Annmarie Ryan

This paper examines how business schools can function as liminal socio‐material infrastructures for upstream performative experimentation. Recent work has advanced management scholarship to foreground the role of imagination in theorizing for desirable futures. However, less is understood about how alternatives might be made sufficiently tangible and credible to acquire performative force in the first place. This is compounded by performativity research that has largely examined how theories acquire effects once they circulate in markets and organizations. To address this, and drawing on a 5‐year qualitative case study of The Futures Lab (TFL), I show how shared visual workspaces, repeated critique, direct engagement with stakeholders, and the making and remaking of maps, models and prototypes enabled participants to (re)‐search alternative futures by making possibilities visible, contestable and open to revision. These practices produced credible fictions: tangible yet provisional representations to which external actors could attach, align with, and sometimes enrol around emerging possibilities. I develop prefigurative theorizing as a materially experimental mode of prospective theorizing, showing how desirable futures gain performative force not through imagination alone, but by being externalized, provisionally enacted, tested and revised in the present. The study thereby specifies conditions through which business schools can cultivate upstream performativity.

This paper examines how valuation practices shape place branding through the case of a city bidding to become European Capital of Culture (ECoC). While place branding research has emphasised stakeholder involvement and identity construction, less attention has been paid to how valuation practices shape what is considered valuable in branding processes. Drawing on valuation studies and orders of worth, we analyse how valuation devices such as bid books, scoring systems, and consultations mediate competing value claims during the bidding process. We introduce the concept of branding as valuation to show how place brands emerge through the negotiation and operationalisation of competing orders of worth within valuation assemblages. The study contributes to marketing theory by conceptualising branding as a constitutive valuation process and by showing how competitions function as valuation assemblages that organise and stabilise place brand value.

The aim of the SI is to bring to the fore the places in which cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) are formed; how place shapes the dynamics of CSPs, and how CSPs shape the specific settings in which they develop. The papers demonstrate that partnerships and place are intrinsically reciprocal: the morality and materiality inherent in places repeatedly reset the reference points for partners, trigger epiphanies, shift identities, and redistribute capacities to act. Place thus becomes generative of partnerships in the most profound sense: by developing an awareness of their emplacement, CSPs commit to place, and through their place-based commitments produce three intertwined modalities of place-specific ethics that bind CSPs and place: ethic of recognition, an ethic of care, and an ethic of resilience. Our authors have found vivid examples of how emplaced CSPs embody these ethics, signaling hope for the sustainability of our (always hyper-local) life-worlds.

In this paper, we study the formation of a new market actor, the digitalised marketer, which emerges at the boundary between strategy- and data-driven marketing. Building on constructivist market studies, we draw attention to the notion of agencing as boundary work and the range of boundary workers in the agencement of which the marketer is part. Drawing on 63 interviews with marketing professionals from multiple contexts, we reveal the difficulties to keep a pace with the plethora of digital marketing tools and highlight the emerging ‘market for digital marketing’ as a key device in the agencing of the digitalised marketer. We present two modes of agencing work, prosthetic and habilitative, to conceptualise how digitalised markets and platforms concurrently enable and captivate marketers’ agency, but also how marketers and their peer networks contest these limits and expand the space for action. This contribution serves to extend the recognised need to reconnect marketing with markets, to also acknowledge how markets are connected to the shaping of marketing and its actors. Implications for theory, practice and marketing education are discussed as we seek to capacitate marketers to operate in an increasingly digitalised environment.

This paper is set in the context of a yearlong cultural programme and the relations initiated and developed (or not) between the organisers and their sponsors. Empirically we are set in 2014, and Limerick’s year as Irish National City of Culture. Theoretically, we consider the particular dynamics arising from the (sets of) sponsorship relationship dyads, where each party frames the interaction in different ways. Taking a case study approach the paper examines multiple sponsorships operating during the CoC year. The findings point to multiple time frames, offerings, and narratives operating between managers on both side of the dyad. As such the ‘relationship(s)’ under study are each considered multiple, that is, they are practiced and performed differently by the different actors involved. The paper contributes to the theory and practice of sponsorship by identifying how managers, on both sides of the dyad coordinate the mismatches that this context can trigger.