Alisa Minina Jeunemaitre, emlyon business school

Stefania Masè, IPAG Business School

This special issue examines how conservative, populist, and reactionary consumer movements use consumption as a cultural and political practice. While progressive consumer movements have received substantial scholarly attention, conservative consumer movements remain understudied and often analyzed through frameworks of extremism or social danger. The editors seek contributions that adopt an emic approach, understanding these movements from participants' perspectives while maintaining critical analysis.

The issue welcomes interdisciplinary research exploring how conservative consumer practices construct political, religious, gendered, and national identities. Contributors are encouraged to distinguish analytically among conservatism, populism, reactionary politics, and related categories rather than treating them as interchangeable. Research should examine how markets, brands, platforms, and material practices shape these movements, what needs they express, what forms of belonging they create, and whether consumption can facilitate dialogue across ideological differences.

Appel publié par Consumption Markets & Culture. Voir l'appel sur le site de l'éditeur. Fiche de l'appel sur kerostig.

Potential topics

• Tradwife and gendered lifestyle movements
• Conservative and populist consumer activism
• Religious consumption and faith-based markets
• Religious influencers and religious marketing
• Prepper, survivalist, and self-sufficiency movements
• Conspiracy theories and consumer communities
• Gun cultures and influencer economies
• Nationalist and anti-globalist consumption
• Modest fashion
• Anti-multicultural and antiprogressive market practices
• Boycotts, buycotts, and ideological consumption
• Platforms and circulation of political identities
• Consumer culture and family values
• Traditionalism, nostalgia, and heritage
• Domesticity and conservative subject formation
• Market responses to reactionary and populist movements
• Consumption and dialogue across ideological divisions

Timeline

• February 28, 2027: Manuscript submission deadline

The Nordic region exhibits a distinctive consumer culture marked by paradoxes: societies balance egalitarian values with status-consciousness, individualism with collective welfare systems, and modesty with aspiration. The Nordic welfare state uniquely aligns state and individual interests, creating a distinctive marketplace. Despite growing research examining Nordic consumption patterns—from branding and cultural phenomena to alternative food markets and immigrant experiences—significant gaps remain in understanding how these contradictions manifest across consumption practices and market formations.

This special issue seeks to advance comprehensive scholarship on Nordic consumer culture by publishing novel and critically grounded research that explores the interplay between state, market, and consumer practices. The editors welcome contributions analyzing market dynamics, investigating paradoxes inherent in Nordic consumption, and examining how macro-level contexts including welfare policies, cultural myths, and political ideologies shape consumer behavior, with particular interest in innovative methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches.

Appel publié par Qualitative Market Research. Voir l'appel sur le site de l'éditeur. Fiche de l'appel sur kerostig.

Potential topics

• State-market-consumer relations and welfare consumption
• Neoliberalization and privatization of welfare services
• Nordic imaginaries, myths, and branding
• Sustainability, nature consumption, and friluftsliv
• Immigration, minorities, and consumer integration
• Indigenous consumption and colonial legacies
• Gender, family, and domestic consumption practices
• Egalitarianism, conformity, and status distinction
• Consumer resistance and alternative markets
• Digitalization and platform consumption
• Dark consumption, Nordic Noir, and dystopian aesthetics
• Trust and distrust in state institutions
• Nordic brands and cultural exports
• New Nordic movements and manifestos
• Contradictions in Nordic consumer culture

Timeline

• January 5, 2026: Opening date for manuscripts submissions
• December 20, 2026: Closing date for manuscripts submission

Joel Hietanen, University of Helsinki

Søren Askegaard, University of Southern Denmark

Onni Tulensalo, Aalto University School of Business

This special issue seeks to address the significant absence of Baudrillard's social theory from contemporary marketing and consumer research, despite his foundational contributions to understanding consumption as a system of signs rather than need satisfaction. The editors argue that his radical critique of consumer society remains largely neglected or misunderstood within the field, despite being recognized as canonical work and despite contemporary calls to reconsider his insights for understanding current consumer culture.

The issue invites scholarly engagement with Baudrillard's complex theoretical framework, including his concepts of fatal strategies, hyperreality, and the intensification of signification toward implosion. Contributors are encouraged to explore how his work illuminates contemporary consumption phenomena—from sustainability discourse to market inequality—and to investigate whether fatal strategies and accelerationist impulses offer alternative perspectives on capitalist realism and consumer critique.

Appel publié par Consumption Markets & Culture. Lire l'appel complet sur le site de l'éditeur. Fiche de l'appel sur kerostig.

Potential topics

• Baudrillard's critique of consumer society and consumption as a system of signs
• Postmodern thought and its applications in marketing and consumer research
• The concept of fatal strategies and their relevance to contemporary consumer culture
• Hyperreality, simulation, and the collapse of meaning in consumer markets
• Sustainability, environmental discourse, and sign proliferation in consumer culture
• Symbolic exchange and death as critiques of political economy
• The relationship between subject and object in late capitalism and consumer behavior
• Critiques of emancipatory consumer narratives and resistive practices
• The role of excess, spectacle, and implosion in understanding contemporary consumption
• Applications of Baudrillard's theory beyond marketing, including social sciences broadly

Timeline

• June 30, 2027: Manuscript deadline

Eunjin (Anna) Kim, University of Southern California

Robert Kozinets, University of Southern California

The proliferation of AI tools and digital platforms is transforming advertising storytelling into an adaptive, multi-authored process where narratives are created, circulated, and remixed across humans, algorithms, and channels. This raises critical questions about how stories function as persuasive and cultural resources when they are fragmented, personalized, and constantly recombined by algorithms and influencers. The special issue addresses gaps in understanding what makes advertising narratives compelling in this evolving landscape.

While established psychological mechanisms like transportation, empathy, and identification explain narrative effectiveness, these mechanisms are being tested in environments of short-form content, emerging formats, and AI-generated narratives. Simultaneously, cultural and ethical dimensions remain underexplored—including the role of authenticity, the risks of manipulation, the tension between entertainment and persuasion, and how algorithmic storytelling interacts with human creativity and consumer meaning-making.

Appel publié par International Journal of Advertising. Lire l'appel complet sur le site de l'éditeur. Fiche de l'appel sur kerostig.

Potential topics

• (Re-)Conceptualizing advertising storytelling in contemporary contexts
• Exploring AI-generated content that circulates alongside human imaginaries and narratives
• Moving beyond 'do narratives work in advertising?' toward 'how do they work in contemporary media environments?'
• Investigating the craft of advertising storytelling from the creator's perspective
• Revisiting narrative advertising persuasion mechanisms such as transportation, empathy, identification, and mental simulation in fragmented and multi-platform environments
• Comparing effectiveness of narrative versus non-narrative advertising approaches
• Investigating questions about authorship, coherence, authenticity, and credibility when campaigns function as adaptive or transmedia flows
• Examining how algorithmic and human-authored narratives interact to create or fracture meanings for consumers
• Brand storytelling strategies where advertising narratives function as cultural resources
• Researching the human craft of advertising storytelling built on relationships
• The role of retro-narratives, nostalgia, and other human and cultural elements in advertising
• Micro-narratives in TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts: narrative advertising strategies for persuasion in seconds
• Examining forms, structures, and impacts of influencer storytelling around the globe
• Cross-device coherence in narrative advertising across TV, mobile, and digital formats
• Algorithmic sequencing and recombination of story fragments and implications for narrative coherence and persuasion
• Brand integration challenges in short-form storytelling advertising and risks of the 'vampire effect'
• Tensions between advertising messages and social and political issues
• Exploring the dialectical relationship between brand storytelling and consumer resistance, skepticism, or counter-narratives
• Story fatigue and manipulation: consumer overexposure, cynicism, and narrative distrust
• Dark narratives: how persuasive stories may normalize harmful stereotypes or glamorize risky behaviors
• Ethics of AI-augmented storytelling and deepfake narratives
• Gap between brand narrative promises and reality in terms of truthfulness and accountability
• How storytelling in advertising creates context for identity, authenticity, and the quest for the 'real'

Timeline

• November 11, 2026: Manuscript deadline
• November 11, 2026: Submissions open
• December 11, 2026: Submissions close

Alan Bradshaw, Royal Holloway, University of London

Joel Hietanen, University of Helsinki

Appel publié par Consumption Markets & Culture. Voir l'appel sur le site de l'éditeur. Fiche de l'appel sur kerostig.

Potential topics

• Histories of consumer culture as US soft power
• Flattery and imitation: the keen attempts to reproduce Americana across the globe
• American hegemony and the professionally polished field of consumer culture theory
• Anthropologists, ironically or otherwise, explaining exotic Americana for the benefit of the rest of the world
• Analyses of contemporary modes of Vassalisation
• Resistances of all kinds: attempts to counter and break from American consumerism through experiments in commodification and hyper-consumerism
• Submissions that are polemical, Gonzo, inspired by Baudrillard's America or Adorno's Minima Moralia or Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan that are radical of heart and stylistically break with the norms and expectations branded into doctoral students

Timeline

• June 30, 2026: Full paper submission deadline
• August 31, 2026: Manuscript deadline