The future as a social fact. The analysis of perceptions of the future in sociology

•Sociological research that empirically studies perceptions of the future has emerged in the 1960s.•Since the 1990s the research field has particularly grown and diversified into three discernable clusters.•These clusters differ in their theoretical, methodological and epistemological approaches towards future orientations.•Each cluster also emerged at a different point in time, was influenced by different sociological developments and uses different journals as output.•Sociology could benefit from integrating existing knowledge on the societal role of expectations, aspirations, and future beliefs. A small but growing share of sociological research recognizes the importance of perceptions of the future for explaining social outcomes. This article, taking a sociology of knowledge perspective, provides a systematic study of sociological scholarship dealing empirically with perceptions of the future. It is based on a qualitatively driven mixed methods analysis of 571 sociological research articles published between 1950 and 2019 and distinguishes between three clusters of scholarship: in the first cluster authors consider future orientations as either dependent or independent variable; in the second cluster they analyze the multifaceted ways in which actors imagine the future; and in the third cluster they are interested in the politically contested construction and diffusion of future orientations. By investigating these clusters, the article demonstrates how sociologists pay attention to future orientations in a broad spectrum of sociological fields, using a variety of methods and asking a wide set of questions about assessments of the future. The future is increasingly a realm of sociological analysis. We show how this field of research is structured and has developed over time. Elaborating on different facets of research that so far operate largely in isolation from each other, we aim to contribute to the development of the field. Sociology could benefit from more systematically integrating perceptions of the future – as they are reflected in actor expectations, aspirations, and future beliefs – into the discipline's empirical investigations and explanatory models and from integrating the existing knowledge on these issues better.