Community

May 25, 2016

Community

Introduction

Consumption, Politics and Transformation, Special issue of Journal of Marketing Management; Deadline 24 Apr 2017

Journal of Marketing Management Special Issue Call for Papers – The Consumption, Politics and Transformation of Community

Deadline for submissions 24 April 2017.

Guest editors: Mona Moufahim, Durham University, UK; Victoria Wells, University of Sheffield, UK; Robin Canniford, University of Melbourne, Australia

More than twenty years of research has elevated community to a theoretical and analytical touchstone for marketing and consumer researchers (Arnould & Thompson, 2005; Gainer & Fischer, 1994). From early conceptions of consumption subcultures (Schouten & McAlexander, 1995; Kates, 2002), through brand communities (Muniz & O’Guinn, 2002; McAlexander, Schouten & Koenig, 2002; Schau, Muniz & Arnould, 2009), and latterly, consumer tribes (Cova, 1997; Cova, Kozinets & Shankar, 2012), research on marketing and consumer behaviour has applied and developed conceptual tools to understand how people construct more or less dense webs of interpersonal interactions, and more or less durable attachments to shared territories and identities within market societies (Arvidsson, 2013).

Despite broad acceptance in the marketing literature, criticisms can be levelled against some common conceptualisations of community. In particular, the placing of clear conceptual borders around social activity by calling it ‘brand community’, or otherwise, requires ‘purifications’ (Latour, 1996), deliberate simplifications of hybrid and complex realities that serve the purpose of labelling and managing phenomena. These clear conceptual boundaries have resulted in representations of community that have become popular by virtue of their offering managers handles on slippery marketplace phenomena (Canniford, 2011; Lee, 2009).

Nevertheless, such managerial handles tend to reflect as much about the politics and purpose of management as they do about the communities they describe. Moreover, neatly bounded categories might be considered to reproduce a worldview that stops short of considering instances where communities flow into each other, fail to gel, or forces such as ‘affect and atmospheres’ that mediate communities as ‘social flows’ via shared emotions and embodied experiences (Hill, Canniford & Mol, 2013; Ingold, 2011; Thrift, 2008).

In response to these critiques, emerging work is exploring differences that occur within communities of consumers and the practical ways in which differences are created and negotiated (Arsel & Bean 2013; Thomas, Price & Schau, 2013). Equally, marketing scholarship is tackling issues of boundary construction and maintenance in markets that are framed as dynamic cultural systems (Scaraboto & Fischer, 2013; Weinberger, 2015) …