CFPs: Two Journal Special Issues of Interest

The Journal of Historical Research in Marketing (JHRM) has issued a call for papers for a special issue on "Marketing History from Below: Bringing the Consumer Back In," to be guest edited by Stefan Schwarzkopf. The call states,

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 submission instructions and a more detailed explanation of the special issue theme, please see the call for papers on the JHRM website. The submission deadline for this special issue is September 1, 2014 with an expected publication date of August 2015.

The journal Business History will publish a special issue on the topic, "Towards a Narrative Turn in Business History"; guest editors will be Mads Mordhorst and Stefan Schwarzkopf, both of Copenhagen Business School. Because the call for papers is not yet posted on the journal website, we provide the full text here:

During the last two decades, narratives and narrative theory have gained influence at Business Schools in fields such as management studies, marketing, and organizational studies to such a degree that some scholars have framed these new perspectives as a distinctive ‘narrative turn.’  Scholars in these subfields of the business and management research community have used narrative theories and narratological concepts as analytical tools to discover who constructs narratives, in what ways, for what purpose, and how these narratives then influence sense-making and strategizing in organizations and markets. Furthermore, narratives and other linguistic entities, like metaphors and modes of storytelling, have been analyzed for their uses as performative tools by managers and other drivers of organizational change. In other words, what started as a mode of critical investigation turned into a managerial tool focused on the status quo, as scholars began to focus on how organizational change can be ‘managed’ through changes in organizational narratives. Despite the boom in research on narratives in organization theory, economics, marketing theory, and management studies, associated with scholars like David Boje, Barbara Czarniawska, Deidre McCloskey, Barbara Stern, Melanie Bryant, Andrew Brown and many others, this research has so far made only limited inroads into the business history community. Business and management scholars who engage with these questions often ignore that ‘history’, both in the etymological and the disciplinary sense, is born with an inherent tension between ‘history’ as past and ‘history’ as narrative. This ambiguity means that the field, from Herodotus to Leopold von Ranke and Hayden White, is forever engulfed in discussions about the narrative character of the discipline and its scholarly products. This, in turn, means that business historians should be in a position from where it is possible to bridge and negotiate the recent approaches in business and management studies on the one side and the practices of archival research and historiographical representation on the other. Different attempts to engage in a conversation about the fruitful tension between these two research traditions have been made recently, amongst others by Stephanie Decker, Per Hansen, Mads Mordhorst, Andrew Popp, and Mick Rowlinson. The purpose of the special issue is to intensify these discussions.

The guest editors encourage submissions that engage with the following problems and questions:

• Narratives and narrative structures (narratology) as a method for business historians.
• Narratives and the construction of shared memories in organizations in the past and present.
• Narratives constructed by professions and academic fields (accounting, marketing, strategy).
• The potential uses of Oral History methods in business history.
• Storytelling vs. business history: do business historians create narratives, and in what ways?
• What metaphors do business historians rely on and construct? Are business historical models metaphors?
• The ‘Narrative turn’ in organizational theory, management and marketing studies: how can business historians engage with and contribute to this challenge?

The deadline for receipt of papers is October 1, 2014, with publication planned for spring 2015. Only full papers will be considered. Papers should be sent to both guest editors, Mads Mordhorst (mmo.lpf@cbs.dk) Stefan Schwarzkopf (ssc.lpf@cbs.dk). Please do not submit the contribution through the journal's Manuscript Central site, but do see the journal website for style guidelines: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/00076791.asp