Editorial

Citation

Jones, D.G.B. and Tadajewski, M. (2015), "Editorial", Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Vol. 7 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHRM-01-2015-0003

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Volume 7, Issue 2

The Journal of Historical Research in Marketing is somewhat unique among academic journals in the three categories of content we publish – regular full articles that undergo the usual blind review process, invited commentaries in our “Explorations & Insights” section and invited articles addressing our “Teaching and Learning” theme. This issue features all three categories of content.

Very little has been published about Russian marketing history, so we are very pleased to feature in this issue Sheresheva and Antonov-Ovseenko’s research on “Advertising in Russian Periodicals at the Turn of the Communist Era”. This article documents the development of Russian print advertising between the end of the Russian Empire and early Soviet era circa 1917. The research is based on source material gathered from the State Archives of the Russian Federation and Russian State Archive for Social and Political History, the collections of which were only recently made available to scholars. Sheresheva and Antonov-Ovseenko document the decline of the Russian economic miracle through the prism of advertising.

In 1988, Russell Belk published a landmark article in the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) titled “Possessions and the Extended Self”. It was a seminal contribution to the subfield of consumer behaviour known today as Consumer Culture Theory. In “Belk’s (1988) ‘Possessions and the Extended Self’ Revisited”, Daniel Ladik, Francois Carrillat and Mark Tadajewski assess the historical importance and role played by Belk’s work in the field of consumer behaviour. The authors begin with a prehistory of the “extended self” concept highlighting a number of scholars who were grappling with similar issues, and then examine the impact and controversy triggered by Belk’s seminal article in 1988. To evaluate the impact of “Possessions and the Extended Self”, Ladik et al. carry out both citation and interpretive analysis comparing it to the top ten most cited articles published in JCR that year. Our authors conclude that Belk’s was the most prominent interpretive article published in JCR and one of the top three impact articles regardless of paradigm. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the influence of Belk’s landmark article had a significant impact beyond just interpretive research.

To borrow an over-used metaphor, research on the history of branding has exploded in recent years. One of the most downloaded articles published recently in JHRM and three of the top ten downloaded articles since we began publication in 2009 deal with branding history. In this issue, Mark Avis and Robert Aitken use a critical evaluation of the literature on branding since the 1950s to examine the role of brand personification in the historical development of the concepts of brand personality and brand relationships. They find that brand personification was developed as a research “gimmick” that provided the foundation for the concepts of brand personality and brand relationships. Indirectly, this research also provides insights into the role that motivation research played in the development of modern brand theory.

The final full article in this issue is “The Development of Consumer Privacy Protection Policy in China: An Historical Review” by Zhihong Gao and Susan O’Sullivan-Gavin. The widespread use of digital technology and e-commerce has resulted in worldwide concerns about consumer privacy. Most studies of consumer privacy have focussed on Western countries. Gao and O’Sullivan-Gavin examine the historical trajectory of policy-making on consumer privacy protection in China from the 1980s to present day. Influences on Chinese consumer privacy protection policy have included (of course) technology, elite advocacy and emulation of other markets, but were all conditioned by local forces.

In JHRM, Volume 3, Issue 4, we outlined our hopes for an occasional feature under the theme of “Teaching and Learning”. JHRM has published pedagogical material in past issues and that material is summarized in the “T & L” section of Volume 3.4. At that time, we acknowledged that, as the only academic journal dedicated to publishing historical research in marketing, we have an obligation to make available through the journal materials related to teaching marketing history and the history of marketing thought. We believe that those subjects should play some role in the education of marketing students, but, at the same time, there are too few of us teaching them. At one point in time, the history of marketing thought was a staple of doctoral training in marketing. Sadly, that is no longer the case and we are all the poorer for it. One of the few remaining American doctoral courses specializing in the history of marketing thought is taught by Eric Shaw at Florida Atlantic University. In “Teaching the History of Marketing Thought: An Approach”, Shaw provides a detailed description of what and how he teaches in the history of marketing thought to doctoral students. Shaw has been teaching this course for, well, a very long time. It is based loosely on the doctoral course taught by Shaw’s mentor, Donald Dixon, whose work in marketing history was featured in a special issue of JHRM in 2011 (Volume 3, Issue 1). Shaw’s piece here will be of interest to anyone who teaches marketing and especially to marketing historians. As one who has battled to have included in our curriculum a course on marketing history, I know you will find insights and inspiration from Shaw’s experience in teaching his course on the history of marketing thought.

Explorations and insights

In this issue, we have two excellent contributions that aim to make marketing historians and historians of marketing thought more critically reflexive and context sensitive. These papers are written by Rohit Varman and Hari Sreekumar and by Eminegul Karababa, respectively. Both pieces argue that marketing history and marketing theory is Western-biased. Many of the key articles in our discipline in recent years have been produced by Western scholars or those whose background has been shaped in conjunction with the major “ways of seeking knowledge” valorized in the USA and increasingly over the rest of the world. These are all too often hinged on some variant of logical empiricism, the hypothetico-deductive method and frequently ahistorical. Yet, despite awareness of the contextual and historical variety that confronts marketing scholars when we study our objects of knowledge, it is sometimes tempting to assume that our Western-inflected paradigmatic and methodological influences will help illuminate other contexts far removed from those we study. As an aside, in our ongoing work bringing together marketing historians to study marketing practice – not theory – across the world, we found it particularly difficult to identify key sources for many of the diverse contexts we wanted to include in a book project. Presumably much is being written about non-Western contexts, but, due to our own language limitations, we have been unable to access or understand it. We hope that the readers of JHRM will work to rectify these limits to knowledge in their submissions in coming years.

In the first contribution to this Explorations and Insights section, Varman and Sreekumar trace the development of marketing education and research in India. Developing on the back of a number of related studies, but adding a considerable dose of historical contextualization, they articulate the pathways that helped foment a very particular version of research and pedagogy published by, and utilized within, some of the major business schools in India. It will perhaps come as little surprise that key institutions such as the Ford Foundation were working to help set the institutional and research agenda in India. The impact of this agenda setting had ramifications for the doctoral research undertaken, the academic publications that resulted and the key textbooks utilized in this context. One of the problems with this, however, was that the empirical context differed substantially from the predominantly American foundations of much management and business knowledge that were subsequently transplanted elsewhere. This sedimentation of academic and teaching knowledge still has an impact today, with much marketing knowledge production and teaching vehicles remaining wedded to a managerial – and big business – approach.

Our second contribution is provided by Emi Karababa whose writings in the history of marketing theory have been influential in tracing the formation of market structures in a non-Western, particularly the Ottoman context. This research has taken an historical approach, stressing the importance of this type of research for understanding alternative markets. The paper included in this issue further develops her calls for historical research by drawing on secondary sources to illuminate the dynamics of the flower trade in the Ottoman Empire. In this rich historical narrative, she provides a multi-level survey of the development of this trade, engaging with the institutional forces certifying this market, as well as offering insight into consumer side of the trade. Importantly, Karababa emphasizes both the similarities between the Ottoman market and their Mediterranean counterparts. This sensitivity to contextual difference as well as similarities is an important one worth underscoring.

Put differently, both papers in this section highlight important institutional mechanisms that contributed to the development of the academic structure that exists in India and, on the other hand, illuminate the dynamics of a popular marketplace. We hope you enjoy both contributions and sincerely would welcome seeing similar submissions of either full papers or shorter Explorations and Insights manuscripts that engage in the close study of non-Western contexts.

D.G. Brian Jones and Mark Tadajewski