Future-Making Power: A Study of Competing Imagined Futures in Healthcare

Abstract

This paper presents a conceptual model of strategies of power in future-making, informed by a case study in the healthcare sector. In zooming out from investigating the future-making activities of an organizational innovation project team and tracing competing imagined futures enacted by medical professionals and strategic management, this study explains how and why the project struggled to realize its mandate. In this case, we identify three strategies of power, namely mobilization, discipline and discretion, and discuss their potential controversies and combinations. Moreover, we contribute to theories on discretionary power, demonstrating how it is produced by combining interdiscursivity with management control and nondecision. Strategies of discretion are productive in the realm of future-making, particularly in exploiting forces of discipline and mobilization to enable parallel imagined futures to be created and maintained over time. On the downside, this may keep competing imagined futures hostage, potentially serving non-transparent agendas.