Future Matters: Challenge for social theory and social inquiry

Social action is performed in the temporal domain of open pasts and futures. It is both mindful of the recoverable and lived past and projectively oriented towards an intangible future. It sets processes in motion that ripple through the entire social system, across space and time, to eventually emerge as facts. This futurity of action tends to get lost in analyses that concentrate primarily on empirically accessible, factual outcomes of plans, decisions, hopes and fears. To encompass this ‘not yet’ as central component in the production of social facts requires changes to social theory and the logic of social inquiry. It necessitates an openness to rethink the subject matter of sociology, its epistemology and its methodology. The paper presents a broad-brush socio-historical analysis of changing approaches to the future as foundation to theoretical considerations of necessary conceptual changes to the discipline in order that social futurity may be accorded its appropriate place in the study of social life