Image, Imagination, Imaginaries: A Genealogy of Imago-Concepts in Organisational Research

The concept of ‘imaginaries’ has gained prominence as a lens for examining how collective orientations shape social and organisational action; yet the meaning of this concept and its relation to neighbouring notions has become so diffuse as to call into question its analytical potential. Addressing this need for clarification, we situate imaginaries within a genealogy of imagination, tracing the concept’s descent from early philosophical debates on the ontological status of the image to the contemporary uptake of imaginaries in organisational research. Extending this genealogy to provide an inventory of imagination-related concepts in organisational research, we show how inherited conceptual habits continue to constrain the field by reducing images to single discrete functions, by narrowing imagination to creativity, and by stretching imaginaries across distinct theoretical tasks in ways that blur differences which matter for analysis. From this diagnosis, we make three interventions. First, we theorise images as layered formations ( palimpsests ) that accumulate meaning and shift across modes and contexts. Second, we broaden the concept of imagination beyond creativity by treating it as a situated engagement with the non-present . Third, we attain a clearer specification of the different analytical uses of this concept by distinguishing the main lineages through which imaginaries have been theorised. To address the need for a more situated notion of collective imagination beyond imaginaries, the final part of the paper develops the concept of inter-subjunctive as a way of theorising shared imaginative departures from the present. We complement this with a processual and new materialist account of imagination as a relational capacity constituted in the encounter between bodies, materials, and circumstances, rather than possessed by a prior subject.