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Journal of Marketing Management

"Violence, Markets, and Marketing" – Special Section Call for Content Proposals. Deadline for content proposals 30 November 2016.

Special Section Coordinator: Rohit Varman, Deakin University, Australia

Background

Violence is ubiquitous in the contemporary social world (Butler, 2004; Sassen, 2014). Violence can be symbolic or physical in form (Bourdieu, 1977; Zizek, 2009). Many have argued that violence is inherent in the current trajectory of neoliberal capitalism as businesses extract profits by violently dispossessing and displacing people through the logic of markets (Evans & Giroux, 2015; Harvey, 2003; Sassen, 2014; Varman & Al-Amoudi, 2016). Indeed, this prompted Banerjee (2008) to coin the term necrocapitalism that shows how profit-making and violence or death are intertwined (see also Banerjee, 2011). In emphasising necropolitics, Mbembe (2003, p.34) points out that, "the extraction and looting of natural resources by war machines goes hand in hand with brutal attempts to immobilize and spatially fix whole categories of people." Accordingly, necropolitics creates death worlds in which vast populations are subjected to extreme violence.

Several scholars in the critical tradition have highlighted how ideology of marketing is often utilised to justify violence against underprivileged groups (Eckhardt, Dholakia, & Varman, 2013; Tadajewski et al., 2014). For example, discourse of marketing is deployed to valorise the position of consumers, who become sovereigns entitled to perpetrate different forms of violence against underprivileged sellers of goods and services. Similarly, corporations can use markets and marketing to violently displace vulnerable consumers or inflict violence on workers. Marketing is often deployed to recruit consumers in corporate projects of profiteering that may rest on violent processes of accumulation.

Aim of the Special Section

The special section will focus on the relationship between marketing and violence. The objective of the section is to offer insights into how markets and marketing create, sustain, and normalise violence. As Evans and Giroux (2015, p.7) observe, "when violence becomes normalized and decentered, the disposability of entire populations becomes integral to the functioning, the profiteering, and the entrenchment of the prevailing rationalities of the dominant culture." This special section is dedicated to revealing how markets and marketing make violence culturally acceptable and socially normalised. Most forms of violence are often resisted and challenged in various ways. Therefore, there is also need to understand different forms of resistance.

Potential topics
We welcome empirical pieces, theoretical papers, and research notes on this topic. We invite submissions from divergent theoretical perspectives, such as critical theory, feminist theory, queer theory, post structuralism, Marxist analysis, postcolonial theory to name a few. A wide variety of topics will be suitable for this special section and may include (but not limited to) the following:

• Different forms of violence that prevail in markets
• Mechanisms of normalisation of violence in markets
• Violence against underprivileged market actors
• Market based violence and gender, race, and class
• Role of corporations in creating violence
• Critical analyses of marketing concepts used to normalise violence
• Role of marketing in production of subjectivities that are indifferent to violence
• Analysis (visual, textual etc.) of different forms of media to understand their roles in normalising violence
• Academic writings, performativity, and market violence
• Consumer culture and violence
• Discussions of organised forgetting by the State and corporations in sustaining market violence
• Organising alternatives and resistance to violence
• Violence and marketing pedagogy

Interested authors should initially submit a content proposal to the Special Section Coordinator, Rohit Varman rohit.varman@deakin.edu.au by 30 November 2016.

Authors invited to make full submissions to the Special Section review process will be notified by the Coordinator. Full submissions are due by 1 May 2017.

For the full Call for Content and more details about how to submit a proposal visit the webpage:

 

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