Transcending Time Horizons: How Actors Project Innovative Solutions Toward Distant Climate Goals

How actors address climate change through ongoing practices is not adequately addressed in organizational research. In this paper, we extend organizational research through a study of how actors simultaneously project near and distant future solutions through their ongoing practices to work toward distant climate goals. From real-time observations of discussions about sustainable packaging solutions in an international dairy corporation we inductively identified three interconnected practices that actors used to envisage future solutions: bracketing, calculating, and narrating. We develop a grounded model that shows how these three practices became differently interrelated as actors addressed increasingly more distant future solutions. Our paper adds to the literature by establishing a model whereby actors move beyond the near future toward the distant future. This enables explanations of how actors may bridge seemingly irresolvable intertemporal tensions between the short and long terms.