Nostalgia, Remembrance of Things Past, and Timespace in Consumer Behavior: The Museum of Innocence & The Innocence of Objects

The main topic proposed in this paper is the existence of a link between the ontological dimension of the practice-based perspective in marketing studies and consumer research and nostalgic behavior (Arajuo et al. 2010, Warde 2005): this link is constituted by the concept of “timespace of human activity” à la Schatzki (2010) and manifests itself through the role of materiality in terms of interobjectivity (Canniford, Bajde 2015, Kravets et al. 2018). From a grounded theory perspective, these dimensions would allow the extension of the substantive theory on nostalgic behavior as presented by Christina Goulding (2001, 2002), by bringing out the bases of a formal theory on the institutional dynamics of market systems (Marketing Theory 2017). Considering nostalgia as an analytical construct, the case study is aimed at theory building and is based on a project by Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk: around the “creation of a museum as a novel, a novel as a museum and an illustrated catalog as if it were both a novel and a museum”, the investigation suggests a plausible research path to tackle the relationship between “consumption, materiality and [institutional dynamics in] markets” (Marketing Theory 2017; Shove et al. 2009)