2. Expectations and the epistemic problem of the future

Discussions of the future often assume that we first think about it – visualise, imagine, or form expectations – and only then act on the basis of these mental representations. In economics, this view was clearly articulated by Frank Knight, who argued that perception is always a matter of inference: we do not react to what we perceive directly, but to what we infer from it. According to this view, our actions are ‘designed to change a future situation inferred from a present one’ (Knight, Reference Knight1921, 201–2). This reflects a broader cognitivist model, in which perception and action are separated by an internal interpretive step: we first ‘see’ some aspects of the future in our mind’s eye and only then act upon them. As Gell (Reference Gell1992) similarly observes, ‘opportunity costs arise from the fact that the representations, or conceptual models we make of the ‘real’ world, represent the world as being capable of being otherwise than we believe it to be’ (217). This reinforces the idea, present also in Knight, that economic action is grounded in expectations as mental representations of counterfactual futures – what could be, even if it isn’t currently the case.

On this view, economic action is inherently forward-looking: investment, production, innovation, and exchange all presuppose some orientation towards what has not yet occurred. Yet the future, by definition, seems to resist any knowledge in the ordinary sense. Economic theory – particularly models based on expected utility theory – has tried to tame this problem by reducing it to a question of information: treating the future as something that can, in principle, be forecast, calculated, or modelled in probabilistic terms. This reduction transforms a deep epistemic challenge into a technical problem of managing calculable risk.

Within this frame, rational expectations theory – as formulated by Muth (Reference Muth1961) and Lucas (Reference Lucas1972) – assumes that individuals form expectations consistent with the predictions of the underlying economic model, based on full knowledge of its structure and parameters. Expectations, in this view, become informational inputs into the forecasting models that individual actors rely on for decision-making, while institutions – if acknowledged at all – are rendered little more than background informational structures that help coordinate efficient forecasting. This reflects a broader tendency in mainstream economics to treat institutions as passive external constraints rather than as active components of economic behaviour (Hodgson, Reference Hodgson1988). As Davis (Reference Davis2011) has pointed out, this move in effect individualises sociality, leaving rational expectations theory ill-equipped to account for the social dimensions of expectation formation.

If the rational expectations hypothesis falls on the calculable risk side of Knight’s famous distinction between risk and uncertainty, it was Keynes (Reference Keynes1936) who prominently incorporated the significance of fundamental uncertainty – the idea that some futures are not merely unknown but unknowable and incomputable even in probabilistic terms – into macroeconomic theory. However, as Hodgson (Reference Hodgson1988) has argued, a key weakness of Keynes’ approach is that it leaves the formation of expectations unexplained. Expectations are simply treated as exogenous to the model.Footnote ¹

This limitation was taken up by Shackle (Reference Shackle1972), who shifted attention to the formation of expectations as a subjective and imaginative process. For Shackle, economic actors hypothesise about the future outcomes of present actions, engaging in a creative act shaped by radical uncertainty. Rather than looking to the social or institutional environment, however, Shackle located expectation formation in the internal world of individual thought. He argued that expectations necessarily involve freedom of choice – and since economic choice is never about what is already given in the present, it must be exercised in relation to imagined possibilities. As he writes: ‘Choice is amongst things which do not yet exist except in thought’ (Shackle, Reference Shackle1972, 365). In this view, expectations are not responses to information but creative and imaginative acts that reach beyond calculable probabilistic futures.

While Shackle’s radical subjectivismFootnote ² had little lasting impact on mainstream economics, it was taken up enthusiastically by the Austrian economist Ludwig Lachmann. Lachmann incorporated Shackle’s insights – alongside Hayek’s (Reference Hayek1937) demonstration that equilibrium outcomes presuppose the convergence of individual expectations – into his own theory of institutions (Lachmann, Reference Lachmann1971, Reference Lachmann1994). According to Lachmann, individuals act on the basis of plans formed in their minds, and these plans are inherently subjective. The central problem, then, is how coordination is possible amid a multitude of subjective plans. Lachmann’s answer is that, through interaction, some plans become stabilised and crystallise into institutions. These institutions function as signposts: shared reference points that allow individuals to orient themselves toward one another and coordinate their actions. In this sense, institutions emerge through the interactive process in which subjective plans and expectations clash – analogous to the emergence of prices through market processes. Like prices, institutions are heuristics individuals use to navigate the world despite the subjectivity of their expectations (Dekker, Reference Dekker, D’Amico and Martin2022).

However, it remains unclear how these subjective plans are to be studied. While Lachmann rightly emphasises the endogeneity of expectations and directs economists toward the study of intersubjective meaning structures to understand the interpretive frameworks within which individual plans are formulated, his theory of expectations nevertheless leaves the core concept rather obscure. The subjective formation of plans is acknowledged but not systematically analysed. Importantly, in Lachmann’s account, institutions are not necessary for expectation formation. Expectations originate in individual minds and are formed independently of institutions, which emerge only later as stabilising aids to orientation and coordination. Institutions, in this view, are outcomes of interaction among subjective plans, not constitutive elements of the expectation formation process itself.

Koppl (Reference Koppl2002) builds on Lachmann’s radical subjectivist framework but seeks to develop a more systematic account of expectation formation. Rather than assuming that expectations arise solely from internal psychological processes – as in the Keynes-Shackle tradition – Koppl proposes that expectations are of a dual nature. On the one hand, expectations are thoughts, what he terms cognitive expectations, and as such, they remain unpredictable and idiosyncratic, although they can be studied from an intersubjective perspective, drawing on the work of Schutz (Reference Schutz1967). On the other hand, expectations can also manifest as propensities to act, or acognitive expectations, which can indeed be predictable when shaped by institutional constraints such as market competition. In this way, Koppl establishes a more direct link between institutions and expectations: institutions are not merely heuristics or points of orientation, but structures that actively shape which expectations are likely to manifest at the individual level.

Despite this stronger emphasis on institutions, Koppl’s underlying model remains internalist: expectations originate within individual cognition and are merely shaped by the external environment. Institutions still function primarily as external constraints on internal cognitive processes. The core mechanisms of expectation formation remain located within the individual mind, while institutions serve to channel those processes in directions that produce more or less efficient aggregate outcomes. As such, expectations themselves fade into the background, and Koppl’s primary concern remains the explanation of how institutional arrangements contribute to coordination and market efficiency, rather than the analysis of expectation formation as a generative institutional process in its own right.

The recent work by Rizzo and Dold (Reference Rizzo and Dold2025) offers a further development of the Austrian subjectivist framework by grounding expectation formation in a richer psychological model of learning and adaptation based on the work of Hayek. Interestingly, while Koppl relies on Hayek’s ideas to derive an acognitive evolutionary account of institutional selection, Rizzo and Dold use Hayek’s theoretical psychology to provide a cognitive account of how expectations are formed. Drawing on Hayek’s theory of the mind and the predictive processing framework developed by Clark (Reference Clark2016), they emphasise that expectations are not static beliefs but the evolving products of a cognitive system that continually classifies and reclassifies experience through interaction with a complex environment. Error and adaptation play a central role in this process, since goal achievement requires action, and any action entails the risk of error. As individuals act and make errors, ‘old neural patterns tend to weaken, while new ones are formed resulting in a new ‘model’ with a revised set of expectations’ (Rizzo and Dold, Reference Rizzo and Dold2025, 4). The process of learning through errors takes precedence over any particular expression of expectation, because, as they put it, ‘the surprise produced by the divergence between the gap between the individual’s strong belief (expectation) and reality focuses attention on the problem in the first place and then on what has been learned’ (ibid.). They thus locate the problem of expectations squarely within the broader epistemic challenge of knowledge acquisition: their theory is best understood as a model of the evolutionary process through which knowledge – and expectations – are formed.

A key element in Rizzo and Dold’s approach to expectation formation is the explicit recognition that cognition is not confined to individual mind: institutions function as ‘thought aids’, external structures that amplify and extend individual cognitive capacities. Nonetheless, their framework ultimately remains internalist in its basic architecture. Expectation formation continues to be understood as an internal cognitive process, an adaptive reclassification of mental models in response to prediction errors. Institutions, albeit acknowledged as cognitive supports, are still treated as external aids to the process of learning, rather than as constitutive elements of the expectation formation process itself. As with Koppl, the main focus remains on how institutions help individuals overcome cognitive limitations and form more adaptive expectations. What remains missing in the subjectivist perspective is an account that treats institutions not merely as channels through which expectations are formed, but as the very conditions of possibility for expectation formation itself.

A step in this direction is offered by a recent account that seeks to explain the relationship between knowledge acquisition, human action, and the unfolding of time: the account of creative evolution based on the theory of the adjacent possible (Devereaux, Koppl and Kauffman, Reference Devereaux, Koppl and Kauffman2024). Here, the emphasis is not on learning through trial and error but on the growth of knowledge through the discovery of new alternatives to existing uses of things. These existing uses are defined by the combination of all the possibilities that an individual has at a given point in time, and the pattern of beliefs that the individual relies on to interpret this world of possibilities. The central challenge, then, is to explain how innovation and knowledge expand over time. Unlike traditional accounts that locate creativity within the mind of the individual, Deveraux et al. (Reference Devereaux, Koppl and Kauffman2024) propose a model in which novelty arises through the interplay between agent and environment in a creatively evolving system. As they write, ‘[w]hile innovations can be generated through imagination and introspection, additional paths through the adjacent possible are only traversable via interaction’ (506). If new ideas are to lead to innovation, they must be socially and economically coordinated. Institutions, in this view, act as focal points for recognising and stabilising innovation: they ‘emerge in creatively evolving systems as islands of agreement in a sea of disagreement’ (508).

This account moves beyond radical subjectivism by embedding innovation in a dynamic system, offering a compelling model of how ideas evolve through interaction. Yet even here, a crucial assumption remains unexamined: that actors naturally relate to the future as a space of open-ended possibility and continual knowledge growth. In Devereaux et al.’s account, this exploratory stance toward the future is treated as a universal feature of agency. But as Beckert (Reference Beckert2016) has argued, this is not a neutral or timeless condition – it is a specific temporal orientation tied to a particular institutional setting: the capitalist order. Beckert’s analysis of how capitalism enforces a forward-looking temporal logic offers a crucial point of departure. It marks the first building block for the theory developed in the following section.

3. Enactivism and temporal affordances: institutions as conditions for temporal orientation

This section develops the enactivist foundation of the framework by building on and extending recent work on institutions and temporal orientation. It begins with Beckert’s account of how capitalism structures expectations and then shifts to an enactivist theory of temporal affordances grounded in practice-based engagement.

Beckert (Reference Beckert2016) explicitly links institutions and temporal orientations, observing that ‘economic orders are characterised by distinct temporal orders’ (33). While the direction of causality is not always fully determined, Beckert suggests that it primarily runs from institutions to temporal orientations, arguing that ‘the capitalist economy institutionalises specific systemic pressures that enforce a temporal orientation toward future economic opportunities and risks’ (3–4). He demonstrates how the capitalist system – through the specific institutionalisation of competition and credit – shapes actors’ orientation toward the future. Competition compels firms to continually introduce new products, while credit both enables and enforces economic growth, since borrowed money must be repaid with interest, thereby creating a structural demand for increasing profits. As he notes, ‘economic and social competition and the financial system create both opportunities and a systematic demand for dynamic change, which forces actors to pursue the economic opportunities to be found in imagined futures’ (4). This institutional dynamic leads Beckert to introduce the concept of fictional expectations: ‘actors’ images of how the world will look at a future point in time’ (35–6). Crucially, fictional expectations are not probabilistic forecasts, but projections that function as navigational devices in the face of fundamental uncertainty. In Beckert’s account, actors rely on fictional expectations not because they offer reliable predictions, but because they enable purposive orientation in a future that cannot be known in advance.

Although the notion of expectation as an image suggests an internalist perspective, Beckert defines them as discursively constituted social phenomena. However, because these expectations are still understood as internal shared-mental models, they are ultimately only influenced by external factors such as advertising, media, or political discourse. The formation of expectations still takes place within individual minds, albeit within institutionally structured discursive contexts. As Beckert himself emphasises, ‘discourses […] take place in the context of cultural or institutional frames, which actors use to interpret the economic world, and which inform their expectations’ (13). The institutional environment, then, sets the horizon and direction of economic action, while actors construct fictional expectations to navigate within it. This retains the bulk of the explanatory weight on the internal mental processes. Beckert’s concept of fictional expectations rightly emphasises the imaginative and socially constituted nature of expectations under uncertainty. However, it treats all such expectations as variants of a single category that differs only in content, without distinguishing the different institutional conditions that give rise to divergent orientations toward the future, which differ not only in content but in what kinds of futures they render available and actionable.

As the discussion so far has shown, most existing accounts in both economics and economic sociology remain shaped by an internalist lens. This representationalist view, in which perception and action are preceded by the internal cognitive processing, has been challenged by Gibson’s(Reference Gibson1979) theory of affordances. Gibson argued that perception is direct – meaning that perception and action are not mediated by inference but are entangled from the start. The concept of affordance refers to the possibilities for action that an environment offers to an agent, depending both on the agent’s capabilities and the structure of the environment (Chemero, Reference Chemero2003). For example, to a human, a door handle affords pulling or pushing depending on its shape and orientation; we grasp and use it not by first reasoning through what kind of movement is required, but because its form is immediately intelligible as inviting a specific kind of interaction. Crucially, affordances are not purely subjective. As Pezzulo and Cisek (Reference Pezzulo and Cisek2016) emphasise, they are ‘objective in the sense that they do not depend on whether the agent perceives them, attends to them, or chooses to act on them’ (415). In the case of physical affordances, this objectivity stems from a functional fit between the embodied features of the organism and the material features of the environment. In the case of institutional and social affordances, by contrast, objectivity arises from intersubjectively shared understandings that shape how the world appears to actors as preinterpreted and ready for action (Gallagher, Reference Gallagher2013; Rietveld and Kiverstein, Reference Rietveld and Kiverstein2014; see also Remic, Reference Remic2021).

The idea that interacting with the institutional environment is at the core of cognitive processes has recently been proposed in economics in the form of the enactivist account of cognitive institutions (Petracca and Gallagher, Reference Petracca and Gallagher2020; Frolov, Reference Frolov2023, Reference Frolov2024). Proponents of this view have critically responded to the more established understanding of the cognitive role of institutions as shared-mental models (Denzau and North, Reference Denzau and North1994; Clark, Reference Clark1997). They argue that the shared-mental-models approach does not fully capture the fundamentally social nature of economic action, as it remains wedded to an internalist model of cognition.Footnote ³ Cognition is not a process confined to the individual brain but is necessarily extended to include both external artefacts (such as notebooks and calculators), as well as other people and institutions (Slors, Reference Slors2020). Drawing on the concept of the socially extended mind (Gallagher, Reference Gallagher2013), the enactivist perspective emphasises the central role of engagement through practice in bringing cognitive processes into being (Petracca and Gallagher, Reference Petracca and Gallagher2025). This engagement is made possible through the opportunities for action afforded by what are called cognitive institutions (Petracca and Gallagher, Reference Petracca and Gallagher2020). The central claim is the entanglement of action and cognition: in order for cognition to occur, affordances must be acted upon. In this sense, institutions are best understood as environments that afford the co-constitution of particular forms of cognitive activity in the first place. For example, the legal system does not merely constrain behaviour or facilitate coordination. Rather, it enables legal reasoning itself – an extended cognitive activity that becomes available only through participation in practices such as drafting contracts, interpreting statutes, or proclaiming judgments (Gallagher, Reference Gallagher2013).

This view can be extended to the domain of temporal cognition – how we relate to and engage with time and the future. Following the enactivist account of socially extended cognition, I argue that temporal cognition is likewise enacted through interaction with institutional temporal affordances. It does not require a separate cognitive step of internal representation but enters into action much more directly. Rather than individuals forming expectations first and then acting upon them, expectation formation arises through engagement with institutional environments that structure how the future can be related to in the first place. In this view, the orientation towards the future is not primarily inferred, but co-constituted by temporal affordances, or institutionally structured action possibilities that shape how people relate to the future. Just as a physical affordance – like a door handle – invites particular form of bodily action, temporal affordances invite particular modes of temporal orientation. Institutions establish these affordances through rules, norms, and practices, making some futures more actionable, more imaginable, or more meaningful than others.

It is important to note that not all affordances are temporal affordances. While all actions unfold in time, temporal affordances refer specifically to those features of the institutional environment that shape how actors relate to the future – that is, how the future becomes available as open, constrained, urgent, predictable, or indeterminate. In this sense, temporal affordances are a distinct subclass of affordances, not reducible to action possibilities that merely happen to occur in time. This is analogous to how Rietveld, de Haan and Denys (Reference Rietveld, de Haan and Denys2013) characterise social affordances – such as a friend’s sad face inviting comforting behaviour – as a subcategory of affordances that operate specifically within shared social interaction. Similarly, a deadline is not just a cue for task execution – it reconfigures temporal experience. It affords planning, prioritisation, and pacing, but more importantly, it compresses the temporal horizon, heightens urgency, and narrows the perceived openness of the future. It shapes not only what can be done, but how the future is inhabited as the deadline draws near.

A similar structuring dynamic operates in economic settings. Consider the institution of interest rates. Interest, in economic terms, is the reward for waiting – compensation for deferring consumption or investment into the future, thereby incentivising economic dynamism and growth. But this waiting is not a purely psychological disposition; it depends on institutional conditions that render the future actionable, stable, and worth engaging. Low interest rates, in particular, presuppose a situation in which actors are both willing and able to defer gratification. This motivation to abstain is afforded by a long-term outlook, a relatively closed and predictable future, and a general sense that the future is promising or secure. In this sense, interest rates are not merely prices that reflect time preferences; they are institutional mechanisms that structure the very ability to form and sustain future-oriented expectations (see also Zelizer Reference Zelizer1978 on life insurance reconfiguring temporal and moral orientations toward death and future provision). They afford – or withhold – particular temporal orientations depending on how institutional arrangements shape actors’ capacity to defer, anticipate, and commit to future outcomes. While low interest rates are often interpreted as signs of economic stagnation or weak investment demand, they can also reflect an institutional condition in which long-term commitment is possible and engagement with a stable and secure future is structurally enabled. This illustrates how expectations emerge through engagement with institutional structures that shape temporal orientation.

In other words, expectations do not arise in a vacuum; they are formed within modes of relating to the future. These modes are not internally generated but emerge through interaction with institutional environments. While it is widely acknowledged that institutions shape expectations, this is often reduced to an information problem: institutions are seen as filtering or providing knowledge relevant to future outcomes. But this framing overlooks a more fundamental point: for an expectation to form at all, there must already be a structured relationship to the future. This may seem trivial at first glance, but it is not. As Beckert (Reference Beckert2016) has demonstrated, relationships to the future are not uniform but vary systematically across institutional contexts. What explains this variation? I argue that it stems from differences in institutional environments, specifically in the temporal affordances they offer. Institutions do not merely channel information; they configure how the future is encountered – what and how can be expected, hoped for, anticipated, or considered possible. These temporal affordances make certain modes of expectation thinkable and actionable in the first place.

The framework developed here builds on Beckert’s account by generalising it and extending it into a more enactivist direction. Beckert embeds his argument in a broader historical shift: whereas capitalism is defined by an orientation toward an uncertain and open-ended future, premodern societies were characterised by more cyclical or teleological relationships to time. Capitalism marks a radical break – it destabilises fixed horizons and renders the future a site of possibility, risk, and economic necessity. While Beckert frames these dynamics primarily as a macro-historical transformation in economic life, I argue that they are not confined to grand shifts in historical development. On the contrary, these dynamics are continuously enacted in ordinary institutional settings.

In this sense, institutions are understood as necessary but not sufficient conditions for the formation of expectations. They are necessary because they provide the structured conditions under which expectations become possible. But they are not sufficient, because expectation formation also depends on situated engagement: actors must engage with these affordances through practice. Expectations emerge not from internal deliberation alone, but through this interplay between institutional structure and embodied action.

This marks a crucial departure from constraint- and imagination-based accounts. While these approaches rightly emphasise that institutions shape how actors relate to the future, they tend to locate expectation formation outside of action itself. Constraint-based theories stress how institutions limit the space of imaginable or realistic futures. Imagination-based theories highlight subjective and creative future-thinking, often conditioned by institutional frames. But both treat institutions primarily as external filters that shape what actors mentally project. The enactivist perspective shifts the focus: it examines how practice-based, embodied engagement with institutional temporal affordances enacts particular temporal orientations. The question is not only what actors imagine or are allowed to imagine, but how certain futures come to feel obvious, inevitable, or taken for granted – whether welcomed, resisted, or endured. As the next section shows, specific configurations of these affordances give rise to heterogeneous modes of expectation.

4. The dynamics of temporal engagement: institutional temporal affordances and modes of expectation

As argued so far, the concept of temporal affordances helps illuminate how institutions shape the very conditions under which expectations emerge. To clarify this process, this section introduces a framework consisting of four dimensions of temporal affordances: (i) horizon, (ii) openness, (iii) grounding, and (iv) valence. Each dimension captures a different aspect of how institutions shape actors’ relationship to the future: how far into the future possibilities extend, how flexible or determined the future appears, on what basis expectations are established, and how expectations are affectively experienced.

We should take note that these dimensions of temporal affordances are not normative categories. The notion of enabling can refer to both a capacity to do something and the capacity to avoid something. These can both be adaptive and supportive, and there is nothing inherently better about a long versus short temporal horizon, for example.Footnote ⁴ Each dimension plays a constitutive role in shaping the emergent expectation formation. Together, they structure distinct patterns of temporal orientation, which I refer to as modes of expectation.

The framework of temporal affordances systematises insights from the anthropological work on temporal orientations by Bryant and Knight in their book The Anthropology of the Future (2019).Footnote ⁵ They emphasise the significance of people’s relationships to time and the future, noting that the world around us ‘engages us in temporal orientations of differing depth and urgency’ (1–2). For example, a spilled coffee evokes a different temporality than the notes of the unfinished project on my desk – and both of them differ from the broader collective forms of temporality, such as those invoked by the political discussions of the European Union’s ongoing project of integration and expansion. Bryant and Knight argue that the core problem is epistemic: ‘the limit of knowledge defined by the future shapes perception of the familiarity of everyday life’ (19). In other words, how we orient ourselves towards the future affects how and what we know in the present, which in turn shapes our understanding of the world around us.

While Bryant and Knight call for a renewed focus in anthropology on temporal orientations, I suggest that economics, too, would benefit from a more nuanced recognition of the epistemic role institutions play in shaping how the future becomes actionable through different ways of relating to it. We now turn to each of the dimensions of temporal affordances.

5. Comparative institutional analysis and the varieties of expectations

The fact that different institutional settings offer distinct configurations of temporal affordances – each shaping the kinds of expectations they enable – raises a broader question: how do institutional contexts differ in the modes of expectation they afford, and what are the implications of this variation? This question points to a promising direction for comparative research. Beckert and Suckert (Reference Beckert and Suckert2021) observe that, while there is increasing recognition of the connection between expectations and institutional structures, this is, however, ‘hardly ever done in a truly comparative or historical perspective’. They call for ‘studies that account for […] “varieties of future expectations,”’ emphasising the need ‘to investigate variance in expectations based on a comparison of different institutional setups’ (Beckert and Suckert, Reference Beckert and Suckert2021, 17).

The framework developed here offers a foundation for precisely the kind of comparative analysis Beckert and Suckert call for – one that begins not with individual beliefs but with the institutional structuring of temporal orientations. It provides not only a conceptual tool for understanding expectation formation, but a practical lens for studying how different societies, sectors, or historical periods cultivate distinct relationships to the future. In this light, comparative institutional analysis becomes a study not only of incentives or norms, but of how time itself is organised, experienced, and made available for action. This analysis can be carried out both across different institutional forms as well as within a single institutional arrangement, as the examples below illustrate. Temporal affordances offer a way to understand institutional diversity in terms of how individuals, through acting and interacting within specific environments, come to relate to the future – and how that enacted future, in turn, shapes outcomes in the present.

This opens up a range of empirical and comparative research directions. As already indicated, one could examine how different arrangements within labour market institutions – such as tenured positions or precarious postdoctoral contracts – enact different temporal orientations, shaping how workers relate to planning, work organisation, risk, and career development. The four dimensions could serve as a coding scheme for the analysis of written contracts or the ethnographic observation of workplace practices, enabling comparison across job types or institutional contexts in different countries. For example, a tenured position affords a long horizon, low to moderate openness (with clearly defined tasks but some room for exploration), institutionally given grounding (through integration into formal structures of evaluation and promotion), and a positive valence (linked to security and developmental trajectory). By contrast, postdoctoral positions, while similar in professional form, afford a shorter horizon, greater openness (more variable tasks, less predictable outcomes), a weaker and more projective grounding (less embeddedness in the institutional structure), and a negative valence (associated with uncertainty, precarity, and limited vision forward).

As shown in the previous section, even seemingly minor differences in institutional design can enact structurally distinct relationships to the future. Variation along the four dimensions of temporal affordance gives rise to meaningful differences in how people act, plan, and navigate uncertainty. By isolating one dimension at a time while holding others constant, we can more clearly observe how each dimension shapes patterns of engagement, action, and motivation – and how these patterns, in turn, inform institutional dynamics and economic and behavioural outcomes. The following four paired cases offer simple but instructive illustrations:

1. A) Job duration (horizon)

   Two positions that differ only in contract length. A short-term contract encourages immediate outputs, risk aversion, and higher turnover. A long-term contract, by contrast, enables long-term planning, deeper investment in work, and delayed gratification – often leading to greater continuity and a different quality of outcomes.

2. B) Startup success metrics (openness)

   Two startup incubators with similar resources and timelines but different definitions of success. One offers flexible, evolving metrics and supports pivoting; this encourages experimentation and creative adaptation. The other enforces rigid scaling benchmarks, favouring conformity, speed, and predictable results.

3. C) Grant selection criteria (grounding)

   Two grant programmes that differ only in how they evaluate applicants. One is grounded in past academic performance, encouraging retrospective framing and emphasising proven credentials. The other is grounded in projected entrepreneurial potential, prompting applicants to highlight future promise and take narrative risks. The shift in grounding changes not only who applies, but also how applicants present themselves.

4. D) Welfare programme framing (valence)

   Two structurally identical welfare programmes, but with different normative framings. One is presented as empowering and opportunity-enabling; the other as disciplinary and based on assumptions of dependency. Although the material benefits are the same, the positive or negative valence enacts different temporal orientations: in one, recipients come to engage the future as open and actionable; in the other, as constrained and predetermined.

Another promising avenue for comparison is how institutional responses to external shocks are shaped by underlying temporal orientations. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed significant variation in temporal orientations across societal roles: front-line workers, business owners, and state representatives often operated with conflicting temporal horizons and priorities. The capacity to negotiate these divergent orientations may be an important factor explaining broader institutional resilience under conditions of crisis. In both cases, what is at stake is not merely coordination or resource allocation, but institutional structuring of how actors relate to time and the future.

Comparative analysis can also reveal surprising affinities between institutions that differ in form or ideology. As Timothy Snyder (Reference Snyder2018) argues, both authoritarian regimes and technocratic liberal democracies can suppress plural engagements with the future – albeit through different mechanisms. Certain authoritarianisms, through what he calls the politics of eternity, invoke a mythic cycle of repetition that denies the possibility of meaningful change. Technocratic liberal democracies, by contrast, often promote the politics of inevitability, a single narrative of progress in which ‘the details will sort themselves out for the better’ (Snyder, Reference Snyder2018, 8). Despite their differences, both institutional setups proclaim the end of history, suppress the potential for transformation, and diminish space for uncertainty and contestation. The value of the temporal affordances framework is that it makes such similarities more explicit. Both systems may offer a long horizon, a closed sense of openness, and a projective – but predetermined – relation to the future. What differs is the valence: one enacts a tragic loop, the other a complacent optimism. This demonstrates that institutional diversity in form does not necessarily entail diversity in temporal orientation. Comparative research into temporal affordances thus enables not only the study of variation but the detection of convergent patterns in how time is structured and rendered actionable.