The Role of Infrastructure in Shaping Consumption
Introduction
Where Consumers Meet Markets, Special issue of the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research; Deadline 1 Oct 2027
INTEREST CATEGORY: CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
POSTING TYPE: Calls: Journals
Posted by: James Ellis
Journal of the Association for Consumer Research
Call for Papers
The Role of Infrastructure in Shaping Consumption
Issue Editors: Yuliya Komarova, Hoori Rafieian, and Lauren Block
This issue examines consumer infrastructures, including systems, institutions, and material arrangements that organize access to core domains of everyday consumption such as housing, mobility, food, finance, digital platforms, data, health services, and education. Infrastructure is where consumers most concretely meet the marketplace: from transit networks determining access to work and healthcare, to platform algorithms allocating visibility and price, to financial systems enabling or constraining basic transactions. Consumer research has tended to analyze outcomes at the micro level (attitudes, preferences, persuasion) or to focus on discrete domains (e.g., health, food, environmental behavior), without treating the infrastructure itself as a unit of analysis. Rather than focusing on individual attitudes or isolated policy interventions, this issue centers the structural architectures that shape when, how, and whether consumers can participate meaningfully in markets.
For a complete description of the topic, including submission ideas, details about related events and editor bios, please see the call for papers:
Editorial Timeline
- TCR Conference: June 1-4, 2027
- Informational webinar and Q&A: July 1, 2027
- Submission portal opens: August 1, 2027
- First submission deadline: October 1, 2027
- Final decisions: September 1, 2028
- Publication: January 2029