Sociological Forum, Vol. 24, No. 3, September 2009 ( 2009)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1573-7861.2009.01127.x
Projects and Possibilities: Researching Futures in Action
Ann Mische1
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.
KEY WORDS: action; aspiration; culture and cognition; projectivity; temporality; the future.
INTRODUCTION
In his introduction to The Sociology of Hope (1979), Henri Desroche
describes the religious tradition of the miracle of the rope. In various cultural
renditions of the story, a person throws a rope into the air and, instead of falling down, it supports him in his climb toward heaven. ‘‘Hope is a rope,’’
Desroche says, in that it, too, is founded on the unfounded, the imaginary,
and yet ‘‘it holds’’; it undergirds actions, it produces events. In this sense, hope
is real or, rather, has real social effects, even if in ‘‘believing they are bringing
heaven down to earth, they are only moving their ancient lands up towards
new heavens.’’ Hope is both constituted and constitutive; it provides the emotional substratum, so to speak, of the dialectic between the old and the new,
between the reproduction and the transformation of social structures as these
figure in thinking and acting individuals. ‘‘[F]orces of pressure pose and define
a question. But it is the forces of aspiration which formulate and offer an
answer’’ (Desroche, 1979:3).
1
Department of Sociology, Rutgers University, 54 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, New Jersey
08854-8045; e-mail: amische@sociology.rutgers.edu.
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0884-8971/09/0300-0031/0 2009 Eastern Sociological Society
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Although cultural analysis has seen a recent surge of interest in the
‘‘social imaginary,’’ sociologists have dealt only peripherally, when at all, with
the impact of the imagined future on social events. Even when they have taken
seriously the category of the imaginary, most have used it to understand how
people represent their present reality (and how the categories of those representations change), or how people imaginatively reconstruct the past. A seeming exception is the rich tradition of utopian literature; Desroche’s book is in
fact a study of the connection between religious millenarianisms, utopian
movements, and revolutionary ideologies. Certainly, the study of such grand,
totalizing hopes can teach us much about the mobilizing force of imagined
futures. But what of the equally powerful (and not unrelated) force exerted by
the less grand, less total aspirations of everyday lives, the future images that
inform social practices from the mundane to the heroic? 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 want to 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 hope to show that 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.
PROJECTIVITY AND A THEORY OF ACTION
One fruitful way to incorporate the future into sociological research is to
revive the notion of projects, or projectivity, as a tool for social analysis. With
roots in Heideggerian existentialism and the social phenomenology of Alfred
Schutz (1967), the idea of projectivity captures an essential aspect of human
agency (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). However, it has never been widely used
in U.S. sociology, due in part to the historical division between structuralfunctionalism and the abstract voluntarism of rational choice. In his early
action theory, Parsons was in fact highly attuned to the future-oriented dimension of action (whether normative or utilitarian), which he described as its
‘‘teleological’’ structure, that is, the fact that action always refers to a possible
future state, ‘‘which would not come into existence if something were not done
about it by the actor’’ (Parsons, 1968:45). However, by the end of his career,
the integrative-systemic conception of structural functionalism had largely
eclipsed the temporal dimension of his theory. As a result, concern with the
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future was abandoned by culturally inclined normative theorists in most
of U.S. social science. Unfortunately, it became almost the sole domain of
rational choice theory, which reduced the future to posthoc rationalizations of
action abstracted from the human experience of time.
In a much neglected criticism of Parsons’s early action theory, Schutz
(1967, 1978) developed the concept of the ‘‘project’’ as the ‘‘primary and fundamental meaning of action.’’ Schutz was concerned with understanding
action from the subjective perspective of the temporally embedded actor,
insisting that the teleological structure of action appears very different to the
observer who sees the act as a completed, past event capable of objective interpretation, than it does to the actor who sees it as a yet-to-be-realized future
possibility. Human action, as Schutz observed, is constructed within an imaginative horizon of multiple plans and possibilities; actors engage in a retrospective ⁄ prospective process by which they draw on previously collected ‘‘stocks of
knowledge,’’ or ‘‘typifications,’’ of possible paths of actions, while ‘‘fantasizing’’ in relation to the developing act in progress. Such an imaginative process
differs from that of choosing among clearly defined possibilities, as instrumentalist theories propose; rather, it entails focusing ‘‘rays of attention’’ on a plurality of possible states until one or more alternatives detach themselves ‘‘like
overripe fruit’’ and appear before the reflective consciousness as possible
objects of choice (Schutz, 1967:67–68).
One implication of this conception is that one only knows with clarity
what the choice is after it has been taken, through what Garfinkel (1984) calls
‘‘post-hoc accounting practices.’’ For Garfinkel, as for ‘‘practice theorists’’
such as Bourdieu and Giddens, engagement of the future clearly plays second
fiddle to the deeper layers of the ‘‘taken-for-granted’’ practical consciousness
underlying conscious choice-making. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and Giddens’s structuration theory provide useful correctives to an overly voluntaristic
conception of future orientations by linking action to the recursive relationship
between received structures and situated practices. In this view, aspirations are
strongly conditioned by one’s position in a social field, which in turn is determined by the objective structure of social relations as well as by the dispositions and competences internalized during one’s early experiences.
Yet there is a danger here: in basing an analysis of future possibility on
the ‘‘objective’’ structure of fields of action, we risk losing precisely the forward-looking element that Schutz warned Parsons not to neglect. I argue that
we should refocus attention on the open, indeterminate, ‘‘polythetic’’ perception of the field from the point of view of the actor surveying the future in
terms of multiple possibilities, as opposed to the ‘‘monothetic’’ view of the
actor (or observer) who interprets the decision after it has already been taken.
For this reason, Bourdieu provides us with a theory of ‘‘strategies’’ and
‘‘expectations,’’ but not, in Schutz’s sense, of projects. And neither Bourdieu
nor Giddens—nor Schutz himself, for that matter—offers an adequate theorization of how such projects can be restructured through imaginative human
practice. Taking a step beyond all these theorists, I suggest that we view the
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697
process of projectivity as composed of creative as well as willful foresight.
During the ongoing procedure of motivated, selective ‘‘protention,’’ as Schutz
calls it, received categories of thought and action may be put together in new
ways through a process of imaginative experimentation with projected courses
of action.
In rethinking the link between future cognitions and social action, I draw
not only on the social phenomenology of Schutz, but also on the pragmatist
theories of Mead and Dewey. Mead (1932) addresses the development of temporal horizons as a form of ‘‘distance experience’’ that takes us out of our
immediate sensory engagement and allows us to imaginatively engage the past
and the future. Our multiple levels of social embeddedness (which he calls
‘‘sociality’’) also embed us in multiple temporal horizons. The problems posed
by such complex sociotemporal relationships give rise to what he calls ‘‘deliberative attitude,’’ that is, the capacity to ‘‘get hold of the conditions of future
conduct as these are found in the organized responses we have formed, and so
construct our pasts in anticipation of that future’’ (Mead, 1932:76). Dewey
argues that the reflective capacity to ‘‘read future results in present on-goings’’
is at the heart of democratic participation; ‘‘[e]xperience in its vital form is
experimental, an effort to change the given; it is characterized by projection,
by reaching forward into the unknown; connection with the future is its salient
trait’’ (Dewey, 1981:69, 61).
RESEARCHING FUTURE PROJECTIONS
If hope is a rope, as Desroche suggests, which is cast into an uncertain
and shifting future horizon, how then do we study it? Perhaps we are justified
in backing away when it comes to the tenuous, hard to see (or verify) effects
of future projections on social action. Within sociology, studies of future projections have mostly been carried out by demographers and life-course
researchers, who have used survey and interview research to show the association between goals, aspirations, or expectations and outcomes such as fertility,
social class, educational or occupational attainment, retirement planning, life
satisfaction, and mental health. Longitudinal surveys have examined whether
future orientations at Time 1 can be associated with particular outcomes at
Time 2; interesting work in this area has tracked shifts in aspirations over the
lifecourse (Jacobs et al., 1991), as well as the ways gaps between aspiration
and subsequent achievement affect psychological well-being later in life (Carr,
1999). There may, of course, be confounding variables; perhaps the same
social conditions that ‘‘cause’’ the particular future perspective also underlie
the outcomes in question. Locating the ‘‘real social effects’’ of a particular
way of imagining the future is a slippery task at best.
Cultural analysis can help us address these limitations by providing richer
insight into the form and process of future projections as they play out in particular social contexts. We need to know something about the character of the
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rope itself: how long or short it is; its thickness, strength, and flexibility;
whether it consists of a single cord or multiple interwoven strands; whether it
is cast upward to one imagined target or to several targets at once. And as
rope climbing is a temporal process, we also must be aware that the shape and
feel of the rope change over time, as do the winds buffeting the climber and
the latter’s own sense of capacity to bridge the sociotemporal distance the rope
represents. Moreover, just as climbers sometimes climb in teams—backing
each other up and putting each other at risk—the process of project formation
entails the capacity to interpret and coordinate one’s actions in accordance
with the motives and projects of other actors.
In other words, we need to study the cognitive contours as well as the
relational dynamics of project formation. Some aspects of future projections
have been studied in interesting ways by cognitive and social psychologists.
This tradition goes back to Lewin’s early studies of the role of time perspective in morale and the construction of ‘‘life space’’ (1939, 1942), which contributed to a flourishing of related studies in the 1970s and 1980s (Cottle and
Klineberg, 1974; Gorman and Wessman, 1977). Recently, there has been a
resurgence of experimental and clinical work on temporality, examining,
among other things, transitions between optimism and pessimism; variation in
consideration of future consequences; and the realization of ‘‘fantasies’’ about
the future (Sanna and Chang, 2006). There is also a tradition of psychological
research on the dimensions, determinants, and consequences of hope (Snyder,
1994; Stotland, 1969). In addition, some psychologists have addressed the relational dimension of future projections by studying communication between
past, present, and future selves (Markus and Nurius, 1986; Pronin and Ross,
2006; Zimbardo and Boyd, 2008).
As sociologists, we can extend this relational vision to include a projective
dialogue not only with future selves, but also with other people who inhabit
the imagined future. In fact, by incorporating a future perspective into Mead’s
idea of ‘‘sociality,’’ along with Simmel’s (1955) theory of relational intersections, we can conceptualize social networks as extending into the imagined
future, requiring cognitive work as people sort through the projected relational
consequences of different actions and involvements. For example, researchers
might study how people imagine their future interactions with romantic partners, growing children, teachers and colleagues, business associates, or leaders
and authorities. We can examine whether they anticipate—or naı̈vely fail to
anticipate—tensions between intersecting social worlds, for example, in predicting the difficulty or ease with which they expect to resolve work-family
conflicts (Blair-Loy, 2005; Gerson, 1986). Alternatively, we might look at how
people juggle multiple timeframes as they seek to link their personal projects
with those of the various collectivities to which they belong (Mische, 2001).
Of course, a focus on future projections risks a naı̈ve teleology in which
by documenting what people hope, expect, or aspire to, we think we have a
handle on what they actually choose, achieve, or experience. In fact, recent
work in experimental psychology warns us that future projections tend to be
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limited and faulty, often failing to adequately predict future experiences and
emotional states, due to cognitive limitations and contextual shifts (Gilbert,
2007). The same point is made by behavioral economists in their critique of
the rational choice grounding of neoclassical economic models (Ariely, 2008;
Kahneman and Tverksy, 2000). People often make decisions based on analyses
of the future that involve limited information, routinized decision-making heuristics, and exaggerated discounting mechanisms that strongly limit their ability to make accurate predictions, leading to seemingly irrational behaviors.
Likewise, sociologists have studied the difficulty of predicting ‘‘worst-case’’
scenarios, given the cultural and institutional grounding of our future cognitions (Cerulo, 2006; Clarke, 2005).
DIMENSIONS OF PROJECTIVITY
Nevertheless, regardless of whether future projections ‘‘actually’’ predict
the future, they do have an influence on action. As W. I. Thomas said, they
are ‘‘real in their consequences’’ even if those consequences are quite different
than the imagined future that motivated the action. As Zimbardo and Boyd
argue: ‘‘Beliefs and expectations of the future in part determine what happens
in the present by contributing to how people think, feel, and behave’’
(2008:137). Even if our predictions prove faulty, they affect what we do, and
thus influence the course of events, sometimes in self-fulfilling or unanticipated
ways (Merton, 1968). For this reason we need to play close attention to the
form and content of future projections, seeking patterns in how particular
cognitive structures lead people to act (or not act) in particular ways. Here are
a few cognitive dimensions of future projections that bear exploring from a
sociological perspective.
Reach: the degree of extension that imagined futures have into the short,
middle, and long term, along with the future scenarios imagined at each stage.
Some actors may stay focused on the immediate future and ‘‘discount’’ the distant future, as behavioral economists have suggested; others may focus on middle-range tactical planning; and still others may focus on long-term objectives
(strategically or idealistically conceived). Social psychological research has suggested that time horizons may vary by socioeconomic class background
(O’Rand and Ellis, 1974), with middle-class families more likely than those who
are poor or working class to engage in long-term planning and scenario building. Projective reach may also be rooted in institutional, subcultural, or political
orientation; for example, utopian social movement activists may be inspired
and fortified by the promise of long-term transformations (Voss, 1998), while
pragmatic politicians focus on short-term bargaining and negotiations.
Breadth: the range of possibilities considered at different points in time.
Some actors may see the future as having only a single possible trajectory and
outcome, while others may see it as multipronged, with a wide range of alternative outcomes, possibly branching off into multiple directions. This may
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vary by timeframe; for example, some actors may have a broad repertoire of
possible short-term actions, but still have a straight and narrow vision of
where the future is heading in the long term. I saw this, for example, among
some leftist groups that I studied in my social movement research who were
tactically flexible while keeping their ideological sights fixed on the socialist
goal (Mische, 2007). Others may see the long term as having many different
possible outcomes, but try to reduce complexity and regain control by becoming rigid and single-minded in the short term.
Clarity: the degree of detail and clarity with which the future is imagined. Although this may be related to breadth, it is not the same thing;
a single-pronged future may be imagined in quite elaborate detail, while a
multipronged future may be vague and impressionistic. Socialization plays a
role here; we may develop greater clarity about possible futures that are
modeled around us, and have trouble visualizing the ‘‘roads less traveled.’’
This may vary by timeframe; a long-term scenario can be richly imagined
(as in utopian or dystopian visions) (Hall, 1978), while short-term contingencies and intermediary steps are glossed over, or vice versa. For example,
the ideologues of the Iraq War may have been so fixated on their long-term
vision of regional stability and democratization that they neglected to consider the complex short- and medium-term challenges involved in occupation
and nation building.
Contingency: the degree to which future trajectories are imagined as fixed
and predetermined versus flexible, uncertain, and dependent on local circumstances. Some ideological narratives of future transformations offer fixed-stage
theories of how the future will progress from one point to the next; however,
dramatic events may make the future appear more uncertain and malleable,
strongly responsive to local context and sequencing (Wagner-Pacifici, 2000).
Likewise, some career paths develop according to predictable, well-ordered
‘‘cultural models,’’ while other careers have a higher degree of uncertainty and
flux (Abbott and Hrycak, 1990; Blair-Loy, 2005). Prediction in conditions of
extreme uncertainly—such as weather forecasting (Daipha, 2007; Fine,
2007)—may require institutional legitimation as a safeguard against the havoc
such contingencies can wreak with future projections.
Expandability: the degree to which future possibilities are seen as expanding or contracting. Sometimes, possibilities for the future are perceived as
increasing and opening up (such as in youth, the start of a new career, a budding romance, or an economic boom); sometimes, they are seen as declining
or approaching closure (in the case of old age, a terminal illness, an impending
divorce, or an economic downturn). Recent research suggests that those who
have expanding temporal horizons focus on gaining information and exploring
new areas, while those with constrained or closing horizons focus on emotional well-being and relational satisfaction (Carstensen, 2006). Moreover, in
situations in which future horizons seem to be contracting, people may rescale
their goals toward more a feasible range, in contrast to tenacious goal pursuit
in more expansive periods (Boroditsky and Ranscar, 2002).
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Volition: the relation of motion or influence that the actor holds in regard to
the impending future. Sometimes, the future is imagined as coming toward us,
while at other times we see ourselves as moving toward the future (Boroditsky
and Ramscar, 2002). This sense of volition as movement is closely linked to
the idea of volition as will and purpose. We may take passive, receptive
stances toward an approaching future over which we have little control; or we
may assume active, purposeful orientations toward a future that we are
striding into, and that we presume we can control and design. Sometimes, we
may overestimate our capacity to control future events (Langer, 1975); this
sense of control over actions can change over the lifecourse, and may vary
with social class and educational background (Mirowsky and Ross, 2007).
Sociality: the degree to which future projections are ‘‘peopled’’ with others whose actions and reactions are seen as intertwined with our own. Not
only do we engage in conversations with our imagined future selves, but we
also imagine those future selves conversing and interacting with others. Thinking through future relationships is an important part of considering the consequences of action, and some people may do this more clearly, and with more
imagined interaction, than others. While some cultural groups envision the
future as resulting primarily from the independent actions of individuals, others foresee their futures as strongly socially embedded (Markus and Kitayama,
2003). Likewise, some people may compartmentalize imagined interactions in
their diverse networks, while others anticipate intersections between different
relational worlds.
Connectivity: the imagined logic of connection between temporal elements.
This relates to what narrative scholars call ‘‘principles of linkage’’ (Polletta,
2006) between actions and events; it often implies differing models of causality, agency, and influence (Markus and Kitayama, 2003). The relationship
between tactic and strategy in military or social movement planning is an
example of one such connection (Jasper, 2006); divine or magical intervention
might appear at the opposite extreme. Sometimes, these ‘‘links from here to
there’’ might be made explicit in future projections, as when people lay out
step-by-step plans to reach a goal (Little, 1983) or develop elaborate scenarios
of social transformation. Other times they might remain vague and ambiguous, leaving transitional moments subject to ad hoc improvisational solutions
(Cohen et al., 1972).
Genre: the recognizable discursive ‘‘mode’’ in which future projections are
elaborated. Future projections often take a narrative form that ties into familiar modes of storytelling (Polletta, 2006) or social drama (Wagner-Pacifici,
1987), which serve as templates for future action. For example, the future may
be envisioned as comedy, tragedy, or melodrama, elaborated in the future or
conditional tense. Other genres that are especially relevant to social movements
and collective actors might include utopian, instrumental, pragmatic, or oppositional orientations toward future scenarios. These genres express culturally
embedded (and often socially contested) models of how social change is
envisioned to occur.
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FROM COGNITION TO ACTION
The challenge for research on projectivity is not simply to document variation along the dimensions I’ve described, but also to understand its genesis and
effects. We need to look both at what Maria Islas-Lopez (2008) calls the ‘‘production of the future’’ and the ‘‘productive future,’’ that is, the different social
forces that shape variation along these dimensions, as well as the ways that particular ‘‘modes of projectivity’’ affect people’s decisions, practices, and relations.
Ricoeur (1991) describes this as the movement ‘‘from text to action,’’ that is, the
ways that cognitions and narratives affect what we do, how we do it, and (I
would add) with whom we do it. The time is ripe for sociologists to turn the same
sort of rich attention to future projections as we have directed to collective memories. To date, our understanding of future imagining has been thin and static,
perhaps in reaction against the perceived distortions of rational choice perspectives. The focus on routine practices has largely trumped future orientations in
recent cultural and institutionalist theories, truncating our understanding of
temporal embedding. Yet this is precisely where sociology can make its greatest
contribution to the somewhat disjointed research areas described above. As
sociologists we can focus attention on the cultural, institutional, and relational
grounding of future projections, elements that have been addressed in a
fragmentary way, when at all, in the psychology and economics literatures.
On a more general level, this discussion points toward a ‘‘sociology of the
future’’ by examining how future projections—often tenuous and uncertain—shape and are shaped by social processes. To examine future projections
is not to assume that they come true, but to explore the ways they deeply
infuse social interaction, albeit in possibly contradictory and surprising ways. I
would argue that it is high time that cultural sociologists reclaim the analysis
of the future and turn our attention to the nature of the ‘‘rope’’ and what
makes it hold.
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