"The Matter of Matter of the Past: Unveiling Temporal Materiality in Organization Studies"

The past and its effects on organizations in the present (and for the future) have been increasingly finding space in organization and management studies. Responding to a call for a ‘historic turn’ in this realm, uses-of-the-past and organizational memory studies have brought different - but related and sometimes overlapping - perspectives on the relevance of the past in organizations and organizational processes. Slightly distancing from a ‘pure’ rhetorical history approach - more centered on a strategic interpretation of the past based on discourse, narratives and spoken or written language -, some scholarship interested in the past has started to embrace the so called ‘material turn’ in organization studies. Material objects, artefacts, physical spaces, buildings, and other remaining from past times have been acknowledged to play a relevant role in recollecting, remembering and representing the past in the present. However, perspectives, research methods and insights differ from paper to paper, probably due to distinct theoretical approaches to the past and to materiality. Through a narrative review of some exemplars of published works at the intersection of the past and materiality, this paper aims at showing the different roles that materiality has in uses of the past and organizational memory studies. Basing on these insights and in the wake of the “historiographical reflexivity” approach advanced by Decker, Hassard and Rowlinson (2020), I propose an agenda for future research advocating a “temporal materiality”, which comprises the study of materiality in time (through practices) and over time (considering a view on materiality and its embeddedness in the historical context).