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The purpose of this paper is to describe the “scientific identity” of the “top” research journals in the broader discipline of marketing by examining the methodological approaches and the geographical affiliations of authors published in selected journals.

A sample of “top” research journals in marketing is selected on the basis of expert opinion and journal ranking lists. The selection includes the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR), Journal of Marketing (JM), Journal of Marketing Research (JMR), Journal of Retailing (JR), Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS); and Marketing Science (MS).

The “scientific identities” of JCR, JM, JMR, JR, JAMS and MS are revealed as being built on quantitative research designs and the North American paradigm of research values. In fact, all journals are US‐based. None was found to be based on a mix of empirical research designs. The selected research journals were found to be narrowly focused, and the lack of variety of “scientific identities” among the journals studied here is discomfiting for the ongoing scientific knowledge building and theory generation in marketing.

Further studies of the “scientific identity” of individual research journals are desirable in other sub‐disciplines of marketing. A series of questions have been raised that the authors argue are worthy of further attention and debate in the world‐wide research community.

Researchers will benefit from insights into the “scientific identities” of the “top” research journals in the broader discipline of marketing. In particular, researchers can note the particular feature of dogmatic narrowness of research designs that are present in all of these journals.

The study delivers insights into the publishing requirements of “top” research journals in the broader discipline of marketing. It provides some challenging and discomfiting findings.

The aim is to describe the “empirical characteristics” of the “top” journals in mainstream marketing by assessing selected journals with respect to: the proportion of “empirical” versus “non‐empirical” contributions; the proportion of national versus international research data; the geographical origin of research data; and the geographical affiliations of the authors whose articles are published.

A sample of “top” scholarly journals in mainstream marketing is selected on the basis of expert opinion and journal ranking lists. The evaluation considers all available articles at the time of data collection (a total of 1,463) published in these journals over a seven‐year period from 2000 to 2006.

A large proportion of all contributions in the selected journals were “empirical” in nature. Although this finding is not unexpected in scholarly journals, it is apparent that the journals evaluated also provide opportunities for non‐empirical contributions. Other “empirical characteristics” were found to be skewed.

This evaluation is limited to the “empirical characteristics” of “top” journals in mainstream marketing.

The study provides valuable insights into the nature of academic publishing in the area of top journals of mainstream marketing.

Scholars will benefit from insights into the “empirical characteristics” of the “top” journals in mainstream marketing. In particular, scholars can note the particular features of individual journals. Further studies of the “empirical characteristics” of individual research journals are required in other sub‐disciplines of marketing.

Companies inevitably interact and entrench in complex organic systems of business relationships with other. These business networks are not objectively defined, instead they are shaped by the subjective perception of actors. This inherent subjectivity is associated with the notion of network pictures, that is, a research tool that researchers or managers can use to grasp practitioner theories. In this chapter, we discuss how the importance of identifying these theories results mainly from underlying principles of sense-making theory, as well as from the idea around performativity. Drawing on these theoretical groundings, this chapter has two objectives: to explore how practitioners actually perceive their business surroundings and to assess the extent of overlapping between (IMP Group) academic theories and practitioner theories. To achieve these objectives, the researchers use a dimensional network pictures model previously developed in the literature to analyze the network pictures of 49 top-level managers across 17 companies from two very distinct contexts or networks: a product-based network and a project-based network. Among other practices, findings illustrate how practitioners tend to simplify what is going on in their complex surroundings, to personalize their relationships with those surroundings, and to think in a stereotyped way. Moreover, the juxtaposition between the captured practitioner theories and academic (IMP Group) theories show that these are not always overlapping, and are in some cases quite the opposite. This research contributes to the ongoing discussion of the importance of grasping actors’ views of the world, arguing that sense-making theory and the notion of performativity are the two main conceptual drivers justifying the urgency in making those views more visible. This research also adds to the research on the impact and suitability of IMP Group theories on managerial thinking and practice. Finally, this research reinforces the current call for further practice-based research in business network contexts.

This article addresses recent calls in the literature for advancing our understanding of public affairs consultants and their role conceptions. By testing and further exploring self-perceptions of public affairs consultants the study aims to offer new insight into how consultants define and view their occupational role.

The study draws on a nationwide survey with public affairs consultants in Sweden.

Four main role conceptions were identified (advocate, do-gooder, expert and intermediary). Further, the study tests how personal and professional characteristics correlate with different role conceptions, by viewing professional experience and consultants' selection of clients. Data also suggest that consultants' background in politics does not promote any specific role perception. Finally, the findings also show that how consultants choose clients is a divider in the industry, where some act as passive intermediaries while other take a more active role in their choice of clients.

The findings enhance our understanding of public affairs as a field, and specifically about the modelling of professional roles amongst consultants. The empirical results in this study show how contemporary role typologies needs to be extended to better capture the specificities of consultants' roles in public affairs. By addressing the issue of how consultants choose clients the study engages with the complex debate of whether consultants ought to act as objective or subjective agents and hence join the conversation on ethics in public affairs.

This chapter explores the nature of the cultural context that frames value creation and provides insight to the way in which value is collaboratively created, or co-created, in markets.

We develop a conceptual framework and research propositions for studying the co-creation of value-in-cultural-context through the intersection of consumer culture theory (CCT) and service-dominant (S-D) logic and the integration of a practice-theoretic approach for value co-creation.

The integration of CCT, S-D logic, and practice theory provides a conceptual framework for studying the co-creation of value among multiple stakeholders and the (re)formation of markets.

Drawing on this framework, marketers can contribute to the co-creation of new markets by influencing changes in cultural contexts – practices, norms, meanings, and resources – that frame value co-creation and exchange.

This chapter explores the integration of CCT and S-D logic by focusing on value co-creation and applying a practice approach to further weave together these distinct research areas. In addition, the proposed framework elaborates the conceptualization of value-in-context to consider the cultural context that influences and is influenced by the co-creation of value.

The purpose of this paper is to address an issue related to the role of interaction processes in the development of customer-supplier relationships in business markets.

Focusing on the role of cognition in interaction behaviours in business relationships, the authors examine two research streams that offer perspectives on interaction processes akin to the IMP – the socio-cognitive perspective and the practice-based approach to markets and marketing.

The two research streams analysed contribute to understanding the link between cognition and interaction behaviours by pointing to the construction of meanings as an important factor in interaction behaviours and indicating storytelling as a tool to construct meanings among the actors.

This paper is among the few studies that focus the attention on communication processes in business relationships and networks.

This paper examines the calculative practices used by the Slave Compensation Commission to value a slave for the purposes of compensating slave owners on the abolishment of slavery across the British colonies in 1833. It contributes to accounting research in the field of valuation, particularly to understanding the practices of valuing human life.

The methodology is primarily archival and draws on the records of the Slave Compensation Commission held at the British National Archives (Kew).

The paper makes two contributions to the literature. Firstly, it contributes to the valuation studies literature by suggesting the significance of understanding the practice of valuation as a product of the dynamics of strategic action fields (Fligstein and McAdam, 2012). Secondly, it contributes to the theory of strategic action fields by revealing the role of calculative technologies in supporting the organizational apparatus of valuation within the Slave Compensation Commission, and therefore suggests the powerful role of accounting in stabilizing a strategic action field.

The paper provides novel insights into the monetary commensuration of life and the role of calculative technologies in that valuation process.

This paper explores the role of institutional objects in the constitution of institutional logics. Institutional objects depend for their objectivity on the goods produced through those objects, such as economic models, passports, or sacred texts. The authors theorize institutional logics as grammars of valuation that institutionalize goods through institutional objects. The authors identify four value moments through which goods are objectified: institution, the instituting of a good, a belief and an imagination of its objective goodness; production, how the good is produced, what practices are productive of the good; evaluation, how good is the good, the practices and objects through which worth in terms of that good is determined, and territorialization, the domain of reference of the good, to what objects and practices a good can and does refer in its instantiations. The authors assess the adequacy of our model through an institutional object based on the good of “market value” – i.e., an options pricing model. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for institutional logical theory and the sociology of valuation.