Crystal balls and calendars: A structural analysis of projected futures

Methods

When they investigate the future, sociologists are confronted by unique challenges—both theoretically and empirically. Mische (2014) identifies three ways researchers can make future projections visible. We use two of these methods—a survey and qualitative analysis of resulting narratives—to reveal how individuals imagine the future.

Given the questions that prompt this study, it was necessary to obtain firsthand accounts of projected futures. The first author collected the data for this project from a combination of open-ended online surveys and semi-structured interviews during May of 2012. Typically, the interviews provided richer data than did the surveys, but the latter enabled us to collect empirical material from a wider variety of people and substantiated the more elaborate data from the interviews. Furthermore, as Mische (2014) explains, the nature of the respective formats themselves allowed us to collect data on divergent aspects of projected futures. Surveys are particularly useful for quick, automatic responses that capture deep-seated, or unconscious, beliefs about the future; the in-person interview format afforded more time for self-reflective, intentional elaborations. In short, our methods balanced depth through interviews with breadth through surveys.

Our respondents completed 98 questionnaires and 28 interviews. All of the participants were either members of the faculty or students at a small college in North Carolina. The sample is fairly homogenous with respect to racial and ethnic background; since the college draws many non-traditional students, the sample provides some variation across education, occupation, and age. The total sample includes 39 males and 87 females, of which 99 are White, 12 Black, 7 Asian, 4 Other, and 3 Latino. Their ages range from 18 to 64. Of the respondents, 78 were students and 48 were members of the faculty.

All student participants were recruited from several sections of Introduction to Sociology. Participation in the study was completely voluntary, but student respondents were offered an incentive of extra credit. The faculty participants responded to an email sent to a listserv requesting volunteers to help with this research project. Faculty and students had the option of completing the online survey or participating in an interview. The interviews were completed over the course of two weeks at scheduled times and, on average, lasted from 20 to 30 minutes.

The same questions were used for the online surveys and the interviews. We asked respondents to provide information concerning their age, gender, race, education, employment status, and occupation, but the balance of our questions focused on aspects of the future. After the demographic items, we asked respondents to tell us how often they think about the future using the following scale: almost never, sometimes, regularly, frequently, and constantly. Then we asked a series of open-ended questions regarding the future in general:

When you think about the future, what things do you think about most?

When you think about the future, do certain images come to mind? If so, please describe them.

As you think about the things that will happen in the future, when do you see them happening?

We used a grounded theory approach for the analysis of our data by searching for themes and variations in the resulting narratives (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). There were two main theoretical commitments that guided our analysis. The first was a desire to “examine social process as subjects experience it from within,” which, as Katz (1988: 135) puts it, “promotes the discovery of internal variation for external validity.” Thus, we wanted to let the respondents speak for themselves as much as possible. The second commitment was to inductive theory construction where data collection and data analysis are viewed as interrelated processes (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Using an open coding method, we analyzed the data through repeated comparisons of similarities and differences (Strauss and Corbin, 1994). Initial readings produced provisional themes and concepts that were anchored in the data. These concepts later “earned their way into the theory” by repeated representation in the data and were coded as theoretical categories (Strauss and Corbin, 1994).

Findings

We quickly noticed that respondents described segments of the future in two qualitatively divergent ways. Almost without exception, their depictions of the immediate future were bland, routine, and devoid of enthusiasm, but they portrayed the intermediate future in colorful, detailed, and hopeful terms. This, despite the fact that the intermediate future is intrinsically less certain. As we continued coding, it was apparent that the overwhelming majority of our data fit into one of these two broad themes, which we represent with the terms crystal balls and calendars.

We use crystal balls and calendars as categories to describe our data because these cultural symbols represent distinct ways to conceive of time. A crystal ball depicts the future as a specific, yet foggy, visualization of what is to come, while a calendar delineates the future as a sequence of ordinary tasks or events. A crystal ball reveals images of the obscure and uncertain future, whereas a calendar is used for the scheduling of future activities that are more immediate and predictable. In short, crystal balls and calendars symbolize the dominant ways that individuals in this study projected their lives into the future.

Discussion

Although we can present only a small sample of the data here, participants responded to the interview questions with overwhelming uniformity. No less than 90 percent of the responses fit nicely into the inductive categories described above. Our findings show that the future is not an undifferentiated segment of time. In accord with Mische’s (2009: 699) suggestion for scholars to explore future “reach,” we have parsed the future into four segments: the immediate future (i.e., tomorrow or next week), the near future (i.e., next month or next year), the intermediate future (i.e., five to ten years from now), and the distant future (i.e., more than ten years from now). Clearly, our respondents allocate more cognitive and emotional resources to the intermediate future than they do to the immediate or near future, and they pay almost no attention at all to the distant future. From a practical standpoint, of course, it would be presumptuous to think that one knows (or can even imagine) what the distant future will be like in a quickly changing society. The distant future is a temporal version of terra incognita. What is more, our data suggest that, broadly speaking, there are two different cognitive structures when individuals make future projections that resemble the nature of crystal balls and calendars. In other words, there is the repetitious future (which consists of the immediate future and much of the near future) and the novel future (which consists primarily of the intermediate future).

We are not alone in categorizing time into dichotomous temporal landscapes. Durkheim ([1915] 1965) was the first to conceptualize all of social time into the categories of the sacred and profane. He paved the way for other sociologists like Henri Hubert, Edmund Leach and later, Pitirim Sorkin, and Eviatar Zerubavel who similarly characterized social life in terms of collective temporal rhythms that are distinguished by contrasting elements (Zerubavel, 1981). Findings from this study suggest these same cultural patterns also shape the ways individuals project into the future. The dichotomous nature of time—continuity and discontinuity—that Zerubavel and others describe in calendar and “free” time, shows up continuously in the ways individuals imagine their future as well.

Zerubavel (1985: 106) explains that the seven-day week includes the experience of both ordinary and extraordinary, or “colorful” and bleached, days simultaneously. Assuming a 40-hour workweek, where each of five days are largely characterized by work and routine, the two days of the “weekend” introduce discontinuity and “multi-dimensionality” in an individual’s life by offering more freedom and flexibility in their use of time. In an article on the social experience of vacation time, Karen Stein (2012) argues similarly that vacations and holidays, like weekends and Sabbaths, function as temporal “free intervals” in the same way that Goffman described spatial “free places.” Vacation time is characterized by a break from routine and therefore experienced as “extraordinary.”

The social rhythms of time are characterized by an alternation between order and disorder, ordinary and extraordinary, routine and spontaneous, structure and freedom, sacred and profane. Although Zerubavel does not focus explicitly on the future, it is implicit in many of his conceptualizations. For example, a calendar, as a social convention of time, is a society’s way of ordering and anticipating the events of future time. Furthermore, anthropologist, Kevin Birth (2012), makes a compelling case that as objects of time, clocks and calendars carry with them particular logics that shape the way we internalize and conceive of time. So given the ubiquity of schedule and calendar time in our lives, we might expect these temporal rhythms of the past and present to shape our projections of the future.

In addition to mapping the temporal structure of the future, our data have implications for several lines of sociological inquiry. Since our projected futures make up our cultural-toolkits, they profoundly shape our social interactions (Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013). Swidler (1986: 278) notes, however, that the use one makes of this cultural tool kit differs among those with “settled” and “unsettled” times. Settled times are characterized by unquestioned tradition and common sense that have a constraining effect on new ways of thinking. Unsettled times are characterized by competing ideologies that represent deeply held values, and this creates opportunities for innovative thought and action.

Although these categories represent the cultural present, our data suggest that there are “settled” and “unsettled” futures, as well. The immediate future is defined by the cultural conventions of calendar time. It is the settled future that is characterized by the unquestioned routine and common sense of one's scheduled responsibilities. In contrast, the intermediate future is defined by the uncertain possibilities of a crystal ball. It is the unsettled future that is characterized by the “free” play of imagination and hopeful images of one's possibilities. In our study, respondents described the settled future with very little enthusiasm or detail and with a considerable amount of certainty. Undoubtedly, “tomorrow will be just like today,” and they assumed that they will accomplish various tasks. They described the settled future with a passive terminology by listing things they “have to do” or places they “have to be.” The immediate future was associated with a sense of obligation and repetition. When, however, they consider the intermediate future, they enter a realm of possibility, desires, novelty, and agency. Their projections into the intermediate future were playful, imaginative, enthusiastic, and detailed. Although we did not conduct a textual analysis for grammatical patterns, our data illustrate the usefulness of coding for “future grammars” (Mische, 2014).

Our data also invite scholars to explore the ways macro forces shape the nature and structure of our projected futures (Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013). Guyer (2007: 409) argues that recent developments in the US cultural landscape have created a “relative evacuation of the near future” and infatuation with a glorified distant horizon. Our findings are in accord with this perspective. It is equally important, however, to examine how more hopeful and open futures act back on us in the present. Cerulo (2006) suggests that American culture has created an inability to imagine worst-case scenarios. This “positive asymmetry” is overwhelmingly characteristic of our data concerning the intermediate future. Almost no one mentioned careers they would not attain, marriages that would end in divorce, or their own demise and that of loved ones. The upshot may be a widespread inability to foresee and prepare for unwelcome futures. Thus, the anticipated future may be more powerful in shaping identity, emotion, and action than is the remembered past.

We recognize that our sample, like all samples, contains complexities that future scholars must take into account if they wish to build on our work. On the one hand, our sample is limited by being from a narrow geographical location and predominantly from a single institution so we are cautious about making any universalizing claims about the structure of projected futures across social locations. And we would encourage future work from scholars to explore the temporal structure of the future from diverse social contexts. On the other hand, our confidence in the generalizability of our findings is buoyed by the fact that our data both corroborate and extend the results of previous psychological studies that have found similar patterns (Eyal et al., 2004; Liberman and Trope, 1998). Like those studies, but using very different methods and data, we find that “individuals tend to be more optimistic and confident about distant future than near future outcomes” (Liberman and Trope, 1998: 6). When asked about the immediate future, our respondents feel constrained rather than agentic, resigned rather than enthusiastic, and apathetic rather than hopeful; they are terse rather than detailed in their descriptions.

Furthermore, our data add a qualitative complement to recent studies by psychologists who integrate research from neuroscience that corroborates Mead’s theory of temporality almost a century later. Schacter et al. (2012) find that there is significant overlap in brain activity in the same regions for remembering the past and imagining the future, as well as greater neural activity dedicated to imagining the future given its novel character relative to the past. These brain scanning technologies provide the empirical corollary to Mead’s notion of the specious present, where we use the information from our past to imagine our future. As Mead would have it, we use the ingredients of the past and present in cooking-up our image of the future. Our data show that this is the case for the temporal structure of the future as well.