To­bi­as Olofs­son

I work in the intersections of economic sociology, valuation studies, and science and technology studies. My research investigates the different ways that actors and organizations negotiate boundaries between certainty, risk, and uncertainty, objectivity and interpretation, and technology and society. While I have worked on a range of project and areas, my work tends to focus on situations and phenomena involving contested knowledges as well as predictions, imaginaries, and other temporal domains. In previous projects I have investigated how mining companies use predictions to manage uncertainty and they mobilize predicted futures in interactions with decision-makers and stakeholders, how book publishers and sellers prepared for a new digital landscape and the death of print in the first decades of the 21st century, and how erroneous predictions helped decision-makers navigate uncertainty in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

I am currently working as a postdoc on the project The Politics of Time – Navigating Conflicting Imaginaries where I study the ways that competing visions about the future come together to determine which future will prevail and which solutions to present day sustainability challenges will be able to shape current and future strategies. 

Before joining the Department of Organization I worked as a postdoc and researcher at Lund University and Stockholm Center for Organizational Research. In February 2026 I was awarded the title of Reader in Sociology from Uppsala University. I hold a PhD in Sociology (awarded November 2020) from Uppsala University where I defended my dissertation thesis “Mining Futures: Predictions and Uncertainty in Swedish Mineral Exploration.”