Tag: Nostalgia

Talk: Nostalgia at Work

Steph

Aston Business School – Work and Organisational Psychology Department – Seminar Series

Nostalgia at Work

By Prof Constantine Sedikides

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~crsi/constantineprofile

 We are delighted to invite all colleagues and doctoral researchers to Prof Constantine Sedikides seminar taking place on the 4th December, Wednesday 12pm, Joint meeting rooms in the Work and Organisational Psychology Department, 8th floor SW, followed by lunch. Prof Constantine is currently head of the Centre for Research on Self and Identity (CRSI) and a Professor at the university of Southampton.

The seminar will address the relevance of nostalgia in organisational settings. The emotion of nostalgia will be defined and clarified. Then, representative research will showcase the role of personal nostalgia in acting as a buffer against procedural injustice. Finally, representative research will showcase the role of organizational nostalgia in acting as a buffer against employee burnout and as a resource fueling work meaningfulness.

Professor Constantine’s research focuses on self and identity (including narcissism) and their interplay with emotion (especially nostalgia) as well as motivation, close relationships, and group or organisational processes. This research has been supported by grants from many national and international funding agencies, such as Economic and Social Research Council, Leverhulme Trust, British Academy, and National Institute of Health. The research has culminated in approximately 400 articles or chapters and 15 volumes. He has received several awards, including Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize (Society for Personality and Social Psychology), Distinguished Lifetime Career Award (International Society for Self and Identity), Kurt Lewin Medal for Outstanding Scientific Contribution (European Association of Social Psychology), and The Presidents’ Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychological Knowledge (The British Psychological Society). Before joining University of Southampton as Director of the Centre for Research on Self and Identity, Constantine taught at University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. He holds a BA from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and a PhD from The Ohio State University, USA.

Please do confirm attendance by replying to this invitation via email to Linda Watts (l.watts1@aston.ac.uk).  A light lunch will be provided after the seminar.

Workshop report: Pop Nostalgia

Steph

The German Historical Institute published a workshop report on an interesting event on pop nostalgia & uses of the past that took place last year here: https://www.ghil.ac.uk/pop_nostalgia.html

Pop Nostalgia: The Uses of the Past in Popular Culture

 

Pop nostalgia, we are told, is everywhere. Our current golden age of television—from Mad Men to Vinyl, Downton Abbey to Call the Midwife—lovingly recreates earlier periods of the twentieth century, while club nights devoted to the 1980s or 1990s allow us to return to our youth. What is more, popular culture is, in the words of music journalist Simon Reynolds, addicted to its own past. It not only reminisces, it revives, reissues, remixes earlier forms and styles instead of coming up with genuinely new. Finally, our most modern technologies are always also time machines: producing sepia-coloured images of the present for an anticipated nostalgic recollection in the future.

These very different cultural phenomena, which are often subsumed under the term nostalgia, raise a number of still under-explored questions. How new is this development, given that period films are as old as the cinema and that popular culture and music has drawn on earlier periods as long as it exists? Can the recycling of old styles and forms not also be highly creative and result in innovations? Are period settings and costumes, retro and vintage styles as such indicative and synonymous with nostalgia? Is it really nostalgia that drives our interest in and our engagement with the past? And if not what other motivations are at play? What role, for example, have media technologies such as film and the internet played in preserving the culture of the past in the present?

These are some of the questions the workshop Pop Nostalgia addresses. It explores the uses of the past in popular culture across all media and genre, from literature, cinema, television, and video games to theme park, club nights and sports events. It is interested not only in representations of the past but also in their production and circulation as well as in audiences and reception. The workshop is particularly interested in the historical dimension of pop nostalgia.

ESRC Nostalgia Seminar Report

Adam Nix1 Comment

The fifth seminar in ESRC funded series on organizational history took place in a rather damp Birmingham on Wednesday 15th June. With the key theme of the day being Nostalgia, one might have forgiven the delegates a wistful look back to the June days of their past. Nonetheless, sprits were high despite the weather and our off-campus location alongside the canals of post-industrial Digbeth provided a fitting setting for the day’s programme.

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The first speaker for the day, Yannis Gabriel (University of Bath), initiated proceedings with a fascinating look at the role of nostalgia as a supporting feature of right-wing ideology. Moving away from his previous perspectives on nostalgia as a relatively benign phenomenon, the research instead focuses on those times where its existence can be leveraged for the aggressive promotion of a return to a past seen as better. Based on this, Yannis argues that nostalgia fuels authoritarian ideologies and movements by constructing the past in mythical terms that is free from the features of modern society that such groups see as undesirable.

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Following on from this, Constantine Sedikides (University of Southampton) shared his studies on the relevance of organizational nostalgia in work meaning. These looked at nostalgia as a factor in the reduction of employee turnover as well as observing the benefits it can provide to those suffering from burnout. Constantine goes on to suggest that where there are high levels of burnout, organizational nostalgia gives a rich source of meaning that is of benefit to employees work experience.

IMG_20160615_135434After lunch, Agnès Delahaye (Université Lumière Lyon II) started the afternoon session off with her presentation on usable pasts and the role nostalgia plays as a device for promoting an author’s version of a given history. The research centred on the writings and historiography  relating to the founding and development of New England. It is ultimately suggested that at times, history as a practice of caring about the truth, rather than a discourse, is idealistic.

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Eva Heesen’s (Leibniz Universität Hannover) followed with her research on the role of nostalgia within museum exhibitions and the
vistors’ use of such exhibitions as a form of mental escape. The talk highlighted the importance of balancing the educational role of museums with the need to provide an emotional experience to visitors. Her paper argues for nostalgia as escapism, which is seen as an indistinct longing for a recognizable but notably different version of reality.

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The final session by Marie MacLean (University of Bath) and Charles Harvey (Newcastle University Business School) focused on the uses of oral history and narrative interview techniques within business history. The research explores the use of such methods as way to capture subjective experience and in doing so looks at nostalgia of East Germans for the time before reunification with West Germany.

Thank you to all the speakers, session chairs and the delegates for the engaging and lively imput throughout the day. Announcements regarding the sixth seminar in this series will be published shortly and will be posted here on the Organizational History Network. For further information on the above presentations please follow this link – Fifth ESRC seminar series in Organizational History – Abstracts

ESRC seminar on “Nostalgia & History”

Steph1 Comment

Nostalgia, Emotions & Organizational History

Wednesday 15 June 2016

The fifth seminar in our series will take place in Birmingham, hosted by Aston Business School at the Bond in Digbeth. Digbeth is a fitting place to consider the subject of nostalgia, as it is Birmingham’s post-industrial urban regeneration zone between the Bullring and the future HS2 station. It’s many empty warehouses and buildings have become venues for clubs featuring Northern Soul Dancing Classes, the Digbeth Dining Club, and alternative shops at the Custard Factory. Nearby is Birmingham’s oldest pub, the Old Crown, dating back to 1368.

If you would like to attend, please register for free here and enter the code ABS1.

The preliminary program so far:

0930-1000      Arrival and Refreshments

1000-1015       Welcome and Introduction

1015-1130        Yiannis Gabriel (Bath): “Organizational Nostalgia”

1130-1145       Coffee/Tea

1145-1230       Constantine Sedikides (Southampton): “Organizational Nostalgia Increases Work Meaning: The Moderating Role of Burnout”

1230-1330       Italian Buffet Lunch

1330-1415       Agnes Delahaye (Lyon 2): “Usable pasts and the anxieties of nostalgia: colonization and historiography in New England”

1415-1500       Eva C Heesen (Hannover): “Nostalgia and Museums: Invaluable Tool or Curse?”

1500-1530       Coffee/Tea and cake

1530-1615       Marie MacLean (Bath) & Charles Harvey (Newcastle): “Nostalgia, metaphor and the subjective understanding of historic identity transition”

1615-1645      Discussion and Closing Remarks

1645-1830      Drinks reception

As an ESRC funded seminar, attendance is free. Please register here and enter the code ABS1. If you have any questions, please contact the organizers: Prof Stephanie Decker (s.decker[at]aston.ac.uk) or Mr Adam Nix (nixaj[at]aston.ac.uk).

Nostalgia Conference in London

Steph

By chance I came across the announcement for a conference at the German Historical Institute in London on the topic of “Nostalgia: Historicizing the Longing for the Past”. The influential historian David Lowenthal was one of the contributors, and one of the keynotes was delivered by the social psychologist Konstantin Sedikides, one of the leading nostalgia researchers in the field. Multi-disciplinary in nature, it was a fascinating two day event, which the GHIL has covered in a blog that recounts the different panels and discussion. If you are interested, see https://nost.hypotheses.org/. The website also includes a “reading list” of texts discussed at the event, which underscores how varied the academic research on nostalgia is.