Imagined Futures is a highly innovative and significant work of sociological theory with particular relevance for economic sociologists. In his book, Jens Beckert offers a new paradigmatic perspective on economic action by developing the concept of fictional expectations. By taking seriously the notion of fundamental uncertainty, Imagined Futures offers a distinctively sociological alternative to mainstream economic theories of rational expectations and risk. And unlike other sociological theories of “non-rational” economic behavior, Beckert seeks to address the manner in which institutions supporting instrumental action within modern capitalism operate in practice––namely, through the particular role of imaginaries that actors use in place of actual knowledge about future events. Beckert’s conceptualization of expectations as fictional offers a new theoretical lens to old problems, and thereby aims to generate a new research agenda related to both the politics of expectations and the way in which actors construct and use imaginaries to coordinate economic action. The book provides a wealth of empirical illustrations of why and how this concept may produce useful insights related to credit, investment, innovation, and consumption.
Beckert poses his central question as follows: “If actors are oriented toward the future and outcomes are uncertain, then how can expectations be defined? What are expectations under conditions of uncertainty?” [9]. This question goes back to economics and what Beckert sees as a neglect of fundamental uncertainty. While economics acknowledges uncertainty, most work focuses on how rational actors seek to reduce uncertainty and translate it into calculable risk. One key consequence, he argues, is the unfortunate disjuncture between the micro-foundations of economics and the larger macro development of capitalism.
In staking his alternative, Beckert’s key concept is “fictional expectations,” which refers to how actors imagine future states of the world, including their understandings of causal relations and perceptions of how their actions influence outcomes [9]. These expectations are imaginaries by nature, since real outcomes are fundamentally uncertain. Importantly, these imaginaries are nonetheless used by actors to act “as if” and thereby influence future decision making. In calling these expectations fictional, Beckert stresses their socially contingent nature. Importantly, fictional expectations are not reducible to cognitive regularities discovered by behavioral economics, and which have now become widely influential in the field. Rather, expectations are seen through the Durkheimian perspective with a splash of American pragmatism—they rest on collective beliefs and ends-in-view that arise collectively “influenced by culture, history and power relations” [14].
Beckert develops his concept with the patient and systematic detail that characterizes much of his earlier work, and echoes a larger German tradition in social theory of theorizing through critical engagement with the classics (e.g. Habermas, Joas, etc.). The dense engagement with these works, particularly in Chapter 3, is admirable and, for the reader, more akin to dining at a slow food restaurant than consuming McDonaldized social science. Imagined Futures begins with some classic conceptions from both economics and sociology. As in his under-appreciated 2002 book Beyond the Market, his prowess with the classic foundations of the discipline is one of Beckert’s strengths. In this book, he again takes economics very seriously—which has an upside and potentially a downside. Too many scholars ignore or brush aside relevant concepts in related disciplines in favor of a tribal reinvention of the wheel—something of which many economists may be particularly guilty! Here Beckert strives to tell us exactly how and why sociology offers something different. His critique is centered on rational expectations theory, as a key foundation in economics. He uses it to develop several takeaway points that inform his alternative conceptualization. However it is difficult to imagine a future where economists will themselves be sufficiently persuaded by this critique to abandon established paradigms in favor of Beckert’s strongly interpretative perspective. Consequently, the detailed engagement with economics does not ultimately extend to the diverse ways in which uncertainty and expectations are treated in economics today. As such, his critique is potentially preaching to the non-economist choir. Nevertheless, I feel that the problematization of core economic concepts does add tremendous depth to this work.
For sociologists, Beckert’s approach itself draws significantly from literary theory and the philosophy of science. In part, his approach has much in common with well-established trends in following a broad cultural turn in the social sciences. Here culture is process arising out of social relations. Along these lines, Imagined Futures stresses that fictional expectations are symbolic representations, projections of the future under uncertainty or anticipations of the qualities of future goods. These imaginaries do not describe the real world, but are fictional in the creative sense of being able to aspire to and even change reality. For example, the performativity of economic models plays a large role in the book [MacKenzie 2006] Footnote 1 , since such models inform beliefs about causal relations that in turn guide peoples’ action and thereby may also change the world in the direction of the theory. Notably, Beckert provides a broader generalization of this argument, since he assumes that economic models may have real effects that have little to do with the models themselves. Here Imagined Futures is a play on Imagined Communities [Anderson 1983] Footnote 2 , and one that Beckert might have elaborated upon. Parallel to the fiction of the nation, we have the fiction of the future—both fictions with very real consequences for shaping action.
As a theory of social action, Beckert is particularly concerned with the projective element—the future as opposed to the past or present. Recent sociological theories of action have argued for a “chordal triad of agency” where social action has a temporal-relational context that bridges past, present and future [Emirbayer and Mische 1998] Footnote 3 . Social action involves iteration with the past, such as through habit, and evaluation in the present, drawing on practical and normative judgements. But in Imagined Futures, the focus is squarely on the projective element—here action is not simply constrained by the past or present alternatives, but involves the generation of hypotheses about possible futures. This projective element stresses the human capacity for reflexivity, whereby past habits and present orientations are challenged by the imagination itself. Beckert’s approach here owes much to the interpretation of pragmatist thinking developed by Hans Joas, particularly in his work on creativity [Joas 1992] Footnote 4 . Action is intentional, but non-teleological. Actors focus on ends-in-view, but these are constantly formulated and revised within the social context. As such, the past and present sow the seeds of the future, but do not determine them. In this regard, Imagined Futures expresses an implicitly optimistic view.
One sticking point I experienced with the book concerns the relationship between fiction and credibility. Beckert argues that fictional expectations are salient because of fundamental uncertainty, where the future cannot be known. Viewed in this way, expectations must remain fictions by definition. Beckert then situates fictional expectations in comparison to both literary fictions and non-fiction [72]. On one hand, Beckert seeks to maintain a distinct role for fictional expectations by elevating them above trivial forms of fiction. He argues that fictional expectations are conventionally treated more seriously than openly fictional work, being subjected to greater scrutiny. Since they are used to coordinate and mobilize action, fictional expectations need to maintain a certain level of credibility [273], often in the face of political challenge by others. Indeed, actors may go to great lengths to downplay or conceal their fictional character, fostering overconfidence. On the other hand, Beckert suggests that fictional expectations are distinct from non-fiction, where fundamental uncertainty is absent. Beckert says precious little about this distinction, but rather outlines social factors that support the greater or lesser credibility of fictional expectations, based on 7 elements: opportunity structures, cultural frames, institutions, networks, cognitive devices, mass media and past experiences. This list is useful, and could help us hypothesize about how and why people are confident in their expectations based on social reinforcement. If these social structural constraints support people to behave as if something is true, when do they start to actually believe and have confidence in it? Likewise, when does inconsistent personal experience, scientific evidence, or political change lead to a revision of fictional expectations?
The question of under what conditions actors may have more or less confidence in fictional expectations is raised in the Conclusion. Yet Beckert seems to bracket this question for most of the book, and does not examine in detail how fictional expectations come under self-reflexive or collective scrutiny, and might be revised. With fiction, there is no such need. With science, this scrutiny is ideally carried out systematically, despite any blind spots and imperfections in the process. In between these cases, Beckert places another key concept of the politics of fictional expectations: here truth claims are contested to a greater extent than with fiction, but either to a lesser extent or outside the rules of science. Fictional expectations do get revised over time, but not necessarily in the direction of greater truthfulness. For example, Trump supporters seem intent on casting doubt on climate change, thereby creating what seem to me to be very fictional expectations in which global warming will not occur or is not driven by CO2 emissions. Meanwhile, scientific theories are clearly important instruments for creating fictional expectations, but their potentially greater scientific validity may or may not persuade people. Everything, it seems, is a little “fictional”—but does this then simply bring us full circle to the tantamount meta-theoretical claim that reality is socially constructed?
A good concept is not worth its salt unless it provides useful insights. Beckert advances his theoretical concept throughout 4 empirical chapters that provide the second major section of the book. These chapters address the “building blocks of capitalism”: money and credit, investment, innovation and consumption. Each chapter follows a roughly common template, introducing basic concepts from economic sociology, and recasting these in the light of fictional expectations. The empirical material is drawn largely from secondary literature on both historical and contemporary phenomena, and used to highlight the role of imagined futures. For example, Beckert conveys with true sociological imagination how early credit relied on developing fictional expectations or confidence that the value of money would remain stable in the future. Along similar lines, innovation is supported by projective anticipation of possible new futures, which become the basis of investments in R&D. I found the empirical chapter on consumption to be the most insightful. Beckert brings back Durkheim’s sociology of religion and the totem, and how objects may become symbolically charged as representations of particular kinds of future value.
The empirical chapters all underline a single basic insight: fictional expectations fulfill a necessary condition to make rational investment or innovation possible because the value of assets is directly related to the fictional expectations of actors in its future value. In order to create and maintain capitalism as a complex economic order, actors need to extend their time horizons to the future and act in the face of uncertainty. Fictional expectations provide the means to do so. Beckert underlines their necessity by also examining financial crises, which he describes as the collapse of certain fictions. For example, his analysis of the 2008 financial crisis stresses how banks used certain risk management models to build fictional expectations and thereby facilitate a vast expansion of collateralized debt obligations. However, these fictional expectations led to overconfidence, and key players ultimately lost confidence in these particular imaginaries, thus precipitating the crisis. While I have no disagreement with Beckert’s retelling of the 2008 story of fictional expectations, I do not feel that this analysis generates a powerful alternative explanation or new insight into the case itself. We see a necessary condition for the crisis, but not the sufficient conditions that explain the rise or fall of specific imaginaries. This limitation is a price to pay for the empirical strategy that makes a case for the role of fictional expectations in general across many economic activities.
To further develop this perspective in empirical terms, I believe it is necessary to provide more precise conceptual and methodological tools. Here Beckert perhaps rightly falls back on pluralism—calling for both quantitative and qualitative studies, and studies on both the origins and effects of particular imaginaries. For example, Beckert effectively highlights the real economic consequences of the contrasting imaginaries of Keynesianism and monetarism. But he does not illustrate how we might explain why one becomes popular or loses its momentum. Doing so would bring us more squarely to a much wider literature on the role of ideas in political economy [Hall 1989] Footnote 5 , discourse analysis [Maguire and Hardy 2009] Footnote 6 , or discursive institutionalism [Schmidt 2010] Footnote 7 . Similarly, the last part of the book deals with forecasting and with economic theories as “instruments of imagination,” but the analysis remains somewhat remote from the currently raging empirical debates in the sociology of commensuration, critical accounting, and other subfields with metrics, rankings, quantification, and the use of other models. I would have liked to know more about how the theory of fictional expectations complements or adds to these more constructivist accounts of the economy—there are many and most do not feature in this book. Again if all economic action relies on a projective “fictional” element, then what matters are the politics of those expectations, as Beckert himself suggests. Many constructivist scholars would have agreed to this without ever reading Imagined Futures. So while Beckert provides a powerful critique of the economics paradigm and, I believe, also offers an argument with wide scope, it remains to be seen whether the particular concept of fictional expectations provides something distinctive in the crowded landscape of different theoretical perspectives in the more constructivist tradition. In this sense, Imagined Futures does better at justifying a theoretical paradigm than demonstrating a novel way of crafting such studies.
To do so, I would submit that scholars must turn quite decisively toward the middle range: theorizing about particular economic domains and the historically significant variability of fictional expectations therein. Studies on the images of organization used in industrial policy [Dobbin 1994] Footnote 8 , the diffusion of production models [Djelic 1998] Footnote 9 or the ideology of neo-liberalism [Schmidt and Thatcher 2013] Footnote 10 provide useful templates. These historical ideas could be seen as involving fictional expectations—they coordinate action and are subject to politics. But the point is not to run around relabeling things in new meta-theoretical language, as has occurred quite widely in literature on institutional logics to name one example. I am sure that Beckert would agree.
If focused on middle-range empirics, my hunch is that the potential added value of fictional expectations must rest with the specific aspect of time and stress on the projective element of action. Not many economic theories talk about imagination! Beckert insightfully helps us to more clearly see and understand the transition to capitalism historically as one that is based on the expansion of predictive technologies and capacity to see the future as open and changeable. Capitalism presupposes and feeds into changing time itself. Here the book often goes back to the historical origins of capitalism, which inspired so much of classical sociological theory, and shows how time horizons of economic actors become longer—credit is extended today, but paid back tomorrow (or even the day after), and equally today’s market position will be challenged by competitors tomorrow. Actors need to imagine a future in order to engage in calculative risk taking.
Considering this temporal aspect, I was nonetheless puzzled about how the stress of the book on imagined futures could be reconciled with the pervasive phenomenon of short-termism in contemporary capitalism [Aspara, et al. 2014; Jackson and Petraki 2010] Footnote 11 . Beckert’s necessity for long-term imagining of the future stands in contrast with recent literature on short-termism. Financial economists argue that actors often forgo larger potential returns in the future for small payoffs that arise sooner. Likewise, a large sociological literature exists on the problems of acceleration and how time cycles in modern capitalism are becoming shorter. On this point, Beckert’s book seems oddly silent. The fictive nature of imagined futures stresses the fact that such expectations may be qualitatively different. Imagined futures are differently imagined futures—stories with different endings that move action in different directions. Yet Imagined Futures does not address quantity of time. When does “the future” begin? How soon will it come to an end? Can we buy “more” time [Streeck 2013]? Footnote 12 How are different temporalities calibrated [Noyes 1980]? Footnote 13 Given how imaginaries of the short-term future seem to hinder our response to long-term challenges such as of climate change, even Beckert’s excellent book still left me wondering whether capitalism has much of a future—real or imagined.
