Imagining Desirable Futures: A call for prospective theorizing with speculative rigour

With the looming planetary emergency, the future will be anything but an extension of the past. Yet theorizing the future poses a peculiar problem. By definition, it is not present yet. The conundrum of the future is that it requires conceptualizing and theorizing what is not (yet) observable and does not (yet) exist. Scholars have called for more impactful theories; we argue that one powerful avenue to make organizational theories more impactful is to make them more future-oriented. In this article, we call for prospective theorizing, which we define as a future-oriented approach to theorizing that is concerned with imagining desirable futures.