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 Special Issue Guest Co-Editors: 

Karim Ben Slimane, ISC Paris Business School, France
Damien Chaney, ESC Troyes in Champagne, France
Ashlee Humphreys, Northwestern University, USA
Bernard Leca, ESSEC Business School, France

Despite a growing interest in marketing research for institutional theory, many scholars acknowledge that there is still much insight to be gained using an institutional view of market dynamics.

Institutional theory has developed as one of the most influential organizational theories over the four last decades. It is also a disruptive research endeavor to challenge some widely held assumptions within organization and business studies such as methodological individualism and the efficiency dogma. Institutional theory originality hinges on a focus on the role of shared and diffused cognitive schemas that shape actors’ behaviors and dictate organizational forms and practices. Central to institutional theory is the idea that organizations engage into specific behavior not only for efficiency purposes but because they perceived those behaviors as socially legitimate. Thus, social practices exist not only because they are assessed as the most efficient but rather because they are viewed as the most appropriate by actors in the social and cultural environment. More recently, institutional theory has raises questions regarding how actors can engage with institutions, in particular how they can attempt to create, maintain or disrupt established cognitive or practical categories such as markets or consumption practices.

Recent work using institutional theory in marketing has pointed to insightful avenues through which marketing assumptions can been challenged. Institutional theory invites marketing scholars to move beyond the micro level consumer-firm dyad and to broaden the scope of marketing analysis to the macro-level of institutions. From this perspective one can understand how consumption practices are embedded in cognitive and cultural schemas socially constructed by a wide array of actors. Consumption occurs when macro institutional conditions that render them possible are established. Here institutional theory points to the role that several players can play in legitimating a given consumption practice. Institutional research shows that companies should not be considered the only active agents in a market. Consumers, authoritative bodies, rating agencies or intermediaries among other actors, all contribute to the social constructions of markets, and how products become perceived as legitimate and desirable by consumers.

However, this broader view of marketing remains largely under-explored. Dynamics of consumption practices emergence, maintenance and disruption deserve particular interest from researchers who address the construction process of the macro level conditions of consumption practices to grasp how consumers behave at the micro level.

We thus invite theoretical and empirical works that explores the process of emergence, maintenance and disruption of consumption practices and that acknowledges the variety of roles that actors can play in such institutional dynamics. The potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• How consumption practices emerge at the first place? How do they become institutionalized?
• How consumption practices are maintained and continue over time?
• How consumption practices erode and collapse?
• How do illegitimate consumption practices evolve over time? Why do some illegitimate consumption practices become legitimate whereas others disappear?
• What is the role of consumers as agents in the shaping of consumption practices at the macro level?
• How do consumers engage into institutional work?
• Beyond the dyad firm-consumer, what is the role of media, critics, technology, and professions in legitimating and delegitimizing consumption practices?
• How do collaborative dynamics among companies legitimate new market products and new consumption practices in emerging industries? 

Submission guidelines

When preparing your submission, please check the JBR website for guidelines on style and paper length:

Manuscript submission for the review process will be done in the Elsevier Editorial system at the following website:

 

Submission details:

Initial Submission date: 1 December 2017
Submission deadline date: 31 March 2018

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