Foreseeing is believing: How roleplaying mechanism mobilizes present course of actions for future goals?

Organizational research has increasingly recognized the importance to explore how practitioners construct a continuity between the present and the future (Garud et al., 2014; Flammer and Bansal, 2017; Augustine et al., 2019). This stream of literature illustrates diverse perspectives such as wayfinding, foreseeing, and perfect future making with regard to how practitioners perceive the future (Tsoukas and Shepherd, 2004a, 2004b; Chia and Holt, 2006, 2009; Comi and Whyte, 2018). Given the uncertain and ambiguous nature of future goals, it is not clear how to orient people’s present actions toward these goals.

For instance, village revitalization is an ongoing social change movement in China with an aim to reduce the income disparity and social inequality between the urban and rural area, bringing prosperity to the millions of vacant villages with marginalized groups of women, children, and the elderly. This is a typical future goal, as the involved grand challenges are abstract; hard to define, delineate, and operate; and seek long-term, systemic solutions. “It might remain as a dream as all the talented people in the villages have been relocated to the cities” (quotation from Zhanwu Guo, Yuan village). Given the general public are mostly short-termism, how can they be motivated to take present actions to pursue abstract sustainable development goals if they are not yet aware of what these goals look like? To bring a dream to reality, practitioners may use analogies and metaphors to legitimate their ideas and frame opportunities about the future (Cornelissen and Clarke, 2010; Augustine et al., 2019) and leverage certain mechanisms to foster present actions toward the future goals.

This study aims to fill this gap by exploring the underpinning concretization mechanism that helps to generate concreteness and credibility of the abstract future goals to generate “as-if” realities, which mobilizes present course of actions. According to the construal-level theory (Liberman and Trope, 1998; Augustine et al., 2019, p. 1935), “when abstract futures become represented through increasingly concrete and detailed concepts, they will be seen as nearer and hence more actionable.” The concreteness of a future goal enhances with a closer association with experiential reality. Such a cognitively transformation of an abstract future goal may generate “as-if” realities to a great extent that eventually triggers course-making. Course-making is distinctive from sensemaking or cognition, as it is about being and doing, seeks behavioral changes of the practitioners, making them walking the talks, and taking a more active present stance that goes beyond discourse, learning, or capacity building to take present actions. I ask, how does concretization mechanism influence the transition pathways for practitioners to take present course of actions for the future?

To address this question, I used an inductive approach and followed a process research exemplified by Langley (1999) to trace the revitalization effort of a pioneering village named Yuan in Shaanxi Province of China. The practitioners successfully mobilized the villagers’ present course of actions to pursue food safety goal, leveraging rural eco-tourism to bring prosperity to community members. Food safety is an abstract future goal, as related problems, characterized by ambiguity and uncertainty, are deeply rooted in social, policy, and market systems, extending beyond a single party’s existing knowledge and experience. To bring such a future goal to reality needs certain concretization mechanism that gives concrete meaning to the abstract future, turning imaginings into a realizable course of action.

Building on Yuan village’s pursuit of food safety future goals, I inductively reveal roleplaying as a concretization mechanism that mobilizes present course of actions. Roleplaying refers to the practitioners’ acting out as safe food producers and position themselves in the ideal future state to generate “as-if” realities; then working backward to fill the gap with discursive practices, capacity building, and present actions. These findings advance the organizing for the future literature by shifting attention from the cognitive work, by which practitioners make sense of the future to the practical work related to the practitioners’ course-making. Given that most future goals are complex and grand-scale challenges, to effectively engage practitioners to pursue these future goals have significant policy and practical implications.

Organizing for the future literature cognitively articulates an imagined future that have implications toward present action or choices (Pitsis et al., 2003). These studies discuss wayfinding, foreseeing, and future perfect thinking perspectives through which practitioners perceive the future (Comi and Whyte, 2018). They differ as to their mode in navigation through the uncertainties of the future, their emphasis on the present and past, whether having a passive or active attitude, taking indirect or direct action, or adopting a building or a dwelling mode (Tsoukas and Shepherd, 2004a, 2004b; Chia and Holt, 2006, 2009; Comi and Whyte, 2018). Specifically, wayfinding focuses on spontaneous actions and allows for a more experiential awareness of practitioners’ struggles with the uncertainties posed by the future (Chia and Holt, 2006, 2009; Nayak and Chia, 2011; Sarpong et al., 2013). In contrast, foreseeing “emphasize cognition, deliberation and purposeful action as the primary (if not the only) ways of dealing with the future” (Comi and Whyte, 2018, p. 1058). It highlights a pragmatist perspective, an active present focus which is realized by engaging in discursive practices and organizational learning (Berends and Antonacopoulou, 2014) with prospective and retrospective sensemaking (Weick et al., 2005).

Related to foreseeing, a few active foresight research emerged in the 1960s to guide business planning, forecasting (Godet and Roubelat, 1996), and strategic decision-making (Miller and Waller, 2003), which include scenarios (Wright, 2005), simulation, and roleplaying games (Linstone and Turoff, 1975). Scenarios can be viewed as prospective sensemaking devices to see “multiple plausible alternatives constructed as narratives with the aim of providing frameworks within which assumptions and key decisions can be wind funneled” (Wright, 2005, p. 87). Roleplaying games are constrained to the realm of imagination and use perspective-taking to foresee the outcome of conflicting interactions (Armstrong, 2001; Green, 2002), thus enabling a more nuanced understanding of the complex processes unfolded in the future that empowers social interaction (Orazi and Cruz, 2018).

Contrary to foresight research, future perfect thinking scholars take similar active stance toward the future, but instead of navigating forward as foreseeing, it navigates backward from the ideal future state and brings the imaginings of the future into the present (Comi and Whyte, 2018). Drawing on the early work of Schütz (1967) and Weick (1979), this perspective “projects an ideal state of things and works out retrospectively the paths that may lead to such future” (Comi and Whyte, 2018, p. 1057). In line with this perspective, backcasting is a future planning approach proposed by Robinson (1990) to set a desirable future using normative visioning) and then work backward to identify what measures or actions are required to achieve the end goal (Timilsina et al., 2020). These perspectives and approaches recognize the importance of creating a desired state in the future that gives meaning to the present action. Yet, they did not explain how these aspects can inspire a realizable present course of action to make the future into being.

Temporal construal-level theory (Liberman and Trope, 1998; Trope and Liberman, 2003; Berntsen and Bohn, 2010) suggests that futures that are represented as more psychologically near are construed in more concrete terms, using more detailed situational features, while distant futures are construed in more abstract terms, using more stylized essential features of a situation (Liberman and Trope, 1998; Trope and Liberman, 2003; Berntsen and Bohn, 2010). Augustine et al. (2019, p. 1934) adopted this theory to distinguish the distant future and near future, which has implications toward to the present actions. This perspective posits that the more distant a future event, the more likely it is construed on a higher level by using more abstract features, that it is linked to the belief systems, and evaluated on their desirability; in contrast, futures that are represented as more psychologically near are construed in more concrete terms, used more detailed situational features, and are evaluated on their feasibility (Liberman and Trope, 1998; Trope and Liberman, 2003; Berntsen and Bohn, 2010; Augustine et al., 2019). Distant futures in general do not guide behavior very well, as it generates less urgency toward action (and instead engender more procrastination; Augustine et al., 2019).

To guide present course of actions, the practitioners need to move the distant future nearer to incentivize present actions. The enabling of this transitional process requires a certain concretization mechanism that helps to make the abstract future goals more actionable and credible, creating a closer association with the experiential reality. Such concretization mechanism helps to generate “as-if” realities, so that the practitioners can take the future seriously enough to consider its possible consequences including perceived benefits and the human agencies’ role in goal pursuits or expressions of identity. Due to the way that the future goals were cognitively construed, gaining as-if reality for the future goals is a challenge. Thus, in order to mobilize present course of actions, it is important to explore mechanism through which future goals can be moved closer to enhance concreteness and generate “as-if” realities.

In explaining the concretization mechanism, I drew upon the “acting as if” technique developed by Alfred Adler in the 1920s to identify roleplaying as a concretization mechanism. Alfred was influenced by German philosopher Hans Vaihinger’s (2014) book The Philosophy of As If to explore the power of exercising mental fictions, using “acting as-if” therapeutic technique to encourage a more proactive stance, practicing alternatives to dysfunctional behaviors. Extending this notion from psychological treatment to the field of strategy, practitioners may unconsciously or consciously act out an adopted role, imitating confidence, competence, and an optimistic mindset, in order to realize seek qualities or future goals. Relate to competence building, I drew upon Ansell’s (2011) pragmatism perspective, which involves evolutionary learning and dynamic capacity building through “continuous inquiry, reflection, deliberation and experimentation” (p. 5) to continually redefine definition that guides present actions.

My study aims to elaborate the mechanisms that help to mobilize present course of actions in pursuing future goals. I adopt an intensive case study approach, as qualitative research is an appropriate means of examining the contextualization, unconventional approaches, and effective processes (with deep engagement over time; Maguire et al., 2004). My data collection and analytic approach follow a process research suggested by Langley (1999), explaining how and why “discrete events and states” (Elsbach and Sutton, 1992, p. 708) evolve over time. Data collection consists of events, activities, choices, routines, and practices that emerge chronologically across time (Barley, 1990; Langley, 1999). To show how the practitioners practice positioning themselves in the ideal future state and working backwards to fill the gap, I adopt a diachronic approach to track the evolution of the future goal framing and the practices or actions adopted by the practitioners over time in pursuing a future goal.

From 2007 to 2017, approximately 25–30 pioneering villages in China successfully undertook village revitalization efforts to bring prosperity to the rural farmers. I joined a team of nine interdisciplinary scholars in 2018 to jointly investigate seven of these pioneering villages located in the poorest northwestern part of China challenged by severe poverty and income disparity. Among these pioneering villages, I selected Yuan village in Shaanxi Province as my study case as it was the most successful intervention of village revitalization in the nation. In 2007, Zhanwu Guo, a successful outmigrated entrepreneur and the son of the former village chief, was entrusted by the local governor to experiment rural tourism together with the villagers. What followed was a decade’s collective entrepreneurial effort that transformed Yuan village from one of China’s poorest during Mao’s rule to one of the most prosperous in the nation, advancing from an agricultural economy to a full-fledged tourism enterprise. Yuan village became recognized as a national village revitalization model, incubating over 3,000 external entrepreneurs in about 30 cooperatives, bringing over USD 0.14 billion annual income to the village (USD 20,000 per capita) (Yang, 2022).

This study built on multiple sources of data and three rounds of primary data collection to ensure richly accumulated data with breadth and depth. By perusing historical overviews of actors and events during this decade’s development and evolution, I interviewed the village leaders, villagers, and merchants who were involved in the early stage of the village’s development. To probe more nuanced views about the village’s development, I incorporated voices from the key informants and marginal groups, insiders (villagers), and the outsiders (external merchants) to ensure different views were expressed independently. Altogether 68 interviews were collected from 63 interviewees (see detailed interviewee information listed in Table 1). To avoid desirability bias, I ensured anonymity when doing the interviews. The research team also organized a food safety training seminar at the village to gain their trust. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. The length of the interviews ranged from 30 min to 4 hours, with the majority lasting for about an hour.

In parallel, I collected secondary data, including three documentaries, five TV programs, eight media reports, 17 journal publications, and three investigation reports. The data are used to generate findings and triangulate with observations from the fieldwork. I also consolidated specific aspects of the preliminary findings by returning to the same interviewees on various occasions.

During the three field study trips, I spent 5 weeks living at the village, participating in the everyday life and special events, observing its operation and varied tourism services. Following a life cycle analysis of food safety, I was able to observe how the actors were involved and interacted. A typical day in the field involved over 12 hours of interaction with informants, having tea and sharing meals together and staying in villagers’ hostels during the stay. Our research team held daily discussions to evaluate the village’s diverse initiatives, exploring what factors explained Yuan’s success compared to the other six investigated pioneering villages. All discussions were audio recorded, transcribed, and used to triangulate research findings.

To address the research question (how does concretization mechanism influence the transition pathways for practitioners to take present course of actions for the future), I employed archival data, field notes, and interview data. To build a grounded theoretical process model, I integrated Gioia et al.’s (2013) systematic, 3-step approach with Langley’s (1999) historical process approach to develop a process model that is empirically grounded. This analytical process has three distinctive steps. The first step in my historical research process approach was the chronological identification of major historical events that marked the evolution of the village. Exploratory interviews of the village in the early stage of data collection helped me to generate an overview of the evolution of the village and the local context. The village had a museum and kept memorabilia. These secondary data sources and the primary interview data helped me to identify major historical events or shifts at the village that provided impetus for change. Building on Hardy and Maguire (2010), I identify events or shifts to demarcate the array of historical events at the village. To identify the episodes when actors shifted their frames of the future goals, I looked for the critical junctures that the village expands or upgrades, and the discursive or action shifts that reveal the boundaries. This step resulted in the identification of five major shifts related to the village expansion pertaining to food safety future goals.

My second step was to search for underlying factors that induced actors to change frames of the future in each of the five shifts identified above. I leveraged data from three field trips and followed up phone interviews to look for evidence indicating if, how, and why different actors’ frames of the future and actions were shifted. At the first field trip, I kept the scope of the initial interviews broad to allow the interviewees to elaborate the development process of the village and the factors that explain Yuan village’s success (in comparison to conventional rural villages). I used open coding to analyze interview transcripts and field notes line-by-line by looking for evidence that an informant was describing their perceptions and practices related to the village’s overall revitalization effort over a decade. The initial data coding of these interviews revealed emerging pattern circling around the practitioners’ pursuit of food safety future goals. I then conducted follow-up interviews with the second field trip to ask more specific questions about the tactics and/or actions the village leveraged to realize food safety goal. I asked the informants’ roles in food safety governance, the constraints they experienced, their views of the specific tactics or mechanisms that the village adopted, and the village’s future agenda. I took the third field trip and two followed up phone interviews to validate some of the initial findings and theory, with an aim to reveal more nuances on the mechanisms that influenced the village’s pursuit of the future goals.

In this process, I built on all the interviews to develop general coding categories by seeking differences and similarities among the codes. I started to search concepts, notions, and synonyms that better describe the influencing mechanisms and outcomes that were linked to the village’s pursuit of food safety future goals. I coded each frame shift for features that exemplified extant or new mechanism in the literature. This process eventually reduced the germane categories to a more manageable number until the core category was found. This iterative process generated a generic mechanism with a series of tactics. I terminated the process when the differences between the collected data and the developed theory had become small (Langley, 1999). I reviewed the transcribed interviews and analyzed the codes twice to ensure that there were no duplicate ideas and codes.

My third step was to array these field frame shifts in temporal order and examine their interrelations and pattern. At this stage, I incorporated axial coding to reanalyze interview transcripts, field notes, and secondary data with a focus on the mechanisms and practices that facilitate the village members’ pursuit of food safety goal along the five major shifts, moving iteratively between the data and the generated categories. I attempted to generate a pattern from the interplay among the data, emergent themes, and the literature, examining the conditions, actions/interactions, and consequences of categories and making links between the ideas being conceptualized from the data. The collected data afforded me a broad picture regarding how the future goals of food safety were concretized at the village to mobilize present actions. When comparing the codes and considering the data from various future organization perspectives (e.g., concretization and “as-if” realities), a pattern emerged that demonstrated a process model that sketches the concretization mechanism that mobilizes the practitioners’ adoption of present actions toward the future goals.

My empirical findings are structured first by stage and presented as a narrative (see Table 2) and then by the identified theoretical dimensions (see Figure 1). Table 2 presents a chronology of events related to Yuan village’s pursuit of food safety. I identified five major stages related to the expansion of the village. Figure 1 summarizes the transition of future framing, the discursive practices, capacity learning, and present actions related to food safety across five stages. I organize the findings around the major shifts and key themes that emerged in that stage, which illustrates a process model of roleplaying mechanism associated with these shifts.

In 2007, Zhanwu exhibited a keen insight into the market trends, recognizing that the food safety scandals, combined with the public’s greater health awareness, would lead to a greater market demand for safe food. At that time, food poisoning incidents such as the infamous toxic milk powder scandal occurred frequently. These were associated with the widespread use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics, adding toxic ingredients in food processing, and hormones and antibiotics in the meat industry. These practices had accelerated the spread of diseases and increased food safety risk (Wang et al., 2015). In this context, about two-thirds of rural farmers in China resorted to a self-protection mechanism called “one-family-two-systems” (Lin et al., 2019): They cultivated healthy food (e.g., not treated with chemicals or fertilizer) for their own consumption while selling unsafe or lesser quality goods to strangers in the market (Xu et al., 2013). How to cultivate and prepare safe food to tourists became a big challenge. Zhanwu took the villagers on field study trips to neighboring provinces and acquired experts’ opinions. During these trips, he became aware of his village’s unique farmer-centered folk culture, which was appealing to urban residents who had nostalgic memories of traditional village life. It was under this context that “food safety” became the village’s important future goal and development direction. Together, these presented a great entrepreneurial opportunity in rural tourism for the village to offer healthy and safe produce, authentic traditional snacks, and original cultural experiences to tourists.

To start with this big goal, the village mobilized five of the 62 households to renovate their homes for use as farmhouse hostels and to organize a farming culture exhibition in the old street. They also built a food workshop street, providing a demonstration of traditional way of making spice, vinegar, handmade noodles, tofu, and other food ingredients. They aimed to create a live agricultural museum with a demonstration of their traditional livelihood. They used “food safety” to promote their rural tourism. In responding to doubts and critiques from the tourists, the practitioners explained that the village was not pursuing organic, or green, but rather original food. The village received 30,000 tourists during the first year in operation. The success encouraged more village households to join forces.

In China, many local-villager-led, small-scale rural farmhouse tourism was short-lived and unsustainable due to hostile competition and low-end homogenization. The village made a smart move in 2009 to open a Snack Food Street, providing free store spaces to invite skillful external merchants to incubate verities of original food and snacks at the village. Free rent and initial salaries motivated the merchants to relocate to the village when it had no name. They run their food businesses without pressure, focusing on enhancing food quality and taste. Realizing that “food safety” made their village unique and attractive, the village hanged a ceremonial plaque proclaiming “Yuan Village Resolutely Defends Food Safety” at the entrance to the village to demonstrate their commitment. While this sign could be symbolic, the village backed it up with a relatively strict enforcement of food safety, which included a collective procurement scheme, requiring all the merchants to buy ingredients from village food workshops and had scrutiny over food ingredients purchased outside the village. They formed a debugging team to taste all food items at the village on a regular basis, ensuring the merchants used good quality food ingredients and extracted the most original taste out of the food.

Since 2012, the village experimented a shareholding system: following up on the success of a food business it was turned into a cooperative and more investment was invited from the villagers and merchants. This was a dramatic change at the village’s management history. With this expansion, Yuan village adopted more routines to secure food safety at the village. It was required that the snacks involve traditional craftsmanship with no additives, and the merchants’ raw materials be procured at designated food workshops or stores. The shops that traded in vinegar, flour, spices, and tofu, whose basic ingredients were sourced from neighboring villages, sold the products at the shopfront, while they were processed at the back. A donkey pulling a mill that grounded red or hot peppers was, for example, used as a demonstration, after which the store sold the end products. Similar demonstrations included weavers demonstrating the 24-step procedure of traditional weaving techniques, a demonstration of traditional way of making vinegar, handmade noodles, traditional woodcarving, and so on, while mass-produced products have replaced these home-crafts and handicrafts elsewhere. The safe and original food ingredients and the vivid demonstrations of food processing encouraged tourists to shop for preserved food items to take home as souvenirs, which greatly boosted their food sales. These practices helped the food workshops in Yuan village to expand vertically, incorporating tourism service and processing into one cooperative.

Moreover, most merchants at the Snack Food Street followed a regional folk tradition to publish a “self-cursing” statement on the storefront, committing themselves to food safety. They promised safe and original ingredients under threat of being cursed with bad luck if they defaulted. These pasted self-cursing notes provided open communication with the tourists, providing detailed food supplier information and food ingredient sources. The safe and original food ingredients, and the vivid demonstration of food processing in the street enhanced trust and reputation of Yuan village’s food safety and quality, encouraging tourists to shop for preserved food items to take home as souvenirs, which greatly boosted their food sales. Yuan village started to receive 3.5 million tourists annually.

In 2015, the shareholding experiment was spread to the most lucrative Snack Food Street, turning the whole street into one big food cooperative. The success of the village developed some external merchants into millionaires, whereas the village aborigines did not share the progress. In this context, the shareholding reform not only expanded the successful food cooperatives but also allowed the village to balance diverse interests and minimize income disparity in the community. For instance, the reform allowed the aborigines to take stock of their land value to obtain about one-third of the shares from the Snack Food Street cooperative. To smooth away the resistance from the merchants regarding the shareholding reform, the village organized reflection meetings for the merchants to recognize the generous incubation support from the village. Also, the merchants were made aware that they could invest in other successful cooperatives at the village. Building on the food safety reputation, the village successfully incubated over 30 nested cooperatives, accommodating over 3,000 food-related practitioners. In this process, the villagers and the merchants were allowed to cross-participate in each other’s cooperative businesses, which bonded divergent interests in the community. The village gradually developed a collective awareness that food safety was the lifeblood of their businesses and that they had to work hard to prove, maintain, and improve this reputation.

With food safety as a core competency, the village started a “Reaching Out” strategy by developing five experience stores in the city, providing the provincial city with its high-quality and safe agricultural products. The village also developed a greater international appeal by sending villagers and merchants to study tourism management in Japan and Thailand. They brought back higher food hygienic standard and the ideas of Japanese izakaya bars, Indus cafes, and the Creative Square, thus greatly enriching the village’s tourism offerings.

Following the “Reaching Out” strategy, the village expanded their snack food to the city, opened 17 city experiential stores in total, and developed collaborative projects in nine provinces in the country. The village expanded traditional food workshops into processing plants and assigned managers to take charge of food safety and quality. The managers controlled food processing and monitored food ingredients by selecting designated procurement bases across the country. At the First China Rural Revitalization Congress hosted by the village in 2018, Zhanwu provided a road map for life cycle governance of food safety from farm to folk. He discussed the plan to develop the village’s own agricultural bases for a better source control of food ingredients. But the soil and weather condition in the neighborhood did not support such a plantation. The village then explored elsewhere to recruit trustworthy suppliers. The village’s ultimate goal was to build on their food safety competency to become a national hub of healthy agricultural and sideline food items. In doing so, the village needs to have nationwide production and processing bases and build food standards. So far, the village has developed some food standards at the provincial level.

Starting in 2018, a night school was established officially to offer regular training to the villagers and merchants to improve food safety practices and customer services. With the village becoming a national model of village revitalization, the village established a Rural Revitalization Institute to offer training to many officers, merchants, researchers, businessmen, media staff, and students who came to study the experience of Yuan village.

In summary, the village’s rural tourism business expanded steadily across five stages: inviting external merchants to open a snack street, turning successful incubated businesses into food cooperatives, using shareholding system to expand successful businesses and reconcile divergent interests, and adopting a “Reaching Out” strategy to expand business to the city and other provinces. With these expansions, the village continually scaled up by building on food safety brand and core competency.

The study reveals roleplaying as a concretization mechanism that enables the transition of abstract future goals into present course of actions. Figure 1 illustrates this transition process, explaining how an abstract future is framed as a direction and a business opportunity to start, then gradually converted into a business brand and core competency. In the process, practitioners may position themselves in the ideal future state, acting as if the goal of food safety were a reality (“as-if” reality), then working backward to fill the gap between the present and the future via discursive practices (to reconcile critiques), capacity building, and present actions. Table 3 illustrates the detailed three-step coding approach that arrives at the theoretical elements in the process model.

Frame future as an opportunity. The data reveal that the starting point to turn a future goal into a present course of action relates to how the practitioners “frame” or “position” the future. A future goal will no longer be abstract and vague when it can be framed as an “opportunity.” The interviewees were aware of the unique branding value of the village being set up as a model of food safety. “When everyone feels that food is not safe, the pursuit of food safety becomes promising” (Zhanwu). The study reveals the shifts of future framing across five stages, from vagueness to concreteness. “At the beginning, we took food safety as our goal and direction, but we did not have a clear idea how to go for it. Given more time, we started to have a better understanding how to actually achieve the goal.” Roleplaying enables the practitioners to obtain the value of the future goals upfront. Along the process, their framing of the future goal shifts from a vague direction to a concrete opportunity, continually converting the future goal into a business brand and core competency.

Generating “as-if” reality. The village had achieved a basic level of food safety at the beginning, which was a procurement control of food ingredients and transparent food processing. Yet, hanging a ceremonial “food safety” plaque at the entrance had positioned the village in the ideal future state before it had achieved this advanced level goal. Doing so enabled the practitioners to create an “as-if” reality of food safety, making themselves believe the goal was achievable, and making customers trust the safety of village’s food, which greatly boosted sales. “As-if” reality means the practitioners look as if they have reached the ideal state, yet there is a gap between the future and the present status.

Backup gap-filling practices involve a full set of linguistic discursive practices, directional discursive practices, capacity building, and present actions. First of all, the village adopted roleplaying—faked it before they made it, using linguistic discursive practices to reconcile skepticism, critiques, and raise awareness. The detailed schemes include the following:

1. Framing future as a direction, opportunity, and achievable target to link an abstract future to reality. The village recognized that the accomplishment of food safety was a long-term plan. It was a public good, which was beyond the capacity of the village. “While we have not realized food safety, our dream is to engage in it. We ultimately want to control our production and processing in a way to achieve food safety. This is our ultimate purpose.”

2. Gap recognition. Our research team questioned the village’s acting out on an ideal state of food safety before it had actually achieved the target. In response, the interviewees were quite authentic about their status, admitted that food safety might remain as a dream as the village did not have the professional knowledge and capacity at this stage. “Food safety is a complex problem, and not a single village can handle it yet.” “Farmers, as the main body of this business, do not have this kind of professionalism.” “At this stage, we cannot control whether the wheat or vegetable is organic. It is important for my generation to resolve the source control of food safety. Yet …We may not be able to break through the food safety problem eventually.”

3. Authentic and realistic about status. When questioned by the researchers about the village’s food safety status, the food cooperative merchants were quite authentic about their status in food safety. “We did not strictly control food safety. We only controlled ingredients by requesting the merchants to buy them from the village food workshops. For other food items we did not specify which store the merchants need to go to. We asked the merchants to keep the invoices so that we could source the problem in case some issues occurred.” “Merchants were not allowed to add food additives. They don’t have the intention to harm tourists.” “What we can promise now and what we can achieve at this point is: There will be no toxic or unhealthy ingredients in oil, peppers, and flour, etc. Anyway, do not have too high an expectation on us. At this stage we have to be realistic.”

4. Redefine the future goal to minimize the gap between reality and the future target. I noted that in public occasions, the village chief redefined the future goals of food safety to minimize the gap between an ideal future state and the reality. “In Yuan village, we do not declare that our food is organic, nor do we say that it is green. We can only promise that our food is original. Our farmers are very honest and down to earth. We want to present the most original taste of the local food and snacks. For that goal, we need to get the most original and good quality ingredients, and process them without adding new (chemical/toxic) additives.” Through linguistic usage, he frequently used “original” to illustrate food safety, swap concepts, moving the target closer to minimize the future-reality gap.

Discursive practices—Directional practices. Discursive practices in this case can also be demonstrated by some action-oriented directional practices to influence the evolution of ongoing practices (Tanesini, 1994). These practices include some directional efforts at the village such as awareness and consensus building on food safety, and the detailed description of a road map that leads to the future goal. Data coding demonstrates that the practitioners linguistically connect the goal and action for the purpose of awareness and consensus building. Food safety was a propaganda for consumers and a stimulus for the villagers to become aware of the importance of food safety at the village. “The village’s brand is developed upon food safety. Safe food becomes the lifeline of our business.” “Every year there are over five million tourists in Yuan village. Any food related accidents can be devastating and will destroy the village’s reputation.” The practitioners were aware of the significance of food safety to the village and the risk of noncompliance. This awareness and consensus building about food safety helped to mobilize further actions. The ceremonial plaque proclaiming “Yuan Village Resolutely Defends Food Safety” was both a goal and an action. “We are telling the tourists that it is safe to eat our food. We also want to use the slogan to mobilize the merchants to act on it, to realize the food safety goal, which is the foundation of our business.” “I don’t think it’s possible to obtain absolute food safety in China. No one can do it yet. We are closer, and our goal is to make it happen.”

Other sign of directional practices can be demonstrated by the village leader’s description of a road map of source control of food safety during a village summit in 2018. “We will check the possibility to develop a production base in the neighboring county. Our county could collaborate with other counties to grow peppers and wheat for us. However, we have not reached that stage yet. Now we must set up a task force to handle this, and the government will need to support us to coordinate these production bases. We may have a production base a few years from now. We will eventually be able to cooperate with farmers in the other counties to test the soil, decide what kind of seeds we plan to grow, what fertilizers and pesticides to use.”

Capacity building to reach the future goal. The village set up a night school to provide training of food safety and customer service to all inhabitants. Our research team helped to deliver a food safety training at this night school. According to Zhanwu, “We will do food safety according to what we claim. As for how far we are from the goal, the merchants and villagers will know better after your team provides the training. If the merchant or villager thinks he/she is far from it, then he will learn from you how to make the improvements.” The village invites role models of different business streets to share the best practices with the community. Zhanwu also used the night school to teach “empathy”: “one key aspect of resolving problems in rural areas is to check whether everyone is comfortable. You mostly have to walk in others’ shoes.” Through training and the use of metaphors, Zhanwu made the inhabitants aware of long-term thinking in sustainable tourism development, mentioning that “one sows, and another reaps”—Yuan’s future generations would benefit from their work. Zhanwu then linked this to the importance to build brand value at the initial stage, and specifically, the development of food safety governance.

In addition to night school, the village have regular night meetings for the merchants or village chiefs to discuss concerns of the customers and figured out resolutions. Such meetings were also used to mediate conflict issues among merchants and between merchants and villagers, especially during the shareholding reform. When the merchants resisted the reform, Zhanwu would not scold or instruct anybody directly; instead, he asked them to do self-reflection at the night meetings, reflecting their past experiences and comparing their lives with/without the platform of Yuan village. Some merchants left the village ended up making less money as they lose the important “food safety” brand value and customer volumes. Zhanwu and village cadres also encouraged their own and the community’s continuous learning by taking educational visits to other areas. For instance, the merchants’ hygiene standard was greatly improved after being sent for a study tour in Japan.

A present course of actions. In addition to discursive practices and capacity development, the village adopted an active stance, leveraging a series of food safety governing schemes from procurement control to transparent processing, from external enforcement to internal commitment, to minimize the future-reality gap and earn trust from the tourists and the public.

The first action relates to the village’s external process control. The steady expansion of the village posed significant governance challenges for food safety. The village adopted a trial and error approach to experiment different options and established a food governance system step-by-step, first of which was a process control implemented by external enforcement coupled with sanction. It included procurement control of ingredients and routine inspection of food taste and quality. “The village’s debugging team came to check every store’s food color, taste, delivery speed, service, quantity, quality and temperature, and helped the store to make further improvements.” According to the deputy village chief, “we do not allow food items to be stored overnight for food safety. No refrigerator is provided and merchants need to dump the leftover.” Sanction comes with the noncompliance of process control. “Non-original ingredients including MSG (sodium salt of glutamic acid) are not allowed. If the merchants violated for the first time, they had to explain in the public why they did it and how to make corrections. If violated for the second time, the merchants would be asked to leave the village.”

With the enhancement of food safety awareness, the external control was internalized to influence the merchants’ self-commitment. They would voluntarily identify trust-worthy food sources and paste detailed supplier information of food ingredients for tourists to cross-check. The village also used food processing demonstration to build trust with the tourists. I noted that the village did experiment the road map described by Zhanwu to develop own agricultural supply bases. As it was not successful as expected, the village soon replaced it with a more realistic recruitment of agricultural suppliers in the nation. The village also started to build food standards to strengthen its food safety competency and brand value. Their next goal would be to “buy from whole nation (raw material) and sell to whole nation (process using Yuan village standard and sell end products to all customers in the nation).”

In sum, the study develops a process model illustrating how a roleplaying mechanism enables the transition of an abstract future into a present course of action. With the framing of food safety future goal as a direction, business opportunity, brand, and core competency, the village extracts concrete value from the future. The acting out of the roles of safe good producers positions themselves in the ideal future state, generating “as-if” realities that mobilizes the practitioners to work backwards to fill the gap (with ideal future) via discursive practices, capacity building, and present actions.

Current research on organizing for the future has explored how practitioners make sense of the uncertain future but provides limited explanations of how practitioners are mobilized to take present course of actions for the future. This study contributes to this scholarship by presenting a process model illustrating a roleplaying mechanism that the practitioners adopt to concretize an abstract future in order to mobilize present actions. The contributions are illustrated in detail in the following.

Roleplaying as a concretization mechanism. The first contribution of the study is it provides a more nuanced account of the concreteness concept that generates “as-if” reality. Future goals are not automatically taken seriously and gaining “as-if” reality is a challenge (Augustine et al., 2019). This study illustrates how a set of practices pertaining to a roleplaying mechanism help to concretize the future goals. Specifically, from a socioeconomic perspective, the framing of future as “an opportunity” makes the future target practical and actionable. The perceived benefits of the future may allow community or business leaders to mobilize collective awareness and action in pursuing a common future goal. The acting out of the role of the future (making the public assume they have achieved the future state), coupled with authentic actions, can generate core competency and brand value for practitioners, such a faking or pretending act generates “as-if” reality, gains credits of the future prior to the actual efforts. This faking act advances the aspirational talks that tend to lead to pretense, deceit, and decoupling (Boiral, 2007). Roleplaying practitioners are authentic about their status, fake it to make it, working backward to reach the ideal state of the future. They practice what they preach, to build on “authentic values” (Leisinger, 2007), to let action follow words and to “walk the talk” (Ciulla, 2005; Christensen et al., 2013, p. 374). These roleplaying acts enhance the degree of practicality, credibility, and concreteness of the future, generating “as-if” realities to entice present actions. In some instances, the practitioners succeed in linguistically and behaviorally mingling the future and the present action to avoid critiques and allow time and space to back up the gap.

From sense-making to course-making—Advancing future-oriented organization literature. The study results contribute to the cognitive sense-making of the future such as the temporal construal theory (Trope and Liberman, 2003) and “as-if reality” concept (Augustine et al., 2019) by developing a concretization notion that relates abstract future to the present or personal experience. This notion is connected to sensory observation and the degree of practicality of the proposed actions. Along the line, the study develops a process model illustrating a roleplaying mechanism that provides concreteness and meaning (value) to an abstract future to mobilize present actions. The findings also advance Ansell (2011)’s pragmatism perspective that emphasizes learning and capacity building, as roleplaying goes beyond capacity building to take concrete actions in achieving the committed qualities or future goals.

The identified roleplaying mechanism shares similarities with prior future cognitive work, such as future perfect thinking (retrospective perspective; Comi and Whyte, 2018) and backcasting (Robinson, 1990) in that they all set a desirable future then work backward to identify actions required to achieve the end goal. Yet, future perfect thinking and backcasting remain as sensemaking devices to perceive/forecast/make plan for the future. Roleplaying mechanism goes beyond these cognitive perspectives to highlight the additional “faking it till making it” aspect, and the underpinning concretization mechanism, which illustrate why and how practitioners are motivated to take actions. Specifically, roleplaying mechanism entails a spectrum of practices, transitioning stepwise from linguistic discursive practices (reconciliation), to directional discursive practices (awareness building), to capacity building, and present actions. The practitioners may linguistically framed a future goal as a “dream” and a “public good” to obtain the understanding of the gap between the future and present and to seek compromise with the critics. Simultaneously, a future goal can be framed as a “business lifeline” to raise awareness and attention and as an “opportunity” to drive present actions. Extending beyond linguistic discursive practices, the practitioners may leverage directional discursive practices to guide future actions and in some instances may frame the future both as a goal and an action. Further the journey, the practitioners conducted learning to build capacity and take actual actions (such as building routines for process control and source control of food safety) to back up the commitment or the act-out-roles. These acts make the stakeholders believe that the future goal is present (being), or an ongoing action (becoming), or the end goal (will be), which adds concreteness and credibility to the future to generate “as-if” realities. The transition from linguistic to behavioral practices enhances public trust that the practitioners can eventually realize seek future goals.

Broader theorizing about roleplaying as a concretization mechanism. Prior studies proposed bringing the future nearer through the reduction of ambiguity and uncertainty of the future. This study extends the prior psychological and cognitive sense-making to develop a practical work, concretizing an abstract future and acting on future opportunities. The village fakes it till it makes it, treating food safety as if it were a reality and working backward to mobilize present actions to fill the gap. Even though the study is developed in a Chinese context, the roleplaying mechanism has broader practical implications for policymakers and practitioners, especially pertaining to the pursuit of United Nation Sustainable Development Goals (e.g., global warming, poverty, and inequality) that demand long-term, systemic solutions. The policymakers or practitioners could be aware of the road map toward these long-term goals, and the majority of the public are mostly driven by short-term interests. Roleplaying is very strategic in this context for the practitioners to juxtapose future and present side by side, allowing the public to see the perceived benefits of the future while acting. It builds a strong social change motivation by embedding future into the practitioners’ present status and reality, boosting confidence and competency to match the act-out-roles. The knowledge of this mechanism may influence policymakers to give space and time when promulgating a new goal, allowing the practitioners to take a winding path and configure best practices to arrive at the goal. In this context, benefit incentive or praise-based policy schemes may work better to motivate the best out of the practitioners.

At the organizational level, the identified roleplaying mechanism is also relevant for practitioners who pursue sustainability future goals. Under the mechanism, the bundling of linguistic and behavioral practices and the tie-up of future with practitioners’ reputation and core competency mobilize present actions. The mechanism might have wider application to nurture new thoughts and new ways of thinking about organizational mode. It indicates that it might work best to adopt a positive psychological approach, stimulating participants to act out stronger roles and become a better version of themselves. With a focus on the most positive side, participants may be motivated to strike out their best in handling problems that are beyond their existing capacities.

This study has its limitations in building theory from a single case, theorizing concretization mechanism in an environment of economic stress. Questions that future research could address include how effective the roleplaying mechanism is when adopted in other context. Additional issues include determining why some communities or businesses are successful at leveraging the mechanism while others fail. In addition to roleplaying, further research should examine other concretization mechanisms that can be effectively leveraged to organize for the future.

Prior research has predominantly focused on future-related concerns, such as uncertainty and ambiguity, and focused on the question of how alternatives are imagined in the first place, yet the corresponding problem of how such largely hypothetical possibilities may orient present action is less studied. The study advances the future-oriented organization literature by combining both cognitive and practical features to propose a process model illustrating a roleplaying mechanism with a focus on the making instead of sense-making for the future. Framing the future as an opportunity triggers role playing, encouraging a more proactive stance to act out an adopted role. Roleplaying mechanism fakes it—imitating confidence, competence, and an optimistic mindset, in order to make it—realizing the future goals.

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the author upon reasonable request.

The author would like to acknowledge Dr. Alastair Iles, Dr. Yuwei Shi, and the anonymous reviewer for their insightful feedback of this manuscript. The author would also like to recognize the support from Weichen Qiang for figure editing.

This research was funded by National Social Science Foundation Project 22BGL232 (Research on Cross-sector Partnership Mechanism Relate to Social Forces’ Participation in Rural Revitalization) and two grants from the Natural Science Foundation of Hainan Province: 720RC566 (Research on Social Governance for Construction, Co-governance and Sharing) and 622RC615 (Research on Collective Co-Governance Mechanism for Rural Revitalization).

There are no competing interests in this project.

How to cite this article: Lin, H. 2023. Foreseeing is believing: How roleplaying mechanism mobilizes present course of actions for future goals? Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 11(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2022.00078

Domain Editor-in-Chief: Alastair Iles, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

Associate Editor: Yuwei Shi, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

Knowledge Domain: Sustainability Transitions

Part of an Elementa Special Feature: Social Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Transitions in China