This paper addresses the role of public discourse in processes of category formation. Tracing the emergence and diffusion of a category on the media, and exploring the discourses generated on the media within and around the emerging category, the paper reflects on how these discourses concur in performing the very category they portray. The focus is set on the Historical Shops category, as part of broader processes of urban categorisations for local development and regeneration. By means of a Topic Modelling of a corpus of 3262 press articles collected from Italian news sources between 2009 and 2019, the paper finds that public discourse plays three main roles: echoing category creation processes by policymakers, grounding the rising category in wider discourses of retail crisis, urban degradation, regeneration and overtourism, and narrating it by explaining what Historical Shops are, where they are located, which issues they face and which responses they receive at different institutional levels. Overall, in this paper, the semi-automated techniques afforded by Topic Modelling offer a way to enter the meaning construction processes and elicit the agential role of public discourse in the formation of a category.

The uses of the past are the subject of a stream of research at the intersection of organization studies and business history, which highlights the importance of the past as a "tool" for organizations, but also acknowledges its potential being an "arena of struggle" among organizational actors. However, most contributions in this literature study the uses of the past quite statically, at a given moment in time. Adopting a temporality perspective -i.e. considering the past as constantly (re)negotiated in the present and in relation with the future -, and employing a retrospective study based on historical sources, this paper aims at understanding how the past becomes past and how it informs future outcomes. The empirical case used to explore this research question is the Caffè Pedrocchi, an historical café in Padua (Italy), which the founder's heir left as a bequest to the Municipality, explicitly positing a past-future tension in the use of its past. We found out that in the history of the café there was no such thing as "the" past to be projected for the future, but four main forms that the same café's past took (legacy, burden, constraint, enabler), varying along two dimensions: the past's positive/negative value, and the active/passive role assigned to it. Also, every form of the past came with at least two possible future outcomes: continuous future (the maintenance of the status quo) and discontinuous future, occurring whenever some actor intervened influentially, also creating a new form of the past. By disentangling the role of the past beyond being just a tool or an arena of struggle, we provide a processual view on how the past shifts its forms according to the actors' interventions and future outcomes.

Abstract. The presence of outstanding cultural assets is not always a synonym of tourism and local development. This means that the competitiveness of a destination or a site is also related to other factors, which have been studied and gathered within respective theoretical frameworks by different researchers, focusing the urban destination (Van den Berg, Van der Borg, Van der Meer, 1995), the site level (Jansen-Verbeke, 2012), and the relationship between heritage conservation and tourist use (McKercher, Du Cros, 2002). In the present paper, these three different models have been applied to two cases: Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Venice and Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. Two flexible spaces, recently restored, they are both important on the community level for their past function and modern adaptive re-use. Results demonstrate the usefulness of the models in offering an operative tool to evaluate the site on its own, but also their limits in a network destination governance perspective: thus they open to models integrations and future research in this domain.

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