Re-Imagining Systems: Foresight Entrepreneurs and the Challenge of Institutional Change

Ann Mische, University of Notre Dame
Sehrazat Mart, University of Notre Dame

This paper addresses the question of what it means to attempt “systemic change” from the vantage point of organizational actors who use foresight methodologies as cultural technologies for addressing public problems. Systemic reform is slow and difficult, due to the stabilizing effects of institutional routines and practices. However, past research has shown that institutional reformers can sometimes exercise agency in ways that lead to organizational change. In this paper, we focus on the role of “foresight entrepreneurs” -- that is, organizations and individuals that attempt to disrupt consensus and generate new cultural understandings of future possibilities that (they hope) will lead to deeper social and political change. We examine such entrepreneurs through an analysis of 82 transnational “public interest” scenario projects related to democracy, development, peacebuilding, and climate change. We investigate how scenario projects invoke the mechanisms that organizational scholars say are important for institutional entrepreneurship, i.e., the mobilization of resources, political coalitions, and links with legitimating authority. We also assess the degree to which they delve into the future-ideational component of institutional change, moving beyond simply imagining futures to making explicit policy recommendations, laying out road-maps for change, and proposing infrastructure for tasks and plans. By studying public foresight projects through the lens of institutional entrepreneurship, we contribute to the specification of the material, relational, and cultural conditions under which such political change efforts emerge. In this way, we shed light on both the disjunctions and the connections between imaginative visions of social change and actual institutional change practices.

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 Presented in Session 18. Cultural Entrepreneurs