Futurescapes: Challenge for Social and Management Sciences Biographical Note

This paper is intended to contribute some background knowledge about the future in management and organisation studies. It provides historical information on the way the social sciences have engaged with the future and seeks to identify the difficulties with the subject of the future for scientific study. It suggests that futurity is an inescapable aspect of all social being and thus needs to be encompassed in any study of social life irrespective of the context. However, in the same way that time is taken for granted in the majority of management and organisation studies, much in our approaches to the future is taken for granted, that is, not explicitly explored and theorised. The paper suggests that as long as we leave approaches to the future implicit, we are likely to mis-read and mis-understand some of the key temporal tensions in the organisations we study. Biographical Note Barbara Adam is Professor of Sociology at Cardiff University. She is founding editor of the journal Time & Society and has published extensively on the social relations of time. Her most recent monograph is Time, published in 2004 as part of the Polity Press ‘Key Concepts’ Series. She currently holds a three-year research grant under the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council’s Professorial Fellowship Scheme in which she investigates the social relationship to the future. E-mail: [email protected] web sites: http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/futures/ http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/whoswho/adam/ © B Adam – Palermo Keynote Paper 030606 2