"Politics of time around a legacy: the case of Caffè Pedrocchi"

A legacy is a property transmitted from the past by an ancestor. When received by an organization, the legacy poses a managerial challenge, given the inner temporal character, being an evident remaining from the past, that is supposed to be used in the present and maintained for the future. Literature on “uses of the past” has shed light on various ways through which the past can be remembered and reinterpreted for present and future purposes, or, when unpleasant or not suitably usable as a resource, forgotten or ‘outpasted’. However, in the case of a legacy, although with the passage of time the past can become undesirable, the latter possibility is hard to occur, given the obligation to carry on the past in front of multiple actors with different stakes and temporal orientations, and an unavoidable materiality requiring ongoing care. Through a historical retrospective study on Caffé Pedrocchi, a historical café in Padua (Italy), resorting to archival and secondary sources and qualitative data in the time range 1891-2021, this paper provides a process model explaining the management of a legacy in time and over time, dealing with multiple actors and materiality. We found that, in time, the temporal meaning of the legacy, materialized in the building, and performed in ongoing activities, recursively rise what we label “politics of time”, consisting in acts of clashing and balancing of other actors’ different temporal orientations, and that, accordingly, the past enables or burdens the future of the organization, a situation that changes over time due contextual dynamics and historical distance. Thanks to the concept of legacy and the case’s historical depth, this study offers a processual and critical view on uses of the past, acknowledging the co-existence of change and continuity in material and pluralistic settings where the past is unavoidable and contested.