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Allowing your legacy business program to evolve.
The living heritage of a community—the social and cultural elements, which include legacy businesses—change and evolve over time. The legacy business programs we create must also adapt to allow for this change. Many preservation programs are built on fixed conventions—fixed in time, fixed in style, or fixed in process—that can quickly become outdated and even irrelevant. Designing a legacy business program in this manner would not allow for changes in the community that may impact business significance or eligibility, or changes in the market or economy that may change the included services or support tools. Cultures and communities evolve—our legacy business programs must too.
Big Idea
Deleuzian Social Ontology & Assemblage Theory
Deleuzian Social Ontology and Assemblage Theory is an adaptation and application of 20th-century French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s theory that interpreting the world's structure should focus on movement, change, and connection rather than fixed, rigid categories. Deleuze suggested that things constantly evolve or “become” through their interactions and relations with other elements. Theorist Félix Guattari applied this theory to societal structures in Deleuzian Social Ontology and Assemblage Theory. In his interpretation, social structures or “ontologies” like communities, culture, and institutions (legacy businesses) are not fixed but dynamic and changing. His “assemblage” theory takes this further by outlining that social structures are composed of dynamic assemblages or components. Applying this to legacy businesses, you could have multiple components that make up a legacy business, including core components such as the business owner and customers, along with many others, like social interactions, skills, cultural traditions, community character, etc. Since each of these components is dynamic, they change and affect changes in other components. We can use this theory to envision how our interpretation of legacy businesses should not be set in stone. Changes in components such as social interactions, business owners, or community character can alter a legacy business, not necessarily making it less significant, but certainly requiring reevaluation. Our legacy business programs, then, should also be dynamic and allow for community change and evolution to occur.
As mentioned earlier, the evolution of legacy business programs depends on community-driven input, insight, and learning. By developing a continuous feedback loop for our business owners and community members, we can better adapt our services, expand or redirect our business and economic support, and modify policies to meet their needs. It is important to remember that legacy business programs are just as much about preserving the businesses as they are about maintaining cultural continuity. We support these businesses because of their role in defining a community's culture and character, but the community also helps define the legacy of the business. To create a legacy business program with long-term sustainability, we must allow both the community and the businesses to evolve and adapt.
Here are some things to consider for allowing legacy business programs to evolve:
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Install the option to amend your policy when you create it. Create the requirements and process for making edits and changes.
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Enable updating your services and support to meet changing needs.
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Create low-risk methods for quickly experimenting, testing, and evaluating new services and support.
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Allow for flexibility in your definition of “significance”. This may also require you to revisit the definition of “legacy”.
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Create the framework to revisit eligibility metrics and application processes.
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Create a process for delisting a legacy business based on evolution or change.