly occupy the gaze of social researchers. A further way in which contributions consider futures as in some way lost is in the sense that the ‘not yet’ is foreclosed, unimaginable or catastrophic, as argued in Tutton’s contribution where futures are lost in the present. This idea is further reflected in Coleman and Lyon’s study of everyday engagements with futures during Covid lockdowns in the UK. They reveal senses that everyday futures were lost (fissure) as Covid represented a break between the present and future rendering the latter unimaginable. For others, futures were suspended (put on standby), still imaginable but difficult to enact.

Cross-cutting these four different futures, each article takes a different ‘entry point’ for their analysis. Some contributions explicitly focus on societal futures, (Greenwood, Masquelier, Adkins et al. and Strangleman), in which social institutions and social relations are the object of analysis and mobilised through a discussion of concrete, abstract, latent and lost futures. Others, particularly those that draw on qualitative data, consider personal futures as experienced and narrated by respondents of their studies (Coleman and Lyon, Pors). In these studies, futures were mobilised in the context of everyday lives and described in ‘experiential’ terms. Coleman and Lyon’s article, for example, reveals the different temporal frames through which futures are encountered in everyday lives, as: (a) ‘protention’, which reflects moment-by-moment anticipations; (b) trajectory, which refers to forms of projectivity (see also Mische, 2009); and (c) temporal landscapes that provide a ‘feel for the future’ that informs actions and directions. Conceptualising futures as personal was not, however, constrained to empirical studies. Bazzani’s contribution surveys a wide range of theories and studies that consider how expectations, imaginations and narratives of futures relate to everyday actions.

Bringing these different entry points together, contributions from Ehlers, Tutton and Adam traverse societal and personal futures. Ehlers, for example, explores how community responses during Covid created everyday practices of solidarity and care that interrupted the recursive logic of anti-blackness and crafted alternative realities through which to engage with possible societal futures. Tutton’s account of futurelessness moves between and across the absence of hope, or fear of catastrophe, in societal futures, and the affective modes or regimes of feeling that mean some groups or individuals experience their futures as foreclosed. And, in her short contribution, Adam eschews the dichotomy of societal and personal through her emphasis on futures as lived processes, in which societal and personal futures are always folded or, more precisely in the process of folding, together.

Together, these contributions present a rich and distinctively Sociological take on futures, transcending the previous disciplinary settlement that bracketed the future out of Sociology. They offer a critical mass of Sociological endeavour directed towards questions about ‘the future’ and the part that Sociology will play in making futures. The collection highlights the value of looking across the discipline, both in surfacing a broad re-theorisation of temporality that transcends previous reservations about prediction, empirical inaccessibility and immateriality, and in opening up a diverse range of Sociological inquiries into futures. Even in their diversity these inquiries harness distinctive disciplinary themes, particularly power and inequality, and structure and agency, while drawing in newer concerns for materiality and everyday practices. The contributions demonstrate a strong coherent critique of what futures are not. When it comes to what futures are, however, the conceptual and empirical landscape is less clear. The four forms of ‘futures’ and analytical differences between and across societal and personal futures offer some glimpses into this emergent landscape. In our concluding section we draw from both those earlier interventions and our analysis of the contributions to this Special Issue to reflect on the three core points/contentions outlined in the opening section: that Sociology has significant theoretical and methodological resources, which are yet to be fully mobilised for futures research, and that the critical challenge is how a more expansive sociology might engage with future-making practices.

Building Sociological Resources

Turning first to the development of Sociological theory, methods and empirical resources for futures research. The contributions here demonstrate a conceptual re-framing of pasts, presents and futures that stands in distinction to the more usual framing of ‘social change’ that is so core to Sociology. Attention to social change means examining changes and continuities between past and present. The future is either bracketed off as unknowable or limited to hypotheses about what might change into the future. In contrast, attention to futures shifts the focus from what has and might change over time, to consideration of how multiple futures are claimed, acted on and made, and how this might be done differently through examination of alternative and imaginative futures. As Adam argues, this demands a theoretical re-framing of the future, away from ‘what comes next’ (see also Adam, 2004; Adam and Groves, 2007). There are three key points here. First, there is no ‘future’ – only multiple potential futures. A future orientation does not depend on claims to predictability, which are in any case very limited, but on uncertainty and emergence (Adam and Groves, 2007). Second, the future is ‘already here’, with imaginaries and claims about different futures acted on through investments, policies and everyday decisions that make some futures more likely and others less so. Third, it follows from this that the future is not empty, open to any kind of hopes or possibilities but already populated by latent materialities. We need only think of carbon emissions from the 18th century onwards and the implications that these have for both our presents and futures. To be sure, these implications are not fixed but scope a range of ‘present futures’. Similarly, Afrofuturist approaches demand that we re-frame the past, not as fixed, from which present and future trajectories can be mapped but as live and present (Nelson, 2002). Indeed, Sriprakash et al. (2020) argue that linear narratives of a fixed past, that can be worked on in the present towards a planned future will only ever embed limited perspectives grounded in historical privilege, the very ‘chronopolitics’ of this approach discounting marginalised and alternative pasts that could provide the basis for reparative futures. Finally, taking the previous points into account, we are not recipients of ‘the future’ but protagonists (Adam and Groves, 2007) in opening up some futures and closing down others (Stirling, 2008).

Similarly, the contributions point to the need to build the repertoire of Sociological methods for futures research. How the future is known matters, with determinist, positivist and solutionist epistemologies limiting what is (and isn’t) on the table as well as who can (and can’t) claim futures (Pink, 2022; Wilkie et al., 2017). Moving away from these methods creates the means to champion other ways of knowing futures, empowering other voices beyond the usual suspects in futures debate and practice and – in turn – claiming alternative futures. While well-known Sociological methods, especially qualitative and participatory methodologies, will remain central here, the contributions in this Special Issue make the case for methods hitherto less familiar in Sociology, in particular speculative, slow, sensory and historical methods. Beyond this, the wider upsurge of interest in futures across the Humanities and Social Sciences (New Media and Society, 2021; Qualitative Inquiry, 2022; also many articles in the journal Futures) draws in a wider range of speculative methods (Marrero-Guillamon, 2022; Wilkie et al., 2017), Design Anthropology (Pink, 2016, 2022), creative writing (Lupton and Watson, 2022), participatory exhibition curation (Markham, 2021) and comic strips (Dahlgren et al., 2022) (for example). Detailed claims are made in each case, but the overall drive is to disrupt current practices and power relations of future-claiming and making to include marginalised voices, asking unlikely questions and visiting improbable futures (Wilkie et al., 2017).

Lastly, this Special Issue invites new lines of empirical inquiry that will provide the substantive resources to grow the Sociology of the future. The current articles are, inevitably, the tip of an iceberg. Not least, questions about futures reach across the breadth and depth of Sociological inquiry, including and beyond the sub-disciplines and key questions pursued in this Special Issue. However, if we make ‘futures’ the primary object of enquiry – rather than an area of Sociology about which we might explore futures – there are some particularly pressing empirical questions to be addressed about how futures are ‘done’. What methods and practices are used to claim futures across different domains of social life? Which of these are powerful in shaping future-making practices (or not?), and why? How are power relations and inequalities embedded in future-claiming and making, and how might this be disrupted? How are these future-making claims materialised, for example in technologies, infrastructures, the built environment but also less tangible materialities such as plastics, carbon and data? Afterall, and as Selin (2008) reminds us, the material debris of past futures is all around us. This begs the question of how futures are materialised in the present, and our ‘response-ability’ (Haraway, 2016, also Adam and Groves, 2007) towards these futures-in-the-making.

Making Futures

So far, we have focused on growing Sociology’s’ capacities for futures research, building on existing disciplinary strengths, combined with new theoretical, methodological and empirical approaches. Our final question is if and how this capacity can be effectively harnessed for future-making practice. To be sure, many Sociologists are keen for their research to shape the world. This is particularly visible in participatory and direct-action research, and through direct collaboration with policy makers. It is also observable in a variety of less direct means through which we hope our evidence and analysis will change understandings and practices beyond the Academy (Burawoy, 2005). Long may this last. However, and in distinction, we want to argue that Sociology needs to explicitly recognise its capacity to engage directly in future-making practice. By future-making practice we mean, the ‘doings and sayings’ (Schatzki, 2002: 73) of a diverse range of actants, that actively engage in claiming what futures might and should be, and in materialising these claims.

This calls for direct engagement in the lived processes that make some futures more or less likely. This inevitably pushes us beyond Sociology – as a discipline – to engage Sociology in complex and diverse assemblages of future-making practice. In part, this a question of engagement with other Social Science disciplines, most obviously those allied to Sociology. For example, in Education recent attention to ‘anticipatory capacity’ in schools seeks to empower the future-making activities of younger generations (Amsler and Facer, 2017). Similarly, recent focus on systems reconfiguration within Innovation Studies directly engages with future-making practices for sustainability (Geels et al., 2015; Laakso et al., 2021).

Beyond this, though, we should engage with less Sociological disciplines including Economics and Data Science, for example, but also Engineering, the climate sciences among others. These disciplines are powerful actors in future-making, in part because of their tendency to position the future as predictable and deterministic, which has a reassuring appeal for many and is exactly the kind of positioning that we seek to disrupt. In addition, however, the expertise and capabilities of these disciplines are central to making futures of any kind (whatever epistemological or methodological position underpins this). And, at the same time, this expertise and capabilities are limited by the absence of sociological analysis, which is essential if we are to take future-making as a serious endeavour that transcends disciplinary power struggles. In short, our task is to explore where sociological analysis can make constructive challenges to future-making routines, disrupt dominant narratives and collaborate in building new ways of thinking about and doing futures. As Haraway (2016: 3) argues, with sustainable futures in mind, the circumstances call on us to move beyond both ‘comic faith in technofixes’ and the fatalism of critique where ‘it’s too late and there’s no sense in trying to make anything better’ (2016: 3), to focus on ‘the more serious and lively task’ (2016: 3) of making the future.

This also means engagement beyond the academy, with a wide variety of actors. This includes powerful actors such as government and business, whose future-making practices have wide-reaching and significant consequences. It also includes think-tanks and non-governmental organisations that exist to offer futures expertise (e.g. International School of Futures, UNESCO Futures Literacy, Nesta), thereby shaping how futures are conceptualised and incorporated into future-making practice. Critically, it also includes those such as voluntary and community organisations, and others, who are currently marginalised or absent but should be included if we are to have any hope of challenging the current power relations and inequalities in current future-making practices.

In sum, our overall argument is that without Sociology, its distinctive theoretical, methodological and empirical resources and sociology – engaged across and open to iteration with other future-making actors – futures research and practice are inherently limited. The resources that Sociology brings to the table offer sophisticated purchase on temporality, complexity, inequality, power and more. These provide ways to transcend simplistic predictive and one-dimensional approaches to the future, ways that can enable far more meaningful, effective and response-able ways of working with futures that can never be fully known or controlled (Adam and Groves, 2007). Conversely, without futures both Sociology and sociology are limited, allowing others (including other disciplines, but also journalists, technology leaders, science fiction writers and so on) to claim authority. In a world where it is all too clear that future-claiming exerts powerful influence on future-making, this is a professional responsibility but may also be key to the future of Sociology.