Crafting social memory for international recognition: the role of place and tradition in an Italian silk-tie maker

This chapter focuses on the role of place and local history in building the brand identities of craft organizations. Recent research on craft organizations has focused on the local context as an important factor for identity recognition and distinctiveness. However, an important but understudied aspect of this relates to the organizational use of both the sense of place and history and how visions of the past are used to support and legitimate organizational operations. In this context, local history is not simply regarded as a timeline along which events come to pass, but as a symbolic and cultural artefact that organizational actors deliberately manage and construct. Using the empirical case of an Italian high- end silk- tie maker, the chapter investigates how high prestige associated with ties draws from the past and the sense of place, which become salient components of the product brand itself. Drawing from the notion of social memory, we explore how material and cultural practices performed by the firm provide common cues for interpretation of the past. Our findings suggest the multifaceted and ambivalent ways in which the sense of place and tradition is deployed to create brand singularity, related to: 1) the specificities of the place – firmly embedded in the city of Naples, the image of the firm and that of the city become reciprocally reinforcing; 2) the family- owned tradition of the firm, particularly palpable in the sense of hospitality towards customers. We discuss the theoretical implications of our study in terms of understanding the ambivalence of the sense of place between creative context and chaotic or shabby site, and the ability of the firm to capitalize on a repository of social memories, commonly associated with local context specificities