“Back to the Future”: Making the Future Organizational Space from Experience to Imagination and Back

This article explores how the experience of organizational space shapes the enactment of imagined futures of work. While research on future-making emphasizes the value of imagining multiple distant futures, it has paid limited attention to how such futures are grounded in the spatial and experiential realities of everyday organizational life. Drawing on the emerging spatial turn in organization studies and using a longitudinal qualitative case study of a large Italian business association preparing for a major headquarters redesign, we examine how stakeholders engage with their future of work in the context of a major workplace transformation. Our findings identify three future-making trajectories—speculating, projecting, and realizing—each shaped by distinct spatial experiences and stakeholder positions. We also identify two recursive practices—criticizing and aspiring—through which imagined futures loop back to reshape perceptions of present space. We conceptualize this recursive process as unfolding within an emergent in-between space , a liminal and processual zone where imagined futures and lived spaces co-construct each other. By positioning space as both a medium and an outcome of future-making, we contribute to the literature on future-making by conceptualizing the spatial path dependency of future enactment. • This article explores how the everyday experience of organizational space shapes the enactment of imagined futures of work. • We analyze the process of transitioning to a distant future of work via a longitudinal case study of an organization undergoing a major workplace transformation. • We identify three future-making trajectories shaped by distinct spatial experiences of stakeholders. • We highlight two recursive practices through which imagined futures loop back to reshape perceptions of present space, creating a spatial path dependency. • We introduce the in-between space, a liminal area where present realities and future imaginations co-evolve.