Designing Liminal Spaces for Upstream Performativity: Lessons From The Futures Lab

Abstract This paper examines how business schools can function as liminal socio‐material infrastructures for upstream performative experimentation. Recent work has advanced management scholarship to foreground the role of imagination in theorizing for desirable futures. However, less is understood about how alternatives might be made sufficiently tangible and credible to acquire performative force in the first place. This is compounded by performativity research that has largely examined how theories acquire effects once they circulate in markets and organizations. To address this, and drawing on a 5‐year qualitative case study of The Futures Lab (TFL), I show how shared visual workspaces, repeated critique, direct engagement with stakeholders, and the making and remaking of maps, models and prototypes enabled participants to (re)‐search alternative futures by making possibilities visible, contestable and open to revision. These practices produced credible fictions: tangible yet provisional representations to which external actors could attach, align with, and sometimes enrol around emerging possibilities. I develop prefigurative theorizing as a materially experimental mode of prospective theorizing, showing how desirable futures gain performative force not through imagination alone, but by being externalized, provisionally enacted, tested and revised in the present. The study thereby specifies conditions through which business schools can cultivate upstream performativity.