Fading memories of the future: the dissipation of strategic foresight among middle managers

Strategic foresight among middle managers is crucial, considering their responsibilities and authority vested in them in directing everyday organising. Emphasising practices as the locus of strategic foresight, we argue that imposed organising processes and bureaucratic routines may interact to dissipate the cultivation of strategic foresight among middle managers in their situated practice. Building on an explorative case analysis of a European sportswear retail company, our study highlights how top-down changes in organising processes may induce the dissipation of organisational ‘foresightfulness’. We identify four dimensions emphasised by the new organising processes and their associated routines (rhetoric of legitimation, instrumental rationality, suppression of creative freedom, and the formulations of solutions in search of problems) which typify the observed patterns of foresight dissipation among middle managers. The study and its findings extend our understanding of contextual antecedents that could lead to the dissipation of strategic foresight among middle managers in organizing.