Projects and Possibilities: Researching Futures in Action

TLDR

The paper examines how imagined futures shape social structures, exploring institutional determinants of hope and personal creativity, and their unintended consequences on social change. The author aims to explain why future studies are overlooked in sociology and proposes a framework that integrates cognitive aspects of projectivity. The approach links future projections to action by connecting cognition and behavior, filling a gap in sociological theory.

Abstract

How can we understand the social impact of cognitions of a projected future, taking into account both the institutional determinants of hopes and their personal inventiveness? How can we document the repercussions, often contrary to intentions, “back from” such projected futures to the production and transformation of social structures? These are some of the questions to be addressed by a cultural sociology that attempts to look seriously at the effects of a projected future as a dynamic force undergirding social change. In this essay I discuss some of the reasons why the analysis of the future has been so neglected in sociological theory and research, and then sketch a possible framework for reincorporating it that specifies some of the cognitive dimensions of projectivity. In the process, I will show how a focus on future projections can help us make a link between cognition and action in a manner that has so far been neglected in the sociological literature.