Inheritance has to do with listening to the past and being touched and affected by it. Inheritance is not simply receiving an artefact or a message, but receiving an injunction to be touched by the questions that the inheritance opens (Barnwell, 2025). In the sense that we do not inherit something whose existence or qualities are settled or fully known, to inherit is an event that unsettles the taken for granted and leaves us wondering. The past is no longer known and determined, as inheritance is an event that opens the past anew. In this book, inheritance has done analytical work of opening the past to re- discovery and producing new connections between pasts, presents, and futures.

With the concept of inherited time, I sat out to challenge the short memory often found in organization, strategy, policy and also sometimes in research of these phenomena. With this concept, organizations and work are situated in longer temporalities. It pushes questions about the importance of the thinking, practices, and experiences that came before and the rich pasts that inform vocational work. Thinking with inheritance draws attention to the politics and power at work when policies describe certain pasts as over or outdated, thus delegitimizing them, and it reopens questions about the potential value of past experiences. Indeed, inherited time challenges linear time and the manners in which linear time portrays the past as less sophisticated and less developed than the present. It can also set in motion wonderings about whether there is still an untapped virtuality (Pollock, 2016) of past events in the history of educational vocations that calls on us to re- discover them.