'Hope is not a strategy'. The temporal framing of (in)action

Global efforts to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic have demonstrated that decisive action is crucial. The pressing need for immediate action has been contrasted with a more anticipatory approach and the emotions involved in a cautious strategy. One key Danish decision maker even went so far as to invoke the saying that ‘hope is not a strategy’.
Against this position, existing studies show that actors may, in fact, use hope strategically as part of collective organizational movement processes, especially when faced with grand challenges. If we did not hope that we could find a solution to these challenges, continued action would seem futile; yet, if prospects are too dire, fatalism prevails.
The role of hope in tackling grand challenges points to the centrality of time as affect; time as subjectively felt phenomena. Hope, like other anticipatory emotions are temporal constructs, and the framing of time anticipates and organizes future outcomes vis-à-vis past and present actions. Based on these observations, the paper asks how actors organize hope in the face of (approaching) emergencies, and how dynamics of hope (feeling hopeful/hopeless) unfold.
In answering this question, the paper builds a conceptual model combining vocabularies of motive, anticipatory action, and the temporality of hope—hereby, advancing the concept of temporal framing to include the affectivity of organizational agency. Accordingly, the paper offers two contributions to the affectivity of time and organization of hope. First, a dynamic and emergent understanding of strategy enables exploration of how different affective valences are constitutive of and constituted by future-orientations. Secondly, a sociological perspective of temporal framing underlines the organizationality of feelings, generally, and the specific dynamics of organizing for and being organized by hope. The optimism of hope organizes anticipatory action, making a better future possible.