Special Issue on ‘Marketing History From Below: Bringing the Consumer Back In’

The Journal of Historical Research in Marketing invites submissions for a special issue focused on ‘Marketing History from Below’. Although marketing scholarship frequently asserts that marketing strategy begins and ends with consumers, most marketing historical work still focuses on firms, brands, products, advertising, packaging, government institutions, and the history of marketing thought. Marketing historiography thus extends the perspective of those who market, as opposed to the voice and influence of those who are being marketed to. What’s more, despite the recent acknowledgement that consumers are very active in the creation of value in marketing, very little historical scholarship exists that shows how this value creation by consumers was actually shaped. This special issue attempts to address this hiatus and asks what historical research in marketing can contribute to shed light on the cultural-economic spaces that lie beyond the realm of firm activities, that is, the spaces populated by consumer communities, social experiences, political resistances, and consumer-led alternatives that make up the market.

For this special issue of JHRM, specific topics might include but are not limited to historical perspectives on:

- how consumers and citizens respond to and interact with firms and brands in ways not anticipated by marketers,
- case studies of prosumership and of consumer citizenship,
- consumers’ extended self before and during high modernity,
- consumers as integrators of operant resources (physical, social, cultural); how did previous generations define experiences and (co-)create value,
- marketing and imagined communities (e.g., nations and cities as brands),
- marketing and social criticism before ‘No Logo’,
- 20th-century marketing theory and the idea of the powerful consumer,
- consumer power, empowerment and disempowerment in and through markets before the internet,
- writing the past: constructing histories in/for marketing,
- history, theory and the consumer voice: how do narratives include and exclude those who shape market exchanges,
- marketing and political parties, co-operatives and civil society organizations,
- marketing, consumers and political dictatorships (from Communist East Europe to the right-wing dictatorships of interwar Europe and liberal dictatorships like Pinochet’s Chile),
- the relationship between marketing, black markets, and precarious work in the past (e.g., prostitution, black markets, forgery, etc.),
- marketing and devious, illegal behaviour (e.g., shop-lifting, copyright-theft, brand imitations, etc.),
- Global-Southern varieties of marketing cultures and histories: marketing history outside the North American and West European cultural hemisphere

The submission deadline for this special issue is September 1, 2014 with an expected publication date of August 2015. If you are unsure of the suitability of your topic or have questions regarding a submission, please contact the special issue guest editor Stefan Schwarzkopf, Associate Professor in Business History, Copenhagen Business School, at ssc.lpf@cbs.dk.

How to submit to the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing
Submissions for this special issue of JHRM should be made using ScholarOne Manuscripts, the online submission and peer review system. Registration and access is available on the journal's ScholarOne site: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jhrm. Full information and guidance on using ScholarOne Manuscripts is available at the Emerald ScholarOne Manuscripts Support Centre: http://msc.emeraldinsight.com/.