Call for papers-16th Biennial Conference: Rethinking Marketing, Growth & Development: Contesting & Contextualizing Knowledge

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ISMD 2021 16th Biennial Conference: Rethinking Marketing, Growth, and Development: Contesting and Contextualizing Knowledge

About the Organization:

Indian Institute of Management Tiruchirappalli (IIM Trichy) is a public graduate business school located in Tamil Nadu, India. Founded in 2011, they are one of the seven Indian Institutes of Management the Indian government had set up during the Eleventh Five-Year Plan and was mentored by IIM Bangalore. The Institute offers a congenial and professional working environment.

About the Conference

Extant research in marketing is Eurocentric and marginalizes non-Western perspectives and experiences (Ellis et al. 2011, Eckhardt, Dholakia, and Varman 2013). A limited worldview has resulted in the marketing knowledge and practices rooted in the majority world (settings such as Africa, Asia, and South/Central America) being under-examined (Varman and Saha 2009, Varman and Sreekumar 2015). Even in an ostensibly “globalized” domain such as international marketing, the West remains the key referent against which “the Rest” are compared and understood.

While globalization has resulted in greater intercultural contact, it has also led to the spread of neoliberalism. The neoliberal ideology has proven remarkably hardy, and has not only survived, but flourished in the aftermath of the financial crises and recession in the first decade of the 21st century. Crouch (2011) attributes the resilience of neoliberalism to the enormous power wielded by corporations, and places a mild hope on civil society and social movements acting as countervailing forces on such power.

The onward march of neoliberalism has exacerbated Bauman’s (2000) somewhat dystopian vision of liquidity, accompanied by consumer precarity and helplessness. An unabashedly neoliberal thinking has infiltrated even academic institutions, leading to identity crises and insecurity (see Knights and Clarke 2014). On the other hand, somewhat paradoxically, nativism appears to be on the rise in countries across the world, with populist governments pandering to at times xenophobic tendencies.

There is an urgent need to critique and deconstruct the key nodal points of Eurocentric neoliberal discourse centered around the West, markets, marketing, growth, and development. Scholarship has to move beyond its oversimplified dichotomies and exclusionary tendencies for any effective critique of neoliberalism to emerge.

Specifically, scholars in marketing need to engage with some important questions: How are the hierarchies of knowledge in the discipline structured? How do we subvert the existing hierarchies of knowledge to create a more participatory, inclusive, and socially just disciplinary agenda? Whose purposes do marketing and markets serve? What do we mean when we talk and write on issues such as growth and development? How are power relations embedded in markets, growth and development discourse? As academics, how can we strive for marketing and growth that caters to the needs of the most vulnerable sections of the global population? How can we contextualize marketing knowledge and understanding, and ensure that marketing discourse does not get homogenized and blindsided by focusing on specific geographies such as the West?

Call for Papers

Papers are invited in the following topics:

• Management education under neoliberalism
• Hegemony of markets and consumer resistance
• Marketization and development
• Poverty, markets, and vulnerable consumers
• The connected era, consumer subjectivity, and well being
• Rethinking consumer culture and development
• Alternative imaginations of markets and development
• Decolonization and the Global South
• Online and Physical Retailing in Emerging Economies: Promises, Patterns and Polemics
• Enacting resilience towards sustainable outcomes
• Climate change, markets, and consumption
• Marketing and Agnotology
• Organizing radically: Alternatives to corporate capitalism
• Gender, markets, and the Global South
• Historical perspectives on markets and development

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