We offer an argumentative explanation of the reasons why the field of futures and foresight has not been successful at becoming part of the social scientific establishment. We contend that the very set of norms, beliefs, and epistemological foundations of futures and foresight are essentially self‐sabotaging as they resist the creation of scientific theory on futures and foresight practices and processes in organizations. Drawing from the tradition of management and organization sciences, we describe what scientific theory in the context of organizations is and is not, and how theory development contributes to the incremental progress of scientific fields. We then unpack the crux of the problem, deconstructing the resistance to scientific theory within our field into nine, closely related reasons. We offer solutions to the problem in the form of three sets of recommendations: for authors, journal editors, and practitioners. We conclude by responding to likely misunderstandings in advance.
We propose a scenario planning method that combines quantitative text analysis with the creation of scenario narratives. We design a variation in the scenario archetypes method (Dator, Journal of Futures Studies, 14, 1–18, 2009), a futures method to create four archetypal scenarios based on four predetermined generic alternative futures named continued growth, collapse, discipline, and transformation. In our variation, we extract archetypal information on the futures from documents about the future via quantitative text analytic techniques, and qualitatively elaborate this information into comprehensive narrative scenarios. This method can harness the abundance of unstructured textual data, significantly reducing the time employed to collect the relevant building block information to write scenarios without decreasing the scenarios’ quality. On the contrary, the text analytic algorithm we use allows us to identify very rich and archetype‐specific information. We present the result of an application of this method in a case study on the futures of work. The method's contributions to the futures literature and limitations are discussed.
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