Ghostly Futures and Organization Studies

Prologue

On February 5, 2003, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council to make the case for invading Iraq, which the United States would do 6 weeks later. In his address, Powell presented what he called conclusive evidence that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. The evidence was so overwhelming, he claimed, that any delay would only embolden the errant dictator and even precipitate a nuclear war.

We now know that Powell’s testimony was based on false information. Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. On that pretext, however, one of the bloodiest occupations of recent times transpired. A 2006 Lancet study found that at least 392,979 people had been violently killed up to that period (Burnham et al., 2006), and many thousands more subsequently perished. Powell’s speech came with terrible consequences. In later years, he openly regretted his actions, knowing that it led to an illegal invasion and devastating civil war. Powell confessed that the memory of his Security Council speech was painful and represented (what he termed) a “blot on his record.” The horrors that transpired haunted him until his death in 2021.

An important detail of Powell’s speech is often overlooked. Outside the Security Council chamber hung a large tapestry replica of Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica, the artist’s response to the 1937 Nazi air raid on the Basque town it is named after. The contorted black and white figures are chilling, and the masterpiece is now globally recognized as an antiwar icon. Before the council members arrived to hear Powell testify, the Bush administration ordered UN officials to cover the tapestry with a blue curtain. A news commentator noted that the painting’s “unappealing ménage of mutilated bodies and distorted faces proved to be too strong for articulating to the world why the United States was going to war in Iraq” (Escalona, 2012, n.p.).

This example aptly encapsulates the idea of how an absent present can haunt organizational life. The haunting unfolds through a double logic. First, the weight of meaning conveyed by Picasso’s Guernica—the violent realities of war—marked the occasion of Powell’s speech in trace form, functioning as a ghostly background that could not be completely masked (as the skepticism of UN officials regarding Powell’s “evidence” attested). Second, the veil placed over Guernica could not prevent the guilt from returning to haunt Powell. He agonized over the consequences of his past decisions. Indeed, the oppressive absence of Guernica is a metaphor for how seemingly absent agents and events (for Powell, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi victims who experienced American “shock and awe”) can return in spectral form and reshape the present in eerie ways.

Introduction

The concept of hauntology has recently gained attention in organization studies (e.g. Di Dominico & Fleming, 2014; Hunter & Baxter, 2021; Pors, 2016a, 2016b, 2019). It derives from Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994), where haunting marks a fundamental dislocation of time. Derrida’s eponymous specter is a revenant returning from the past through inheritance, memory, or even the ghostly return of the dead. But the specter is also an arrivant, an unexpected stranger who evokes the surprise and challenge of a future to come. Hauntology, however, is not simply about being visited from a returning past or an arriving future but serves to trouble the very assumption of self‑presence. As such, no subject, object, or idea can ever be fully “real” or present to itself at any given moment. In hauntological temporality, the past persists ahead of us, and the future is already at work within the present. For Derrida, the revenant signals social trauma and unresolved injustices that disturb the triumphant coherence of dominant orders (in his case post‑1989 capitalist triumphalism), whereas the arrivant initiates the intrusion of what has not yet taken place as an unforeseeable future that confounds claims to temporal completion or self‑presence.

Organizational scholars have drawn on hauntology to explain how certain empirical situations are not identical with themselves but appear mysteriously out of joint, shaped by forces that seem temporally absent yet exert a disruptive presence. Three features characterize these visitations: First, they disturb the present by heralding unfinished business; second, they evoke a disturbing feeling among the haunted; and third, they issue an ethical demand for remediation and resolution. Ghosts challenge the emotional and political structure of institutions precisely because they require reckoning rather than repression.

Hauntology matters for organization research because it questions the assumption that organizational life is at one with itself. What may at first appear as a positive temporal and spatial fullness is in fact permeated by traces—former leaders, disregarded conflicts and struggles, old scandals, and other “forgotten” traumas—that underpin present action. Hauntings also frustrate the present with an unknowability about the future, too. Derrida stressed that specters not only return from the past but also arrive from the à‑venir (the “to-come”), dissolving the neat separation of past, present, and future. For him, the à‑venir is always imminent and unforeseeable; it cannot be squared with the present. In this sense, the arrivant represents an event that introduces the à‑venir into the here and now. For us, this renders organizations anxious even when no proximate cause is visible. These analytic qualities make hauntology a powerful interpretive framework for understanding how organizations are shaped by what they cannot fully acknowledge. Our aim is to extend this agenda.

Previous scholarship has concentrated on how the past may haunt organizations (e.g., Beyes & Steyaert, 2013; Maclean et al., 2024; Orr, 2014). We pose a related but underexplored problem of how hauntings might arrive from the future, troubling the temporal coherence of organizational life by introducing possibilities, impossibilities, or catastrophes that have not yet occurred. To address this issue, we developed the notion of organizational spectral futurity to explain how ghosts from the past can conjure future-oriented visitations that disrupt organizational self-presence while simultaneously foreclosing the inherent unknowability of the à‑venir. Our concept converges with Derrida’s theorization of the à‑venir by rejecting the assumption of linear time and insisting that futures intrude on the present in often complicated ways. And as our application to organization’s will indicate, how we experience the future via spectral futurities often can stifle liberating political possibilities and reproduce the present as an eternal necessity.

We identify three forms of organizational spectral futurity. Lost futures are past possibilities for emancipation that are extinguished before they could be realized yet linger as ghostly reminders of what might have been (e.g., socialist feminism, a democratic internet, etc.). Denied futures are eminently achievable alternatives (e.g., decarbonization, workplace democracy, and the reduction of inequality) that are rendered unreachable by the suffocating repetition of the present. Catastrophic futures are premonitions of planetary or political collapse, shaped by late capitalism’s destructive tendencies.

We suggest that each spectral futurity produces distinct political subjectivities: respectively, disappointment, fatalism, and nihilism. When folded onto the present, these subjectivities deny the à‑venir and neutralize our capacity for collective action. In the age of polycrises—including pandemics, geopolitical conflict, and ecological emergencies—such ghosts loom large in our political imagination. Importantly, our approach differs from existing research that frames future‑making practices as an open and elusive process (Wenzel et al., 2020). Organizational spectral futurities are dangerous for the opposite reason: They bind us to the dismal present of capitalist realism and encourage institutions that are endlessly ensnared in “now time” with no way to think or act differently.

Is all hope lost? Not necessarily. As Derrida reminded us, confronting our ghosts is necessary if the future is to be released from the gray and endless horizon of the present. Let us not repeat Colin Powell’s mistake, a mistake born from a lack of honor to time. On that fateful day in 2003, Powell remarked:

When we confront a regime that harbors ambitions for regional domination, hides weapons of mass destruction, and provides haven and active support for terrorists, we are not confronting the past, we are confronting the present. And unless we act, we are confronting an even more frightening future. (Powell, 2003, n.p.)

By not confronting the past and the horrors of Guernica, Powell did not save us from the “frightening future” of a new Guernica but instead propelled us headlong into one. By failing to reckon with that specter, he helped usher in the very catastrophe he sought to avert.

Organizing Derrida’s Ghosts

The word hauntology is a portmanteau of ontology and haunting, with the French words hauntologie and ontologie being homonyms. In Spectres of Marx (1994), Derrida developed the concept to underscore the enduring relevance of Marxism following the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the post-1989 West, a jubilant orgy of self-congratulation took place among neoconservatives because state communism’s dissolution implied capitalism’s unquestionable superiority, if not inevitability. Fukuyama (1989) even proclaimed the ‘end of history.’ In contrast, Derrida argued that this triumphalism was incomplete on account of it being cursed by Marx’s ghost(s). The social costs of the accumulation and unrelenting contradictions of global capitalism demand ongoing efforts to repress the ever-present threat of its spectral counterpart. This return of the Marxian revenant instantiates a “time [that] is out of joint” (Derrida, 1994, p. 21) because it infiltrates our past, present, and future. The haunting has a double movement, with (a) the revenant disrupting neoliberal triumphalism by bringing back its repressed traumas and exclusions and (b) the arrivant interrupting the present with an ethical demand for justice to come.

Hauntology has since informed the broader “spectral turn” in social research (Blanco & Peeren, 2013; Degen & Hetherington, 2001; Fisher, 2014; Gordon, 2008). In organizational analysis, the approach has allowed scholars to explore how suppressed, forgotten, marginalized, and partially erased traces still can inform organizational realities. For example, Beyes and Steyaert (2013) examined the uncanny in organizations, understood as moments of uncertainty and unease that can suffuse even the most robust institutional settings. To illustrate, they described an encounter with the theater collective Rimini Protokoll and its performance “50 Kilometres of File.” One of the authors struggled to find the location of the performance. Disoriented and confused, he was suddenly approached by a stranger who handed him a smartphone with a map. He was then directed to various locations around Alexanderplatz in Berlin. A voice began to speak from the smartphone, recounting horrible historical events at each location, where the Stasi arrested protesters decades before, among others. The author was forced to listen to a recorded Stasi interrogation from that period. Cameras are watching him, he was cautioned, and soon he too will be arrested. In this fascinating analysis, a dark and semi-repressed past merges with an unseated present in troubling ways.

Orr (2014) deployed Derrida’s hauntology to explore leadership and learning among senior executives in a U.K. local government. He found that “local government chief executives are enmeshed with a parliament of ghosts” (Orr, 2014, p. 1057): old bosses, family members, former colleagues, and mentors, some dead, fold into the present practices of leadership. Orr recounted how a group of managers became obsessed with specific performance indicators. Where exactly did those indicators come from? The managers suddenly realized that decisions of now dead and departed technocrats still lived among them. Comprehending their meaning resembled a séance where the truth portended jeopardy for the organization.

Galois-Faurie et al. (2022) affirmed the role of ghosts in leadership practice. Not only can past leaders continue to influence present staff, but sometimes their influence may be even stronger than when they were physically present. This is particularly the case for organizational founders, prompting Galois-Faurie et al. to examine the phenomenon of “identification with the founders’ spirit.” Similarly, Maclean et al. (2024) defined organizational ghosts as “absent members whose presence is consequential to the actions of living members” (p. 3401).

Despite its richness, organizational hauntology has remained largely backward looking, focused on the unsettling return of the revenant. Specters are typically treated as returning spirits that should have remained buried. Far less attention has been given to the other half of Derrida’s formulation: The arrivant that comes from the future. Pors’ work (e.g., Pors, 2016a) is a notable exception. In her account of strategy workshops held by a Danish education authority, Pors (2016a) showed how the future can haunt organizational actors. During a meeting of managers enthusiastically discussing a new assessment strategy, one participant suddenly uttered: “Actually, when I think about all the adverse consequences this will have for our children in the future, it sends a cold shiver down my spine” (Pors, 2016a, p. 1652). An inexplicable sense of foreboding gripped the room, as if something very sinister awaited their new policy. These organizational members had experienced a ghostly visitation from the future, undercovering a hitherto repressed register in their present-day strategy making. As Pors (2016b, p. 477) averred, “Haunting has at its core a contest over the future, over what is to come next. . . . ghostly presences are not only related to mourning over lost past, but also over lost future.”

This raises a wider set of questions about futurity in organizational life. The future, as the research on future making shows (Wenzel et al., 2020), for instance, is an inherently political and contested terrain. Because the future is unknowable, it requires a socially constructive imagination (Beckert, 2013, 2021). Past and future alike demand active interpretation and creation (Plotnikof & Mumby, 2024). In this sense, temporality exists as a kind of white space (O’Doherty et al., 2013) that may constrain or expand our capacity for political engagement. Tying these insights together with hauntology leads us to ask the following three questions: What kinds of futures haunt organizations today? How do these future‑oriented specters reorganize the present? and Do they encourage or close down the open unknowability and surprise of the à‑venir?

Three Spectral Futures

Building on these thoughts, we now unpack our notion of organizational spectral futurities. Three types are identified by locating causal traumas in the past, present, and future: namely a beautiful past—snuffed out by dominant power relations—that still lingers in ghostly form (lost futures); a seemingly interminable present that renders all progressive alternatives forever unreachable (denied futures); and a future that promises to be apocalyptic (catastrophic futures). Each haunts organizations by shutting down our capacity to transcend the here and now. We further argue that each engenders a disempowering subjectivity among organization actors, a bewilderment and resignation that confirms the status quo rather than being radically open to the unknowable possibilities of the à-venir. We now examine each organizational spectral futurity in turn.

Studying Organizations Haunted by the Future

Although organizational ghosts can haunt us from the past, our analysis demonstrates how the future can do so too, collapsing the à-venir into a projection of the present and thus eliciting disappointment, fatalism, and nihilism. Of course, other spectralities exist, and some of them may be liberating (a point we return to soon), but the three outlined above clarify how future hauntings consolidate business as usual by downplaying the future as always à-venir, something that cannot be reduced to knowledge schemas concerning what can or cannot be ahead. One final example might be useful to underscore the point before we discuss the implications of spectral futurity for organizational scholarship.

We opened this essay with Colin Powell and his 2003 speech at the United Nations Security Council. Given his anguish and regret in later years, his is a clearcut case of someone haunted by the past: “It was painful. It’s painful now” (Powell, 2005, n.p.). However, could it be that he was also haunted by arrivants from the future? Perhaps. We suggest that the suppressed Guernica tapestry functioned as a sort of spectral medium that invited other futures to intrude on Powell’s present nowness, ephemeral futures that might have been, those foreclosed by the endless present or feared as catastrophic. Amid the distasteful triumphalism, sanguine proclamations about bringing democracy to Iraq, and the promise of world peace, another, less appealing future lurked in the shadows (denoted by the Guernica image that was now hidden but more redolent than ever for being so). Let us briefly apply our version of hauntology to this case.

First are the radiant lost futures that might have characterized the fate of the Iraqi people in the years ahead if it was not for key decisions made by the American war machine. These decisions included arming Saddam Hussein during the Iraq/Iran war, the erroneous conflation of his regime with al-Qaeda, and rejecting Hans Blix’s testimony that no weapons of mass destruction existed. The country could be facing a very different and gentler future, and that prospect silently prowled in the background of Powell’s warmongering. During the war, Powell reflected on U.S. Middle East policy, stating: “It may not have turned out to be such a mess if we had done some things differently. . . . I was enormously disappointed” (Powell, 2005, n.p.). The Guernica tapestry was covered because it alluded to the peaceable futures that ought to have been possible through the UN and American foreign policy but are now irrevocably lost.

Second are denied futures that block alternative pathways forward and cement current American military exceptionalism as an endless principle. At an intellectual level, Powell and perhaps even Dick Cheney understood that war was never inevitable. A more diplomatic and less deadly solution was possible. Yet, at the political level, the post-9/11 policy of the United States meant that any option other than total war was untenable. Powell was unable to envision a U.S.-less future in the region. Iraq’s fate would be a U.S.-determined one: “We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction. . . . the United States will not and cannot run that risk for the American people” (Powell, 2003, n.p.). Powell’s speech is steeped in fatalism. Future peace was technically feasible (“We wrote 1441 to give Iraq one last chance” [Powell, 2003, n.p.]) but impossibly remote nevertheless. The Guernica tapestry was covered because it symbolized the arbitrary irrationality of war and the inability of the United States, despite that arbitrariness, to act otherwise.

Third are catastrophic futures feared by the haunted as they pondered what might transpire. While often too horrifying to openly contemplate, these specters quietly deflate the upbeat declarations about “bringing freedom the Iraq people.” In a 2016 interview, Powell recalled sharing with George W. Bush his private premonitions about mass civilian deaths following any invasion (Breslow, 2016). That fear was only equaled by his—and the entire Bush administration’s—nihilistic, almost pathologic desire to annihilate Saddam Hussein. It spilt over to the Iraqi people themselves. If thousands must needlessly perish, then so be it: “There are some who say, ‘Well, you shouldn’t have supported [the war], you should have resigned,’ but I’m glad that Saddam Hussein is gone” (Powell, 2005, n.p.). The Guernica tapestry was covered because it echoed the shocking and gory future that lay ahead—a future too disturbing to acknowledge yet too prescient to ignore.

Building on this and the examples discussed previously, we suggest that our essay holds at least four implications for hauntology in organization studies. The first concerns how we study ghosts from the future (and past) in organizational settings. As the Colin Powell case indicates, this is an inherently speculative mode of inquiry, especially given the partial absences that characterize the empirical field. Scholarship on invisibility and the unknown is useful in this regard (see, e.g., Bento da Silva et al., 2022; Giovannoni & Quattrone, 2018; Kociatkiewicz & Kostera, 2010; Quattrone et al., 2021). Building on this research, ghosts manifest in fleetingly visible presences that imply an unseen malignant force. They surface through the slips, images, atmospheres, and affects that index a concealed ubiety. We therefore propose a symptomatic reading of organizations that tracks spectral traces across systematic data sources. This might involve, for example, pinpointing spectral traces in organizational artifacts (e.g., the Guernica tapestry), unplanned utterances about a contested future (as in Pors, 2016a), and mediated accounts of organizational temporality (e.g., Di Dominico & Fleming, 2014). This approach also would complement studies of the uncanny and organizational atmospheres (Beyes & Steyaert, 2013) by specifying how such symptoms can be read as future-oriented spectral disruptions, including multi-temporalities (Maclean et al, 2024). Finally, our symptomatic reading assuages criticisms that we are dallying in empty speculation. It is grounded in empirically observable traces (e.g., temporal markers, affective leakage, attempts at erasure, etc.) that may be collected as data.

Second, we have distinguished three types of spectral futurity and illustrated each with various examples. In the Colin Powell case, however, all three coalesce. This resonates with multitemporal realities (Maclean et al., 2024) once more—but several qualifications are worth noting for organizational hauntologists. Not all three forms of organizational spectral futurities must be present to warrant investigation. Indeed, only one may be relevant in some institutional settings. Moreover, these three categories do not exhaust all types of spectral futurity. For example, we have claimed that Colin Powell knew very well what the Guernica image meant, entering the realm of knowledge as disappointment, fatalism, and nihilism. But what about those spectral visitations that are incomprehensible to the haunted? We are reminded here of Nigel Kneale’s (1964/1976) television play The Road, where residents of an 18th century estate are haunted by a 21st century nuclear holocaust. To address this fracture between meaning and experience, we build on research concerning organizational afterlives (Orr, 2014) and the uncanny (Beyes & Steyaert, 2013). Studying spectral futurities calls for a mode of interpretation that focuses on how participants interpret their haunting through manifest utterances, artifacts, and practices of futures that cannot yet be named. The purpose is to attest to, and attempt to articulate, the un-nameable in interpretations of what is either fully, partially, or fragmentarily present in organizational settings.

Third, how we as organizational researchers actually write about ghosts invites more consideration, especially when it comes to reflectivity, experimentation, and style. Looking back over this essay, for instance, we note that it is traditionally academic, seeking full textual presence in what we argue for and against. But perhaps we too are haunted (and who isn’t in the neoliberal university today?). If so, then this necessitate a different way of writing, one that seeks to disrupt conventional techniques, boundaries, and genres of academic prose. What we term autospectrality refers to a specific self-reflectivity regarding the traces of unwanted and suppressed visitations in our own textual production. This complements Pors’ focus on how futures surface in the interstices of organizational talk and affect. For sure, there is rich opportunity here to overcome the inherent temporal linearity that infuses formal language. Prior interventions, such as Burrell’s (1996) nonlinear retro-organizational theory, Rhodes’ (2015, p. 289) use of “fictocriticism” to write “from elsewhere,” and Pullen’s (2018) exemplification of “writing as deviation” also offer pertinent pointers in this regard.

And fourth, given Derrida’s (1994) foregrounding of exorcism in his formulation of hauntology, it is surprising how little attention that idea has received in organizational approaches to the subject. We suggest that haunted organizational actors (by specters both past and future) often seek to expel and banish them. A return to full presence is the intention, a folding of the past and the future into a singular present. Wasn’t this precisely what Colin Powell’s team sought when covering up Guernica? Such an exorcism kills nothing, of course. We might term this a botched exorcism—attempting to restore full presence by marginalizing and repressing the specter, which often only intensifies the visitation. Read alongside scholarship on institutional memory (Maclean et al., 2024) and founder spirits (Galois‑Faurie et al., 2022), our understanding of exorcism rethinks activities such as rebranding, sanitizing archives, or scapegoating as misguided “fixes” that often exacerbate spectral presence and dangerously deny the unforeseeability of the à‑venir.

Derrida (1994) made an excellent point in this respect. Exorcisms themselves must be exorcized if we are to free ourselves from the haunting (see also Pepperell, 2012). This is where we learn to live and communicate with our ghosts in order to adumbrate new and liberating possibilities without reproducing the dire content of the here and now. Indeed, a whole domain of organizational hauntology awaits further investigation in relation to how actors reckon with their haunting, be it via various attempts of exorcism (e.g., rebranding, firing scapegoats, masking images, etc.), productive dialogue and communion with the phantasm, and other practices that strive to release us from these disquieting visitations.

Conclusion

Organizational hauntology reveals that organizational life is never co‑present with itself. It is constituted by traces, demands, and unknown futures that disturb linear time and expose the limits of self‑presence. Hauntology attends to spectral visitations born of trauma that disturb the institutional order and call on the living to respond. Our contribution has been to extend existing scholarship on organizational hauntology by developing the concept of spectral futurities, understood as hauntings that arrive from the future as well as from memories and visitations from the past. In making this contribution, we seek to complement the current literature that has largely emphasized backward‑looking revenants. In Derrida’s terms, the specter is both a revenant and an arrivant. Our argument thus expands organizational hauntology to include that double temporality.

The spectral futurities we have identified are problematic because they cultivate political subjectivities that erode meaningful hope and impede emancipatory action. In this sense, the future becomes ideological and can be manipulated, manufactured, or foreclosed, including its ostensibly negative forms that currently blight global capitalism. The problem with these renderings of the future is that they ironically cancel the future by hubristically claiming that à‑venir can be designated in the here and now. What, then, is to be done? We have already dismissed botched exorcisms that try to suppress and bury these ghosts. As Derrida (1994) maintained, this seldom succeeds. So, progress requires confronting the specter, acknowledging its demands, and responding in ways that open us to justice to come.

Only when confronted and redressed can the phantom be released and we can “begin to live finally” (Derrida, 1994, p. xii) in manner that is open to the possibilities of a future that exists beyond the limits of our own imaginations and subjectivities. Indeed, the spectral futurities we have identified are born from specific traumas: a set of beautiful past possibilities that sadly never were (lost futures), an endless present that renders all progressive alternatives forever unreachable (denied futures), and a coming future that covets the apocalypse (catastrophic futures). These constitute spectral flex points that demand our attention. Resisting these three spectral fronts by surrendering to the à‑venir hastens the conditions for release, we argue, by working through melancholia, puncturing presentist eternalism, and eschewing apocalyptic paralysis. Only then might we reclaim the future as a vast canvas on which human history might build a better and more just organizational world, a future that might one day look back on our times as a living hell by contrast.