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Scandinavian Journal of Management

Special issue on
MARKETING-AS-PRACTICE

Call for papers
Deadline: 30 September 2009

Guest editors:

Chris Hackley
Royal Holloway University of London, UK

Per Skålén
Karlstad University, Sweden

Sari Stenfors
Stanford University, USA

Academic marketing research has focused disproportionately on studying how organizations should conduct marketing but has largely neglected studies of how marketing is conducted. The emphasis has been on prescribing marketing to practice rather than studying marketing as practice. The result is a paucity of knowledge about the role of marketing in and around organizations. Hence, this Scandinavian Journal of Management special issue seeks to open up a space devoted to studies of marketing-as-practice.

Drawing on the ‘practice turn’ in contemporary social theory, management studies and strategic management studies, we invite contributions that study marketing praxis, practices and practitioners in organizations. Studying the praxis or actions of marketing practitioners need not focus only on those with a ‘marketing’ job designation, but focuses on all who enact and/or carry out marketing praxis in any capacity as, for example, ‘part time’ marketers, service personnel, strategic planners and even consumers. It is also important to explicate the practices (symbolic, linguistic and material resources) which marketing practitioners draw upon when they enact or perform marketing work and interpret the actions of other marketers. We thus encourage submissions studying the marketing practices ordering both strategic and everyday marketing work in all types of organizations.

One of the main advantages of taking a practice perspective on marketing is that local micro-level marketing practices can be understood in relation to broader societal forces and discourses. Academic and consulting discourses of managerial and strategic marketing and regulative organizations such as marketing academies and government institutes often influence practice by framing the ways in which marketing practices are constructed, interpreted and rationalised. Hence, we also invite contributions studying the institutional dynamics pertaining to marketing on the organizational field level focusing, for instance, on how certain articulations of marketing practice become dominant, ‘taken for granted’ and institutionalized, informing the social constructions of, for example, managers, employees and customers within the field.

Marketing-as-practice research can be carried out from various theoretical traditions. We invite contributions drawing on, but not limited to, critical perspectives (e.g. Foucauldian and critical theoretical approaches), actor-network theory, neo-institutional theory, discourse analysis, symbolic interactionism, activity theory, and ethnography. We invite approaches that look at marketing-as-practice from outside the disciplinary perspective of marketing including anthropology, art history, sociology or literary, linguistic, feminist or cultural studies. But we also welcome contributions from research fields closer to marketing such as from human resource management and the strategy-as-practice area and, indeed, also from e.g. retail and services marketing quarters.

Conceptual work is welcome, but empirically based studies are probably more likely to fulfil the aims of the special issue. Also, qualitative methods presenting close look of organizational action are preferred. However, we would like to point out that we do not construe the domain of marketing-as-practice in a preconceived way. Central is that we are seeking work which penetrates the surface level of marketing; work that generates insights into the ways in which marketing practice is constructed, produced and performed. We invite contributions that focus on, but need not be limited to, the following questions:

• Who is the marketing practitioner? What is the subjectivity of the marketing practitioner and where do private and public professional marketing identities meet?
• What do marketers do? What forms does marketing praxis take? What is marketing as interactional social practice?
• How do marketers do marketing? What are the discursive and social practices of marketing which marketers in different domains draw on to enact and perform their professional role?
• What is the role of marketing in the strategy process, and the role of strategy in the marketing process? How are the political tensions between strategy and marketing played out in interactional organizational settings?
• How does marketing-as-discourse, including academic discourse, order organizational action and roles? What are the purposes of these ordering activities, in other words, who gains and who loses?
• How can existing strategy-as-practice research inform marketing-as-practice? Is the distinction meaningful?
• How can local intra-organizational marketing practice be understood against common and shared marketing practices on the field level?
• How do marketing practices evolve and transform? Whom or what do they transform and how does this transformation impact on human subjectivity?

The deadline for submissions is 30 September 2009. All contributions should be submitted through the electronic submission system of SJM, following the journal guidelines for authors. Please upload your document at and choose ‘Marketing As Practice’ as the Article Type.

Additional information can be obtained from Per Skålén at per.skalen@kau.se.

ÂÜÀòÉç¹ÙÍøt the quest editors:

Chris Hackley is Professor of Marketing at the School of Management, Royal Holloway University of London. He has published research on marketing practice in the British Journal of Management, European Journal of Marketing and Journal of Advertising Research, while his work on critical marketing and marketing ethics has appeared in the Journal of Management Studies and Journal of Business Ethics among others. His books include Doing Research Projects in Marketing, Management and Consumer Research (Routledge) and Advertising and Promotion: Communicating Brands (Sage).

Per Skålén is Associate Professor of Business and Administration based at the Service Research Center, Karlstad University, Sweden. His research revolves around marketing-aspractice and critical marketing. His papers on these topics have appeared in the Scandinavian Journal of Management and Journal of Organizational Change Management. Per’s most recent book is Marketing Discourse – A Critical Perspective, (Routledge, co-authored). His next book which will be published during 2009 is: Managing Service Firms: The Power of Marketing in Action (Routledge).

Sari Stenfors is the Associate Director of the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research at Stanford University, USA. Her research interests, borne from 13 years as an international business executive in the advertising, healthcare and design industries, are strategy-as-practice, experiential learning methods, and business research methods. She has published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Organization, and Journal of Productivity Analysis. She is the Associate Chair of the Practice of Strategy Interest Group in Strategic Management Society.

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