Abstract
Anchoring is a concept describing the process or activity through which relevant social groups connect what presents itself to them as new to something they deem familiar (Sluiter, Eur Rev 25:20–38, 2017). It enables people to perceive or construct forms of continuity within change, and it helps them to accommodate and absorb new inventions, practices, objects, or ideas. As such, it is a necessary ingredient of successful innovation processes. As we will argue, anchoring should be regarded as a precondition for imagining the possible, in that it provides the imagination with a starting point: the familiar (which often is the familiar past).
Anchoring can be positive, where a direct connection is established with something already accepted, already playing a role in society; or it can be negative, when a foil is used to identify what something or someone is not or does not want to be. It can take the form of a link with the past and the traditional, on which more below, or it can connect a new phenomenon in one societal domain to a familiar analogue taken from another domain. For instance, when young people are asked to contribute a year of community work to society, recourse is had to the familiar analogue with the military domain, where we know “compulsory military service”: this yields the anchoring expression “civilian service,” which directs the audience toward the imagination of a new possibility. It is the process of anchoring that makes the new imaginable. Anchoring often takes place conceptually through language and discourse (Sluiter, Old is the new new: the rhetoric of anchoring innovation. The language of argumentation, Springer, Cham, 2020). In the example of civilian service, the category of “service” is borrowed from the military and accommodated to the new domain by the addition of the qualifier “social.” In order to imagine the possible, we do not create ex nihilo, but we take as our starting point a familiar anchor. Any theory or analysis of the Possible should therefore take anchoring practices into account.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the Dutch ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) through the Dutch Research Council (NWO), as part of the Anchoring Innovation Gravitation Grant research agenda of OIKOS, the National Research School in Classical Studies, the Netherlands (project number 024.003.012) (see www.anchoringinnovation.nl). We would like to thank Rutger Allan, Caterina Fossi, and Koen Vacano for sharing their conference call (with literature) on fantastical worlds.
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Sluiter, I., Versluys, M.J. (2022). Anchoring. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_243-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_243-1
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