Historical, collective, institutional and market memory (Development of emergent phenomena)

Abstract The article is of interdisciplinary nature with its emphasis laid on sociology. Its aim is to present some considerations on the way in which emergent phenomena1 are created. The question whether the reasoning based on analogy fosters phenomena related to the emergence of new notions comes as the research problem that the author tries to solve. The research hypothesis is formulated as the following statement: applying analogy,2 considerations which refer to historical memory allow additional notions, such as collective, institutional and market memory, to emerge. In the article, the research method applied in order to achieve the assumed aim is the grounded theory3 because it allows us to generate knowledge in numerous fields. During the articulation of theoretical annotations,4 new emerging notions come as a good starting point for further studies on various types of memory, and consequently, they determine their usability in practice. In the article, the annotations are placed in the footnotes and they present the author’s thoughts and reflections presented by people who have been consulted with regard to the discussed problems. Presented in the theoretical part of the article, the reference to scientific achievements in the field of marketing memory is actually very difficult because they are extremely scarce. Historical memory may be seen as knowledge resources recorded in some past stories, diaries and specialist publications; it also refers to artefacts collected in museums and to historical monuments that represent the culture of a particular society. Collective memory refers to historical awareness that is manifested by the cultivation of traditions and customs, reconstruction of buildings in which previous generations used to live. The concept of institutional memory is related to a specific vector that provides collective memory with magnitude and direction in the form of interpretation of events; it can be considered as a resultant of exogenous and endogenous processes taking place in a society. On the basis of those considerations, another type of memory appears: market memory as a new category of knowledge. The essence of market memory comes down reminding various communities about products the consumption of which is supposed to satisfy their needs at a specific level, but it will also lead to the replacement of currently operating devices with new and more advanced ones.