Future Matters: How Future-making Shapes Organizational Path Dependence

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Matthias Wenzel
• Subject Area: Management and Marketing
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 552942279

Management and organizational research on path dependence has advanced sophisticated understandings and explanations of how "history matters" in and for organizations. Yet, the field’s predominant interest in the past overshadows the relevance of the future as a temporal category that actors "make" in the present. Therefore, in this project, I elaborate the thesis that "future matters" by examining how future-making shapes path dependence. This project builds on extensive preliminary conceptional and empirical work in the areas of path dependence and future-making in management and organization studies as well as the empirical context in play. Based on the collection of qualitative data in the field of funeral services in Berlin, the empirical analysis will shed light on (a) what futures are imagined, (re)negotiated, and enacted in path-dependent processes, (b) how organizational actors do so, and © what implications these dynamics have for established patterns of activity.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants