In the ‘future of work’ in particular and organizations more generally, the future is a ubiquitous companion and serves as a key point of orientation for actions. However, at the same time, the future is elusive, as its open-endedness undermines attempts to fully predict and ‘manage’, but also examine this temporal mode. In response to the intricate challenge of exploring the role of the future in organizations, we argue that practice theory can help us gain a deeper understanding of how organizational actors engage with the future. By revisiting key principles of practice theory and their relationships with time and the future, we propose to explore ‘future work’, i.e., the situationally enacted, performative, heterogeneous, and relationally entwined bundle of practices through which organizational actors engage with events that are to come. We conclude by discussing the implications of gaining a practice-based understanding of the future in organizations and suggest avenues for future research.

The conclusion sums up the findings of the study and suggests new directions for future research.

This chapter examines the formidable challenges that remain in transparency research, not least due to the rapid evolution of technology. This chapter highlights four areas of challenges: methodological challenges that call for new methods for transparency research; open research questions related to existing systems; research questions related to new and emerging systems such as the internet of things; and challenges related to systems that are pervasively embedded into real-world systems and infrastructure, such as smart cites.