Narrative approach to futures: Future-oriented perspective to responsible digital transformation

Responsible digital transformation (RDT) involves future-oriented strategizing. The key notion: organizations use digital technology to transform and create responsible futures. Scholars emphasized the importance of future-oriented research to theorize how we can create a better world. Nevertheless, we see little empirical work that takes a future-oriented perspective on digital transformation (DT) or specifically RDT. Since organizational actors often tell imagined futures in narrative form, we develop and illustrate narrative approach to futures as an empirical approach for studying future-orientation in DT. Thus, we synthesize existing work to develop narrative approach to futures and illustrate this approach in a single case study of Greenpeace’s RDT. We contribute twofold. First, we contribute narrative approach to futures as an analytical approach as well as three archetypal futures narratives and concepts that provide for theorizing how futures produce present transformative action. Second, we contribute outlining implications of such approach to studying DT, specifically RDT.