Imagine, predict or perform? Reclaiming the future in sociology beyond scientism and catastrophism

Abstract

In this article I examine and criticize some mainstream views of the future within scholarly debates, mainly in social science. The goal is to review the strategies sociology is following to include the future as a theme of its own reflections. Such strategies also reveal relevant aspects of the society in which they are developed. The main argument revolves around some tensions concerning the relationship of contemporary societies to their future. The key points can be summarized as follows: in contemporary complex societies, where change is believed to be the only constant, social science seems to have abandoned the future as a theme of its reflections, while at the same time prediction and forecast are increasingly necessary. Future studies are, therefore, mainly an enterprise for managers and engineers, taking place in either government or corporate environments and far from the academy. Why is this happening? And is it necessarily so? What does sociology know about "the future(s)? Could prediction still be the form of the argument sociology can make about the future? And if this cannot be, then what exactly is its possible contribution – if any? Are these embarrassing questions a reflection of the way things really are, or of a wrong attitude sociology has taken to future studies? The main thesis is that insofar as sociology still occupies the field of future studies, it is undergoing a process of hybridization, which leads to mix its representational and performative function in a new way, and that can possibly escape confusion with old and new forms of utopian thinking. Such a thesis is illustrated introducing one particular analytic tool deployed in social scientific oriented future studies, namely scenarios, and comparing its inherent logic with that of the morphogenetic approach to sociological research. I attempt to examine the rationale of such a tool, and how it can serve the purpose of sociological analysis, constituting some kind of reflexive morphogenesis of sociological theory of the future