Futures of Everyday Life: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Future Personas in Scenarios

Scenario reports, holding a long-standing tradition in foresight and futures studies, act as an essential document for organizations to prepare for possible, plausible, and alternative futures. Focusing on descriptions and representations of everyday life, we examined 29 future persona narratives from six publications—covering a wide field from public to private sector—through qualitative content analysis. Our guiding question is: How can anthropological perspectives such as cultural relativism or postcolonial discourses contribute to an in-depth, qualitative interpretation depictions of future everyday life? Acknowledging anthropology's colonial origins and its growing commitment to the interests of indigenous and other marginalized groups, we offer alternative readings of prominent scenario reports. Our findings suggest that scenario reports, in addition to anticipating possible futures, construct certain futures based on a systematic analysis of empirical data but also speculative interpretation. The results of these interpretative acts often appear elitist, stereotypical, and technocratic, often replicating dominant societal narratives rather than fostering substantive shifts in how the future is imagined. We therefore call for a more polyphonic representation of futures in scenario writing and foresight work that can produce more discontinuous and transformative images of the future. We understand polyphonic representations as coined by various independent, predominant as well as subaltern perspectives on the same issue at stake while being offered the same amount of space. Therefore, as we will indicate in our analysis, most of the reports referred to are rather monophonic and do not offer discuptive perspectives on the future of everyday life. As an avenue of methodological development, we propose a more nuanced and comprehensive perception of culture and social structures in scenario narrative writing. In addition, ethnographic methods could increase our understanding of how futures are collaboratively constructed and produced by different actors and their respective backgrounds and knowledge in scenario processes.