Sociology of Expectations

It means expectations do not merely describe a future state of affairs; they help bring it about (or prevent it) by acting in the present. A credible promise about a technology attracts funding, recruits researchers, coordinates dispersed actors, and defines what counts as progress—thereby shaping the very development the promise anticipated. Performativity is why the sociology of expectations refuses to treat hype as simply true or false prediction: its analytic interest is in the work expectations do regardless of whether they come true.

Identified by Harro van Lente, the promise-requirement cycle describes how a promise about a technology, once it gains credibility, hardens into a requirement that actors must then deliver against. An initial claim ('this will revolutionise X') becomes a benchmark; agendas, funding, and reputations are organised around meeting it; and the field is obliged to work toward the promised future. This dynamic explains how loose visions become binding agendas and how fields can be locked into trajectories set by early promising.

Forecasting and foresight try to anticipate the future—to get the prediction right or to prepare for plausible scenarios. The sociology of expectations instead takes expectations themselves as its object of study, analysing how they are produced, by whom, and with what effects, without endorsing or evaluating any particular forecast. Van Lente's work shows the two can inform each other: understanding the performativity and cyclical dynamics of expectations makes foresight practitioners more reflexive about how their own visions act in the world.