Management and organisational research are becoming increasingly future-focussed (Wickert, 2025). This is not because scholars are trying to predict what comes next, but because futures are organised. They are imagined, debated, foreclosed and realised through the everyday work of organisations, institutions and the communities that constitute them. Futures do not simply arrive; they are in a continual state of becoming and are shaped through the ways actors of various kinds coalesce around ideas and respond to matters of concern.
Earlier this month, Dr Ryan Nolan, Associate Professor of Circular Economy and Organisation, presented research exploring these ideas at the University of Oxford. The event was hosted by Hertford College and Oxford Ministry for the Future.
Future-making fields and the circular economy
The workshop, themed Accounting for Desirable Futures, brought together an international group of organisational, management, and accounting scholars to share work-in-progress for a forthcoming special issue on how ‘desirable futures’ are articulated, contested and accounted for.
Ryan’s presentation drew on a paper co-authored with Miriam Feuls (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark), Esmaeil Khedmati Morasae (University of Strathclyde), and Sima Farokhnejad (University of Southampton). The paper develops the concept of ‘future-making fields’ highlighting the important and understudied role that knowledge fields play in shaping what becomes thinkable and actionable over time.
The research focuses on the circular economy, a rapidly expanding scholarly field that is explicitly future-oriented but also internally contested. Rather than a single, agreed definition, the circular economy encompasses multiple and competing notions of what it is for, who it serves, and what counts. These ideas are shaped by different research communities working within the field.
Mapping circular economy imaginaries
The research draws on a corpus of circular economy scholarship spanning the past two decades. Using a combination of network analysis and topic modelling, the team examined how research communities form and evolve.
Visualising the network made it possible to map collaboration communities and see who works with whom, while topic modelling brought to the surface clusters of recurring themes. These clusters were treated as the building blocks of circular economy imaginaries (as yet, unrealised futures). The analysis then explored how features of the collaboration network relate to which topic clusters become consolidated within research communities, and which remain on the side lines.
How is this useful?
This field-level view helps explain how future-oriented ideas gain traction. The research highlights three key conditions that shape how imagined futures become stabilised within a knowledge field. The first is relational. It matters whether communities are densely connected and whether there are robust bridges between them. The second is temporal. Fields do not move neatly from one topic to the next. Topics accumulate, persist, and sometimes reappear, reshaping what seems timely or premature. The third is hierarchical and raise important questions around power. Prestige and visibility are unevenly distributed, and that influences which definitions of ‘desirable’ and ‘feasible’ become taken for granted.
The practical implication is that the architecture of collaboration and evaluation matters. For research leaders, journal editors, funders, and convenors, decisions about who is brought into conversation, what kinds of work are rewarded, and how communities are connected can tilt a field toward fragmentation or toward shared concerns that support coordinated action.
If future-making fields such as the circular economy are to live up to expectations in addressing social and environmental challenges, building that connective capacity may prove decisive.