Paper short abstract:

The capacity to foresee the future is essential in my fieldwork. Construction businessmen, their associations, and the part of the administration which works with them, all try to know and anticipate the future.

Paper long abstract:

The capacity of thinking ahead is something positive and necessary in many jobs and organisations. I would like to consider three groups of people I worked with and see how they tried to engage in their activities, face risk and anticipate one another by foreseeing future. These three groups are: construction business entrepreneurs, the part of the public administration which engages in tenders preparation and awarding and the association of constructors which brings together many of the construction businessmen. The capacity to foresee the future is an enormous advantage in construction business. How can this capacity be achieved? How can jobs, tender calls and tender results be foreseen or sometimes manipulated? How do entrepreneurs try to face the ever increasing risk in their job and in their decision making process due to the financial and structural crisis? How does the association keep up with the recent radical and rapid changes in the construction market in Italy? How does the public administration try to respond and adapt to the market? Situations of not-knowing or not being in control are part of the job of my informants, but they also can provoke anxiety and a sense of fragility. Trying to anticipate the future is essential and helps overcome everyday uncertainty. I will show ethnographically the situations in which this capacity is practiced, for instance, the process of tender predicting, writing and winning.