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Managerial postalgia: Projecting a golden future
Abstract
This article seeks to further understand the significance of “organizational nostalgia” for processes of organizational change and to develop the mirror concept “managerial postalgia”. If nostalgia is a longing for a paradisical past, postalgia refers to a longing for a heavenly future, a desire that is central to change-talk and change-initiatives in organizations. The meaning and role of postalgia will be clarified in this paper by comparing and contrasting it with organizational nostalgia and by analyzing ethnographic studies that provide empirical support to substantiate the analogy. It is argued that the glorification of the past, just as the idealization of the future, are part of internal struggles in which organizational actors try to instigate or resist change by praising or dispraising the collective past, present and future. The argumentation demonstrates the significance of temporal constructions of change and continuity through organizational discourse.
Supplementary resource (1)
... Specifically, organizational nostalgia is a secondary or contingent mode that more or less underlies organizational memory. Here, organizational nostalgia provides emotive exports to the organizational memory and explicitly represents the 'living' aspect of memories that employees actively sense and feel the past (Burghausen & Balmer, 2014;Ybema, 2004). In a sense, organizational nostalgia reflects the juxtaposition between the past and present through affective engagement with the past (Wilson, 2005). ...
... In a sense, organizational nostalgia reflects the juxtaposition between the past and present through affective engagement with the past (Wilson, 2005). Thus, it can be a productive way for people to access alternative pasts as emotional resources for the present within the organization (Ybema, 2004). In this way, organizational nostalgia is primarily related to the organization's semantic emotional memory. ...
... We used deductive and inductive approaches here to determine the dimensions of organizational nostalgia. First, using a deductive approach, we reviewed the literature on nostalgia to identify its features and then developed the interview questions (Gabriel, 1993;Ybema, 2004). Next, we conducted semi-structured interviews in our classroom and office meetings from the inductive perspective to determine the relevant organizational nostalgia dimensions and gather more detailed data (Lune & Berg, 2017). ...
The concept of nostalgia has been investigated in various disciplines; however, conceptualization and operationalization of nostalgia at the organizational level remain nascent in the literature. Besides, there is a lack of empirical studies examining the role of organizational nostalgia on specific organizational behavior-related variables, such as affective commitment, with the contingent position of moderators, such as organizational discontinuity. To fill this gap, we performed four studies using a mixed methodology. In the first study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 firms. We found that organizational nostalgia is a multidimensional construct with seven configural properties/dimensions: the organization’s allegiance to employees, social events, management support, bonding between employees, the excitement of employees, work conditions, and physical work environment-related sentimental experiences/memories of the organization. In the second study, including 210 firms, and the third study involving 225 different firms, we tested the reliability and validity of the configural organizational nostalgia scale. Finally, in the fourth study, we tested the impacts of organizational nostalgia on affective commitment by investigating 101 other firms. Using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), we found that the organization’s allegiance to employees-related experiences/memories is a core condition of affective commitment. We also found that when there is less organizational discontinuity, the organization’s allegiance to employees, management support, working conditions, and physical work environment-related experiences/memories are core conditions of affective commitment.
... Nostalgia is a commonly used historical trope. It motivates potential stakeholders by creating a sense of continuity between the past and the future and justifies change by making the future appear similar to the past (Brown & Humphreys, 2002;Gabriel, 1993;Holbrook, 1993;Ybema, 2004). It is a form of rhetoric designed to invoke a feeling that the present world is deficient in comparison to the world of the past (Williams, 1974). ...
... The primary emotion evoked by such sociotechnical imaginaires is hope (Jasanoff, 2015). The word postalgia has emerged to describe the affective longing for an unrealized, imagined future and has been conceptualized as a mechanism whereby managers passionately articulate and advance visions for change to bring about a golden future (Ybema, 2004). In this sense, rhetoric of postalgia is grounded in "a burning desire … to go forward, inspired by a certain restlessness or discontent with the present and an anxious desire to go and find out what lies behind the bend, over the mountain, behind the horizon" (Ybema, 2004: 826). ...
Research suggests that entrepreneurs persuade stakeholders to engage in risky projects in an uncertain future through visions, compelling narratives of the future. A unique challenge for entrepreneurs, however, is how entrepreneurs can construct a narrative that unites stakeholders with different perceptions of the degree of risk or uncertainty posed by the future. We address this question with a diegetic narrative model of stakeholder enrollment. Our primary argument is that to reduce variation in how potential stakeholders view the future, a story must embed a vision of the future in a coherent and collectively held narrative of the past. We introduce rhetorical history as the primary construct through which this occurs. We demonstrate how successful visions employ historical tropes at the intradiegetic level to appeal to individual perceptions of risk or uncertainty and how those historical tropes are combined into meta-narratives or myths drawn from the collective memory of a community to create broad, extradiegetic appeal to all stakeholders regardless of their temporal orientation. Finally we describe three categories of historical reasoning – teleological, presentism, and retro-futurism – that act as bridging mechanisms between past, present and future that provides stakeholders with an enhance sense of agency in the future.
... A leírtak azt sugallják, hogy a fiatal oktató-kutatók késleltetik a hivatásuk, a kutatási téma iránti szenvedélyük megélését, és erre egy átmeneti, időben behatárolt technikaként tekintenek. Ybema (2004) ezt a jelenséget fiatal menedzserek körében figyelte meg, és posztalgiának nevezte, rámutatva ennek a védekezési mechanizmusnak a veszélyeire is. Az egyén a jelenben felmenti magát a megküzdés alól, az esetleges belső konfliktusok fájdalmától, ugyanakkor ott a veszély, hogy ez a kívánatos jövő nem jön el, vagy olyan belső átalakulások történnek közben, amelyek az egyénben nem is tudatosulnak. ...
A fiatal oktató-kutatókat a szabadság reménye, az értelemteli munka és a folyamatos tanulás lehetősége vonzza az egyetemi pályára. Az eltérő nemzeti és szakmai kontextusban felvázolt tapasztalatok nyomán a publikációs teljesítményelvárás központi elemként körvonalazódik, melyre az ellenállás nem lehetséges válasz, ugyanakkor az alkalmazkodás sem jelent egyszerű megoldást azon motivációk tükrében, amelyek miatt ezt a pályát választották.
A cikkben arra keresünk választ, hogy megvalósítható-e, s ha igen, akkor milyen formában egy fenntartható kutatási és publikációs gyakorlat a fiatal oktató-kutatók részéről, és ezek közül melyek azok, amelyeket a szervezet is sikeresként ismer el. Kutatásunk során sikerült megfogalmazni olyan kutatási és publikációs stratégiákat, amelyek túlmutatnak az ellenállás vagy alkalmazkodás leegyszerűsített kettőségén, ugyanakkor az egyén szintjén maradva ezek nem fenntarthatóak, szervezeti kultúra változást igényelnek.
... More commonly, rhetorical history is used to help manage change by convincing internal stakeholders of the need for change or, alternatively, to minimize the impact of change by presenting it as a form of continuity . So, for example, Ybema (2004) uses the term "managerial postalgia" to describe the practice of managing strategic change by simultaneously glorifying the past and idealizing the future as a means of reducing employee resistance to change. In other cases, such as in the previously mentioned study of a leading Dutch newspaper (Ybema, 2014), rhetorical history can be deployed, not to minimize the perception of change but, rather, to exaggerate it by encouraging "discontinuity talk" to create "invented transitions" designed to encourage change by constructing a crisis. ...
Rhetorical history has emerged as a useful theoretical construct that bridges the long recognized gap between historical and organizational scholarship. Despite its growing popularity, the precise nature of rhetorical history as a construct, its scope conditions, and its utility in resolving critical issues in historical organizational analysis remains unclear. This paper addresses these issues. We define rhetorical history and contextualize the construct by elaborating its relationship to associated concepts like collective memory, rhetoric, and narrative. We ground the construct by reviewing literature that has applied rhetorical history in both theory and empirical research. Our inductive review identifies four recurring themes in which rhetorical history is used to construct perceptions of; (a) continuity and discontinuity, (b) similarity and difference, (c) winners and losers, and (d) morality and immorality. We conclude with a discussion of how rhetorical history is an essential mechanism of institutional work.
... Hope labour is largely hinged on the shared notion that the current precarious conditions are transitory, and that navigating them will lead to future improvements of labour conditions and career growth. It is associated with aspirational normativity, a belief of future progress and higher attainments that provokes workers to keep working hard through insecure, adaptable, and flexible labour (Berlant, 2011;Ybema, 2004;Alacovska, 2019). While one school of thought understands hope labour as a utopian and cruel practice which perpetually promote self-exploitation (Jansen, 2015;Pettit, 2019), another school theorizes it as a quotidian and ethical practice of coping with precarious working conditions (Back, 2015; Alacovska, 2019; Alacovska et al., 2021). ...
This article examines the production practices that underpin the production of portal films in the Nigerian video film industry (Nollywood). Following the recent surge in the number of streaming portals focusing on the distribution of Nollywood films, a nascent video on demand (VOD) market has been created. This new market has given rise to a crop of filmmakers who now produce straight-to-portal films. This article draws on semi-structured interviews with 30 industry stakeholders comprising producers, directors, writers, and streaming executives. Adopting a critical media industry studies approach, I argue that, in the face of pervasive precarity in the Nollywood VOD market, portal filmmakers adopt informal social relations and ‘hope labour’ in navigating productions and ensuring the market is sustained. The article contributes to extant research on Nollywood's production dynamics and extends existing debates about precarity in cultural industries through a less-studied context like Nollywood.
... Gossip is also used to express concerns and feelings on threats to an organization's internal policies and may cause some resistance to the implementation of change programs (Ybema, 2004). Based on this viewpoint, gossip can act as a process through which administrative privileges are put to challenge and questioned and the powers of management to control the organization is diminished. ...
Background: Most societies have a negative attitude toward gossip and managers are concerned about the impact of gossips on the communication in an organizational environment. Our study examined the perception of gossip, and the context of gossip at different levels of a hospital, a case of organization with high communicational relation among staff. Also, the differences between the gossip context within the organizational context and within the social environment have been considered.
Methodology: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 27 informants, 9 in each of three groups: nurses, supervisors and managers of the Hospital. Recorded interviews were analyzed using content analysis, and results for each group of respondents were compared. Finally, the main gossiping issues for each group were categorized.
Results: The study revealed that the topics of gossip in a hospital can be divided into eight main categories, and 34 sub-categories all identifiable by special topics. These main topics included confidentiality issues, merits, financial status/standing, personal characteristics, position, communications, biography, and job conditions. In terms of organizational gossip, a person’s merit in the workplace and financial standing were of particular interest to the participants of this study. Also, the gossip topics at different levels among nurses, administrators, and managers had significant differences.
Conclusion: Managers should acknowledge different gossip contents among people at different organizational levels, and that employees do not have the same motives for communication at different organizational levels. Additionally, the distances between contents in the Tendency to Gossip Questionnaire and categories in the organizational environment need more studies, to explore precedents and outputs. Managers may use these findings to facilitate organizational change and communication.
Our study examines collective identity development in the early stages of a social movement as it narratively unfolded on Twitter during the 2019 October revolution in Lebanon. Based on a sample extraction of Twitter content from the first month of the revolution and using both thematic and narrative analyses, our study uncovers an entangled temporality where past, present and future strands of narrative time intervene in online identity narratives. Disentangling these digital narratives enabled us to identify three temporal-thematic categories that outline the contours of the emergent online identity: a revisited narrative past evoking collective nostalgia, a disruptive narrative present creating an urgent “presence in the now,” and a prefigurative narrative future that allows online members to collectively re-imagine and co-create their collective selfhood. Taken together, these findings support better understandings of collective identity emergence in digitally-mediated social movements in three different ways. First, building on the organizational literature on temporality in collective identity formation, we highlight how temporal narratives online support and accelerate a nascent collective identity through their immediacy and global reach. Second, by approaching narrated time theoretically and not chronologically, we address recent calls that challenge linear temporal narratives. We highlight how entangled temporality contributes to the emergence of a social movement’s online collective identity. Ultimately, from a methodological perspective, we offer an approach for “disentangling” digital temporality and propose (ante)narrative theory as a useful interpretive lens for better apprehending identity-relevant social media content.
While the focus for many advertising academics and practitioners has been on nostalgia, there is a dearth of research on future-focused appeals. We introduce a new concept, forestalgia, or a consumer’s yearning for an idealized future. To understand the impact of nostalgia and forestalgia, qualitative background interviews were conducted with creative directors and other advertising creatives from numerous nationally recognized advertising agencies. Building on the insights from the interviews and using construal level theory as our foundation, we explore consumer response to hedonic and utilitarian products when appeals employ far-past, near-past, near-future, and far-future framing. Thus, we examine whether nostalgia or forestalgia is better suited for certain products. We find utilitarian products are better received with a temporal distance that is far from the present with hedonic products better suited for appeals framed in the far past and near future. Managerial and theoretical implications are discussed, along with future research considerations.
Brand ambidexterity is characterized by tensions between brand consistency and brand relevance. Previous research has presented design thinking as an approach to resolve this tension. However, design thinking presents limitations, mainly because it is imported from outside the organization. This paper argues that brand ambidexterity can be driven from within the organization, through Corporate Heritage Identity Stewardship (CHIS). It postulates that CHIS enhances brand ambidexterity, and therefore, the company’s ability to remain both relevant and consistent over time. A conceptual approach is used to relate organisational ambidexterity, brand ambidexterity, and CHIS in an integrative framework. Furthermore, this article draws on applied psychology literature to provide practical managerial practices regarding CHIS. Thus, giving managers a route for attaining brand ambidexterity through CHIS.
Participants viewed slides depicting ordinary routines (e.g., going grocery shopping) and later received a recognition test. In Experiment 1, there was higher recognition confidence to high-schema-relevant than to low-schema-relevant items. In Experiment 2, participants viewed slide sequences that sometimes contained a cause (e.g., woman taking orange from bottom of pile) but not an effect scene (oranges on floor), or an effect but not a cause scene. Participants mistook new cause scenes as old when they viewed the effect; false alarms to cause scenes and high-schema-relevant items increased with retention interval. Experiment 3 showed that the backward inference effect was accompanied by false explicit recollection, whereas false alarms to schema-high foils were based on familiarity. This suggests that the 2 types of inferential errors are produced by different underlying mechanisms.
This book first appeared in 1970 and has gone into two further editions, one in 1975 and this one in 1985. Yalom is also the author of Existential Psychotherapy (1980), In-patient Group Psychotherapy (1983), the co-author with Lieberman of Encounter Groups: First Facts (1973) and with Elkin of Every Day Gets a Little Closer: A Twice-Told Therapy (1974) (which recounts the course of therapy from the patient's and the therapist's viewpoint). The present book is the central work of the set and seems to me the most substantial. It is also one of the most readable of his works because of its straightforward style and the liberal use of clinical examples.
