It seems that people writing for JMR are convinced that their role is to act as ‘experts’, developing cutting-edge market research techniques (in the tradition of the work on conjoint analysis for example; there is merit in that kind of research of course, but is that the limited scope of JMR?).

That’s too bad because the world of market research actually looks a lot like the laboratory life that Bruno Latour described in the 1970s. The sociologists are getting increasingly interested in market research actually (See for example Lezaun 2007.

I read the new editor’s statement, which is called “spanning the boundaries” (ttp://www.marketingpower.com/AboutAMA/Pages/AMA%20Publications/AMA%20Journals/Journal%20of%20Marketing%20Research/JMR_Editor_Statement_Erdem.aspx)

The way she writes about it, the boundaries are already kind of bounded: “in this context, interdisciplinary papers can take multiple forms, from papers that blend economic, psychological, and marketing (and other) theories to aid the analysis to papers that blend, for example, behavioral methods with modeling methods. The goal is to break the boundaries between fields, such as behavioral and quantitative.”

Yikes. I hope Tulin is a bit more open than that. We shall see. I agree with you, we got to knock on every door…

Lezaun, Javier (2007), “A Market of Opinions: The Political Epistemology of Focus Groups”, Sociological Review, Volume 55 (2): 130-151.