Summary of JOIE article by Blaž Remic, Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, The full article is available on the JOIE website.
A one-year postdoctoral contract does not only determine income. It determines how far, and into what kind of future, a life can extend. Applications for the next position or a grant are often due before the work has even begun, while unemployment is a real possibility once the contract ends. The consequences ripple outward: without eligibility for a mortgage and without certainty of location, commitments with a partner or family become difficult. Even the publication cycle is misaligned. By the time an article appears in print, the project that produced it may already be over, with the author relocated or unemployed. For many, the long process of submission and review is itself a luxury—requiring time and stability that not everyone has.
Such experiences are not only personal challenges. They reveal something more fundamental: institutions do not merely constrain our choices—they shape the very futures in which expectations can take form. What is at stake is not how individuals privately imagine the future, but how institutions make particular futures possible in the first place. Whereas economists often reduce expectations to belief-like states inside the mind, this paper develops an enactivist framework that shows how institutions afford distinct ways of relating to the future. Expectations, I argue, emerge through engagement with institutional environments: it is interaction with institutions that renders certain futures imaginable and actionable. Recent work in institutional economics has already begun to challenge the idea that cognition happens entirely inside individual minds, showing instead how institutional environments co-constitute cognitive activity. My paper extends this insight to the way we relate to time.
We often speak of “expectations” as if they were all the same. But they are not. Consider the supermarket. My expectation that bread will be on the shelves is very different from my expectation that I will be able to take it home once I have paid. The first comes from experience: most of the time the shelves are stocked, though sometimes they are not. The second does not rest on probability at all. It depends on the institutional guarantee of property rights, which makes it unthinkable that I could pay for bread and then be prevented from taking it home.
To make sense of these differences, I develop a framework that draws on the enactivist theory of cognition and the anthropology of time. It analyses how institutions shape not only cognition and action but also our orientation toward the future: how we relate to what lies ahead and how we navigate it.
To capture this, I introduce the concept of temporal affordances—the features of institutions that structure how we meet and act on the future. They work along four dimensions: how far ahead we can plan (horizon), whether the future feels fixed or open (openness), what we draw on to form expectations (grounding), and whether the future feels hopeful, threatening, or somewhere in between (valence). Take a grant deadline. It is more than a reminder to finish a task—it reshapes how time is experienced. A deadline compresses the horizon, creates urgency, narrows the sense of openness, and forces us to prioritize and pace ourselves differently. It may also carry hope of renewal or fear of rejection—showing how institutions infuse time with affect. Institutions do this in countless ways, and the particular mix of dimensions they create gives rise to different ways of orienting to and inhabiting the future.
This heterogeneity of temporal orientations—what I call modes of expectation—opens new avenues for comparative research on institutions, within and across contexts. In the paper I outline several directions this might take. Different contract arrangements in the academic labor market, for instance, enact distinct orientations toward the future, shaping the pace of projects, the organization of work, career trajectories, and researchers’ wellbeing. Startup evaluation metrics provide another example: some reward experimentation and pivoting, while others demand speed and predictability—each fostering a different way of engaging with the future. The paper discusses several more examples ranging from micro level decision settings to macro level political systems.
Beyond its empirical and comparative potential, the recognition that institutions can configure multiple temporal orientations also reframes debates in economics. Economists often treat certain orientations as given, which risks overlooking the consequences of the institutional embeddedness of human action. What may appear as a universal orientation—for instance, seeing the future as an open-ended space of growth and possibility—can instead be the product of specific institutional arrangements such as competition and credit, characteristic of capitalist economies.
Furthermore, ignoring temporal affordances narrows analysis. Keynes saw stock markets as inevitably fostering short-termism, overlooking how long-maturity bonds afforded different orientations. Public choice theorists rightly claim elections drive short-termism, but party structures, campaign finance, and bureaucratic routines point further ahead. Neither political nor economic life is defined by a single horizon, but by overlapping ones.
This paper shifts the study of expectations from individual psychology to institutions. The fundamental question is not what people expect but how institutional environments afford different ways of relating to the future, within which expectations then take shape. The shift carries three implications. First, a richer understanding of how social and economic life shapes our relationship to time. Second, a path for comparative research on the modes of expectation different institutions make possible. And third, a call for the crafting of institutions attentive to the futures they enact. If institutions shape how far and in what ways our lives can reach into the future, then understanding their temporal affordances is not just theory—it’s a matter of how we live and interact together.