Networks as Media for Nostalgia in an Organisational Context

Abstract

Nostalgia is popularly associated with the idea of the difficulty of letting go of a past when life was somehow ‘better’ (Gabriel, 1993). Such a perspective is reflected in the organisational literature, for example through the work of Strangleman (1999), Brown and Humphreys (2002) or McCabe (2004), who show how nostalgia can be present in an organisational setting. These works also highlight that nostalgia is a social emotion that is shared and co-constructed; it follows that nostalgia is to be experienced not only individually, but also with others, and thus through a variety of media. This idea that nostalgia is a social emotion has notably been leveraged in marketing, and is discussed in the related literature (see, for example, Cutcher, 2008; Kessous and Roux, 2008), but there is no discussion of the media aspect. Thus, these literatures fail to inform us about how nostalgia is mediated in organisational contexts. Given the general lack of scholarship about the functional relationship between media and nostalgia (see volume Introduction by Niemeyer), this is hardly surprising.