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征文期刊
International Journal of Research in Marketing
Impact Factor 5.9・CiteScore 11.8
征文主题
Rethinking Marketing for a More-Than-Human World:
an invitation for a post-anthropocentric paradigm shift
截止日期
May 1, 2026
（提交将于 February 1，2026 开放）
客座编辑
Julie Emontspool
（University of Southern Denmark）
juli@sam.sdu.dk
Alev Pınar Kuruoğlu
（University of Southern Denmark）
alev@sam.sdu.dk
Mikkel Nøjgaard
（University of Southern Denmark）
mikk@sam.sdu.dk
Eric Arnould
（Aalto University, IJRM Co-Editor）
eric.arnould@aalto.fi
特刊动机
本期特刊的征稿主题是"超人类世界中的营销再思考"。
从宠物狗占据主人的家具和床垫、臭虫引发酒店业恐慌，到肠道细菌塑造人类情绪、野生植物侵占精心培育的花园，非人类物种无疑以出人意料的方式在人类社会中扮演着积极角色。因此，广告、产品开发、服务和消费等核心营销活动，早已与超越人类范畴的多种生命形式密不可分。
尽管营销研究常将市场比作生态系统，但其焦点仍局限于人类参与者，忽视了市场背后复杂的多物种互动。人类中心主义（Anthropocentrism）——即视人类为宇宙中心，将自然界视为实现人类利益的资源（Adelman, 2018）——始终占据主导地位。当营销与消费者研究默认以人类为分析主体、甚至唯一具有能动性的实体时，它实质上在助长这种人类中心主义的世界观（Arnould & Helkkula, 2024）。
这种潜在人类中心主义的警示在于：当前营销研究与实践中所谓的"可持续发展"仍以人类为核心，仅将地球与其他物种的福祉视为维持人类存续的手段（Cielemęcka & Daigle, 2019; Kopnina, 2021等）。公共话语中的一个典型例证是对化肥使用导致蜜蜂数量下降的框架化描述。人们通常不将其视为生态系统灾难，而是将其描述为对未来食品和葡萄酒生产的威胁，使人类利益凌驾于对其他物种或长期生态系统健康的关注之上。类似地，尽管关于伦理和可持续消费的研究层出不穷（Brough等人，2016；Dixon & Mikolon，2021等），却很少挑战可持续性的人类中心主义定义（Borland & Lindgreen，2013）。尽管学界呼吁减少主导性市场和消费结构对环境和社会的危害（Arnould & Helkkula，2024；Kilbourne，2016等），营销领域对人类中心主义的批判讨论仍然有限。
征文话题
This special issue invites marketing to move away from anthropocentrism both theoretically and practically. It does so by redirecting our attention onto markets as not only figurative but literal ecosystems, bringing into focus the missing masses (Latour, 1992) of marketing, namely the multiple types of living beings which shape markets, marketing and consumption processes. We build this invitation on a decidedly interdisciplinary theoretical stream of research in broader social and humanist science and beyond, which enables such a re-thinking on an ontological as well as epistemological level. Part of a broader trend of relational approaches to societal interactions, multispecies studies (Chao, 2021; Gillespie, 2022; Kovacic, 2024; Parathian et al., 2018; Petitt, 2023; Thomsen et al., 2023), alternately referred to as more-than-human approaches, constitute a growing stream of academic work with focus on the relationships between species and beings (Beacham, 2018; Brown et al., 2019; Franklin, 2017; Hawkins, 2009; Irvine & Cilia, 2017; O’Gorman & Gaynor, 2020; Seymour & Connelly, 2022; Whitehouse, 2017). From this perspective, the world, and even humans themselves in their biological and social make-up, are constituted of multiple life-forms without which a body or ecosystem cannot exist (Irvine & Cilia, 2017; O’Gorman & Gaynor, 2020). Human beings as well as some of the products they consume (e.g. cheese, as in Eriksson & Bull, 2017) are thus complex more-than-human entities made up of multiple species, including microbiomes and bacteria. They not only evolve in but are constitutive of interdependent parts of a more-than-human world. To capture these interspecies underpinnings of humans and human societies, one of the foundational authors of multispecies studies, Donna Haraway, leverages the concept of NatureCulture, questioning the dichotomies such as nature-culture, subject-object or human-nonhuman that have dominated Western philosophical traditions (Haraway, 2008, 2016a, 2016b). NatureCulture highlights that “nature” and “culture” are mutually dependent and constitutive rather than mutually exclusive and can thus not be addressed separately from each other.
Inspired by such perspectives, we invite a broader adoption of more-than-human, multispecies, or other relational approaches in the marketing discipline, to lift marketing research – and, accordantly, its theories, concepts, and methods – beyond a solely anthropocentric approach. The comparingly sparce existing adoptions of such a perspective in marketing and consumer research offer powerful inspiration for what can be gained by doing so (Bettany & Daly, 2008; Bettany & Kerrane, 2018; Downey & Ellis, 2008; Grant et al., 2024; Holbrook & Woodside, 2008; Kirk, 2019; Linné, 2016; Stevens et al., 2013), but have stopped short of rethinking marketing's central role in the practices and systems contributing to multispecies exploitation (Arnould, 2022; Tsing, 2015). With the exception of Olsen (2022), they have also tended to focus on (domesticated) animals, only scratching the complexity and diversity of the living world. As a consequence, we suggest that multispecies and more-than-human sensitivities can enhance marketing thought on three levels:
Firstly, a more-than-human approach to marketing in industries and practices that involve complex multispecies relations holds the potential for developing advertising, product development, customer relationship management or service(s) strategies that redirect attention to ecosystemic rather than human wellbeing. Studies about how alternative sources of animal protein (insects, jellyfish) revolutionize definitions of food in those places where these protein sources are not (yet) culturally established can inspire better strategies and policies to widen adoption of these proteins. More-than-human approaches can offer cues for resolving the ethical puzzle that vegan dog and cat nutrition generates about ethical animal care and broader species wellbeing. They can help adjusting marketing and consumption of cleaning products to better balance the dilemma between controlling harmful bacteria while maintaining beneficial human-bacteria interactions in place. The tourism industry can find novel ways to address the conflicting human-animal interactions underlying it by redirecting focus to ecosystemic balance rather than to animals’ benefits or disruptiveness towards human tourist experiences (Valtonen et al., 2020). Likewise, spaces perceived as human-owned, such as houses, gardens or cities, teem with plants and animals sharing – and shaping – human experiences of these spaces, whether songbirds enlivening a picknick or so-called pests destroying (human) food or clothing. A focus on multispecies, ecosystem-level wellbeing may help marketers and policymakers to promote ecologically beneficial consumption practices in these spaces.
Secondly, a multispecies orientation can improve the explanatory power of marketing theories. For instance, findings in biology indicate that the micro-organisms constituting the gut biome influence the host body’s food choices (Trevelline & Kohl, 2022), raising questions about humans’ agency in (rational or “irrational”) consumer choice processes. When taking into account the needs of plants, fungi and animals, the concept of value might be broadened to generate new valorization or pricing processes, where the benefit for the human consumer is brought into perspective by the benefits for other beings. A growing marketization of human intestinal flora or fecal matter raises the question of what delimits an (individual) consumer when their bodies are not only aggregates of multiple species, but also of multiple humans’ personal biological components. Shifting attention to other species also adds to the relational turn in marketing research (Canniford & Bajde, 2015), which has provided rich insights into the role of objects and technologies in marketing phenomena but has yet to fully address the role of other-than-human living beings. The meaning and processes of marketing and consumption should likely be rethought when assemblages of humans and those other-than-human beings - whether horses, orchids or rats - shape consumption priorities, experiences and practices.
Thirdly, drawing on multispecies studies to reimagine business and marketing may offer pathways for broader systemic market change (Arnould, 2022). Anna Tsing’s (2015) foundational study of the matsutake mushroom, a species of fungus which grows in human-disturbed forests, can serve as inspiration for this purpose, as it details how societal and market changes are intertwined with ecological processes. Tsing (2015) details how capitalism thrives in the extraction of value from ruined landscapes and disadvantaged communities, which in her view, is not an unfortunate consequence, but necessary condition of capitalism. Yet she also highlights the subversive potential of economic diversity and human creativity in interactions with these mushrooms and other species, offering inspiration and hope for human societies beyond the Anthropocene. On this basis, how could marketing draw on inspiration from more-than-human studies such as Tsing’s to revitalize itself as a force for constructive systemic change in the marketplace? How can a multispecies perspective in marketing boost the adoption of more circular approaches to business, where resources are not extracted and depleted but circulate within an ecosystem?
Based on these reflections, we invite especially the following topics for this special issue:
Rethinking the Consumer: Questioning what makes a consumer, when humans are ever-changing assemblages or arrangements of more-than-human beings, whose co-constituted agency/agencies shape consumption in unexpected ways. Investigating whether and when other species can be considered consumers and how this might alter our understanding of "human" consumers. Addressing how natural sciences’ continuously expanding list of beings (animals and plants alike) possessing consciousness impacts the ethics of consumption.
Rethinking Core Marketing Concepts: Reconsidering fundamental marketing concepts—such as product, service, value, consumer satisfaction, relationships, consumption collectives, choice, and decision-making—from a multispecies perspective, along with identifying how marketing theory should be modified in a more-than-human approach. Beyond intrinsic theorization benefits crucial for the marketing discipline, such a rethinking can bring forth a truly ecosystemic focus on marketing practices’ sustainability.
Rethinking Market(ing) Systems: Exploring how market and marketing practices can be restructured to prioritize more-than-human well-being. How can theoretical approaches such as doughnut economics (Raworth, 2017) or regenerative approaches to business (Hahn & Tampe, 2020; Konietzko et al., 2023) reframe marketing systems into systems benefiting multispecies instead of only human wellbeing? How can inspiration from multispecies ecosystems inspire new forms of market interactions, where multiple more-than-human priorities are valued and valorised?
Methodological Innovations: Identifying and developing methods necessary for conducting rigorous multispecies research in marketing. How might qualitative but also quantitative research methods take into account more-than-human actions, experiences and agencies, in light of our human limitations in perceiving the world from other species’ perspectives? How do measurements, assessments, variables transform when human agency is dethroned?
We welcome contributions that employ diverse theoretical frameworks and methodologies, including qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Interdisciplinary research that bridges marketing with ecology, biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology and other fields is also encouraged.
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