Organizational/Leadership Utopias: Imaginaries, Intuition, and Ambivalence

After more than two decades of researching lived experiences of women within organizational spaces, I have focused my attention on how organizations imagine and construct futures. My focus has shifted from deconstruction to construction, from critique to creativity. I now ask: how do leaders build not only strategies but also utopias? How are organizations mobilizing imaginaries of different futures, and what can this reveal about power, possibility, and responsibility?

In my current work, I examine what I call organizational utopias. These are not just technical plans or corporate visions but imaginative projects that blend aspiration, risk, and contradiction. I study how business leaders deploy utopian imaginaries—alternative pictures of the future—and use intuition to navigate uncertainty. I also analyze how they operationalize ambivalence: holding multiple, often conflicting ideas at once, and turning this tension into a resource for action.

Organizational utopias are spaces of experimentation. They are where executives balance profitability with sustainability, innovation with ethics, and growth with human-centeredness. In interviews with founders, CEOs, and change agents across industries and geographies, I explore questions such as: How do leaders construct alternative futures while embedded in capitalist logics? How do they cultivate intuition in decision-making where data is incomplete or ambiguous? And how do they transform ambivalence ( see Dr.Shani Orgad's definition of ambivalence in video below)—what might otherwise feel like indecision—into a strategic practice that allows for flexibility and resilience? And then how is that communicated?

The reality is: as marginalized communities are forced to analyze the present merely to survive, futures are being galvanized by powerful organizational actors. Corporations, platforms, and institutional leaders are increasingly becoming the architects of tomorrow. Their imaginaries shape not just markets but also culture, labor, and the very conditions of social life. Studying organizational utopias, then, is not about celebrating corporate idealism but about interrogating how futures are designed, whose futures are prioritized, and what alternatives might be opened—or foreclosed—in the process.

I build here on Erik Olin Wright’s call for “real utopias,” adapted for organizational life. If more just and sustainable futures are to emerge, they will not arrive ready-made. They will require leaders willing to experiment, to act collectively, and to embrace imperfection. Real organizational utopias are always partial and provisional, but they offer glimpses of how ambivalence and imagination can be turned into practice.

Through this work, I aim to understand organizational utopias as both promise and risk: promise in their capacity to expand what leaders and institutions can imagine, and risk in their power to galvanize futures in ways that reinforce privilege. My research asks: How can leaders move beyond narrow visions of growth and efficiency to construct futures that are just and desirable by trusting their intuition and sitting comfortably in ambiguity?