Abstract:

Anticipatory practices in organizations are grounded in prevailing cultural beliefs about time and causation. The dominant anticipatory practices in contemporary management depend on assumptions derived from Newtonian physics, yet these assumptions were superseded in twentieth-century physics and biology. Anticipatory practices thus lag behind recent thinking about time and causation. Salient aspects of new theoretical thinking are reviewed in this chapter, leading to an exploration of how anticipatory practices might be transformed in the twenty-first century. The overall aim is speculative: to anticipate the future of anticipatory practice.

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