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Cultural heritage and memory are essential mechanisms for the formation of individual and group identity, contributing to a sense of belonging in society. More specifically, built heritage (the buildings, structures and monuments associated with our cultural history) reflect our individual and collective decisions about what is important to preserve and remember into the future, further shaping our identities as citizens of Waterford. Thus, our relationship with heritage is just as much about looking forward into our social imagination for the future of Waterford city as it is about reflecting on our past.

Sites of Conscience are a specific type of built heritage which signify a society's belief that by remembering difficult pasts we can interrogate our current lived realities and create meaningful change in the future (International Coalition for Sites of Consciousness, 2022). Sites of Conscience are akin to what French historian Pierre Nora (1989) referred to as ‘les lieux de mémoire’, or places of memory. These physical spaces can connect past traumas and struggles to our present lives. As places of memory which ask us to acknowledge the past, Sites of Conscience can prevent the erasure of historical traumas and stand as an act of restorative justice, providing safe spaces for citizens to engage with difficult memories.

One such site of conscience in Waterford is the complex of buildings located at the College Street Campus of the South East Technological University. The site comprises the former convent of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd of Angers (commonly known as the Good Shepherd Sisters); the St Mary's Good Shepherd (Magdalene) Laundry; and St Dominick's Industrial School. The site was occupied in 1884 and the Laundry operated until its closure in 1982 (Department of Justice, 2013). This chapter will consider the former Magdalene Laundry and Industrial School's cultural and heritage significance to Waterford as a site of conscience, which encourages the citizens of Waterford not only to connect our past to our present, but to connect these memories to current actions to create a more just society into the future.

The built heritage of this complex acts as a powerful memory aide of a shared local history, allowing citizens to connect this past to related contemporary human rights issues. In this way, the former Laundry and Industrial School can stimulate discussions on gendered violence today, or to interrogate modern forms of institutionalisation such as Direct Provision. The chapter will further consider how these connections are even more important when our need to remember and recognise past atrocities are met with social, political, economic or cultural pressure to forget. Sometimes the desire for erasure is understandable; we want to commit events to the past and move on. However, such erasure can further disempower survivors of these institutions; prevent current and future generations from learning critical lessons; and dismantle future opportunities for healing and reconciliation. In this context, Sites of Conscience offer an opportunity to connect a difficult past to visions of a more socially just city of the future.

The past is important for various known and unknown reasons. This paper aims to reveal and justify unacknowledged reasons why, when and how managers should consider leveraging the pasts of previously successful but currently declining brands to restore their more desirable historical market positions.

This conceptual paper combines marketing and branding theory with historical branding examples, anecdotes and inductive inferences to develop and justify brand-pastness as a theoretically-grounded and managerially-actionable repositioning concept that could be applied to resurrect declining brands.

The emergent historically-grounded brand-pastness framework generates innovative insights that could be applied in the future. These insights explain when, why and how brand managers could apply brand-pastness to resurrect declining brands. The framework also facilitates the development of a brand-pastness-based research agenda. The agenda is driven by questions structured to address the nature, scope and potential applications of brand-pastness as a new concept and useful repositioning tool.

This paper’s recommendations are limited by their conceptual and inductive origins. However, a research agenda is developed to guide and structure future empirical investigations of the branding antecedents to and consequences of a prospective brand-pastness construct.

This paper introduces, conceptualizes and justifies the potential value of a historically-grounded concept called brand-pastness. The concept may prove beneficial when marketing managers use brand-pastness to reposition and resurrect declining brands by re-instilling targeted consumers’ historical perceptions of brands’ past superiority.

We form portfolios based on return and liquidity and examine the effects of liquidity and other risk factors on asset pricing in the Chinese stock market. Our results show that the past loser-and-illiquid stock portfolios tend to outperform the past winner-and-liquid stock portfolios in the 1–12 months holding period. The excess return is significantly associated with the market-wide liquidity factor even when we control the three Fama-French and momentum factors. Cross-sectionally, the liquidity beta significantly affects the excess return even with control of other risk betas and other traditional liquidity proxies.

This paper investigates the relationship between past performance and the development of operational capabilities in manufacturing firms, focusing on the role of intra- and inter-organisational learning mechanisms.

This study is based on a survey database collected in 208 manufacturing plants in 15 countries from three industries: electronics, machinery and transport components. The authors developed a model and tested the study hypotheses using the structural equation modelling technique with two-stage analytical procedures.

In the analysis of the overall sample, the study findings support prior literature by suggesting that firms with successful experiences may become complacent and less motivated to engage in learning, leading to a decline in performance. However, high-performance firms overcome the “success trap” by engaging supply chain partners. In contrast, low-performance firms exhibit limited learning from past poor performance, leading to organisational inertia and further declines in their current performance.

This research provides practical guidance for managers in developing operational capabilities, highlighting collaboration with suppliers as an essential element for high-performance firms.

This study focuses on the little-researched topic of how past performance influences the development of operational capabilities in manufacturing firms. The authors highlight the path for developing capabilities in high- and low-performance firms based on intra- and inter-organisational learning mechanisms.

The literature on the past triggering learning in strategy practice is scant. To fill this gap, this study aims to examine the meaning of the past to learning in strategy practice and expands on the strategy-as-practice (SAP) literature. Understanding the relationship between the past and learning in strategy practice is important because learning is what keeps strategy practice in motion and remains in place, even if organizations and strategy practitioners change.

The authors used a longitudinal case study design combined with historical methods to examine how the past is embedded in present strategy practice. To capture learning in strategy practice over time, the authors applied a four-stage methodology in our analysis of document and interview data.

The authors identified four dimensions of the past embedded in the present strategy practice. These dimensions emerged from the analysis of the interviews and document data. The study’s results showed that the past appears in structures and routines, materiality, positioning and reflecting over repeated rounds of strategic planning. According to the study’s results, reflecting on strategy practice draws on past structures and routines, positioning and materiality. The past facilitates reflecting and reflecting on the past enables learning in strategy practice.

The authors constructed a conceptual model and showed that in strategy practice, reflection triggers learning. The authors contributed to theory development by demonstrating how the past is embedded in present strategy practice and is available for use by strategy practitioners. The authors showed that strategy practice is a continuous learning process.

This study aims to use a theoretical-based case study of two distinct ownership groups of the Jack Daniel’s brand to explore how rhetorical history (i.e. malleability of the past for strategic goals) may evoke and capitalize on different forms of nostalgia. Within, the authors configure four forms of nostalgia (i.e. personal, historical, collective and cultural) from the individual or collective interaction and level of direct experience one has with the past as lived or happened.

This study uses an historical research approach which involved the identification of primary and secondary sources, facility tour, source criticism and triangulation to create themes of rhetorical history infused with nostalgic narratives using compelling evidence through rich description of this fusion.

The findings reveal how nostalgia-driven narratives reflecting different collective longing for the re-creation of an American Paradise Lost used by Jack Daniel (i.e. the man) and later but differently by Brown-Forman. This study uncovers how the company’s inherited past was used rhetorically throughout its history, beginning with the nostalgic story of Jack Daniel and the distillery’s nostalgically choreographed location in Lynchburg, Tennessee. This study delves into this setting to highlight the importance of symbols, details, emotional appeals and communications for collective memory and identity development and to showcase the ways in which they are influenced by different types and forms of nostalgia.

This study adds to a limited number of studies focused on understanding the impact of founders on an organization’s brand and how that is malleable. This study responds to scholarly calls to study the influence of sequenced historical rhetoric on an organization and highlight the relevance of social emotions such as nostalgia for rhetorical history. Finally, the theoretical contribution involves the advancing and construction of a theory typology of nostalgia previously proposed by Havlena and Holak in 1996.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of how backward intelligence and forward-looking intelligence interact and impact decision making in the context of acquisitions. Past experiences provide essential information used for decision making, however, the ex ante nature of premiums, which require forward-looking intelligence, can change how experience is utilized.

The authors utilize a fixed effects model to examine acquisitions conducted by US public firms during the period of 1993–2015.

The authors find that as past acquisition returns increase, acquirers are likely to adopt a backward-looking perspective of past performance that leads to higher premiums, as opposed to a forward-looking perspective of consequences. The relationship between past performance and premium is moderated by differences in the target's industry and the target's slack levels relative to the acquirer. The study findings suggest that forward-looking intelligence can alter attention and ultimately behavior based on backward-looking intelligence. By focusing on how these two contrasting perspectives interact, our findings extend research on the tension between backward-looking and forward-looking logics of decision making.

Unlike extant literature of acquisition premiums that have mainly focused on the valence and magnitude of experience, the authors focus on how backward-looking decision behavior changes when the firm's expectations of the future are incorporated. The authors empirically demonstrate how a lower acquisition premium is achieved when the decision of how much to pay is an interaction of the past and the future.

China has been going through a “museum boom” paralleling the domestic tourism boom since 2000; such growth changed the cultural landscape; museums became a vital characteristic of some Chinese cities for both residents and tourists. Encouraged by this growth, the more ambitious “All-for-one Museum (全域博物馆)” was proposed. The physical boundary between museums and living spaces is infinite ambiguity, challenging the idea of museums as “heterotopias.” This study aims to explore the musealization of urban spaces in the context of anthropology and museology, scrutinizing the cultural-political intentions and meanings of these developments, and seeks to ignite further investigation into the reconstruction of historical imaginaries for tourists and urban populations across related disciplines.

This paper examines two cases in Chinese metropolises, Beijing and Shanghai, to illustrate this development of musealization, that is, how the cities actively leverage museological values and methods to connect with their past. In the Beijing case, the authors explore how the local government is leading the effort to musealize the city; in the Shanghai case, they will see how tourists, especially dweller-tourists, navigate through a curated past story in the city and connect their own experience, memory and identity with the place.

The all-for-one museum creates a museal layer projected onto the bigger urban space, even though the authenticity of the “past” is challenged by the modernization development of the city. The authors also find out that for some tourists (especially dweller-tourists), an existential sense of authenticity plays a more significant role as they not only seek to sightsee the past of the city but also to take part in its creation.

This paper discusses two kinds of musealization in cosmopolitan cities of Beijing and Shanghai: top-down and bottom-up. It approaches questions about the musealization of urban spaces from the perspectives of anthropology and museology, and discusses musealization in the specific historical context of China’s modernization process.

This paper proposes a model for detecting unexpected examination scores based on past scores, current daily efforts and trend in the current score of individual students. The detection is performed soon after the current examination is completed, which helps take immediate action to improve the ability of students before the commencement of daily assessments during the next semester.

The scores of past examinations and current daily assessments are analyzed using a combination of an ANOVA, a principal component analysis and a multiple regression analysis. A case study is conducted using the assessment scores of secondary-level students of an international school in Japan.

The score for the current examination is predicted based on past scores, current daily efforts and trend in the current score. A lower control limit for detecting unexpected scores is derived based on the predicted score. The actual score, which is below the lower control limit, is recognized as an unexpected score. This case study verifies the effectiveness of the combinatorial usage of data in detecting unexpected scores.

Unlike previous studies that utilize attribute and background data to predict student scores, this study utilizes a combination of past examination scores, current daily efforts for related subjects and trend in the current score.