Institutional Tipping Points, Future-Making Drift, and Prospective Theorizing
Type
conference paper
Date Issued
2026
Author(s)
Abstract
Organizations increasingly face volatile societal and regulatory concerns around sustainability, prompting them to anticipate and react to looming institutional tipping points. Yet little is known about how, in doing so, actors imagine desirable futures and craft strategies to enact them. Addressing this gap, we examine how organizations shape norms and strategies as they enact their imagined desirable futures to confront uncertain institutional trajectories. Integrating insights from literature on institutions and agency as well as future-making, we draw on a ten-year case engagement with a corporate alliance (CA), a consortium of major corporations pursuing an explicit future-making agenda. Our case reveals how the CA mobilized strategies, narratives, and activities to promote a proprietary vision of translating environmental and social impacts into monetary terms to reshape the future of corporate performance measurement. In doing so, their future-making strategies faced a future-making drift: a pattern of well-intended attempts to transform sustainability measurement became locked into market-centric rationales, reinforcing—rather than disrupting—dominant institutional logics. Ultimately, the CA inadvertently foreclosed alternative futures and reinscribed the utilitarian logics it initially sought to challenge. We contribute to the literature by theorizing mechanisms of intention–outcome divergence in organizational efforts to shape desirable futures, particularly as actors adapt motivations in anticipation of institutional disruption. Methodologically, we present a novel approach of studying qualitative research through engaged scholarship and prospective theorizing. This approach allows problem-focused, interactive and real-time case analysis which illustrates how scholars can analyse, engage with, and potentially reshape institutional processes as they unfold.
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
Refereed
Yes
Event Title
85th VHB Conference
Event Location
Göttingen, Germany
Event Date
March, 2026
Subject(s)