Crossing Race and Markets: Introducing the Race in the Marketplace Research Network

Both research and practice reveal that race plays a key ideological role in the functioning of consumption markets worldwide (Nopper 2011; Thomas 2017; Zerofsky 2016). However, scholarship on race-related issues in the context of marketplaces has generally been limited, overlooked or marginalized in the marketing/consumer research discipline. However, the tangibility, reality, and brutality of racial dynamics are increasingly “front-page news” and marketing scholarship increasingly emphasizes issues of inclusion and exclusion (Henderson and Williams 2013). As a result, the absence of scholarship- and scholars- who prioritize impactful work on race in marketing presents a challenge to move the discipline towards more inclusive scholarship, employment, and pedagogy. This film explains impediments to scholarship at the intersection of race and markets by examining the evolution of the RIM Research Network (RIM). Developed in 2017, RIM is a response to the marginalized status of race-related scholarship and scholars in the marketing domain. While marketing scholars and scholarship that focus on race and racism have long suffered a marginalized status, attempts to attract private sector dollars has resulted in large-scale shifts in institutional cultures and priorities which has served to exaggerate pre-existing hierarchies within research topics, disciplines, and methodologies (Moleworth, Scullion, and Nixon 2010). Areas and methods most deemed able to benefit the bottom line of potential donors and strategic partners garner the most attention and praise, while critical race scholarship and other forms of research perceived as discordant with present day marketplace functioning are further marginalized. The conceptual equivalent of consumers, these scholars find a dwindling marketplace in which to cultivate community, acquire funding, secure publication outlets, and gain a sense of legitimacy in the broader academic canon. In this marketized environment, research that focuses on diversity and multiculturalism often take precedence over critical examinations of marketplace activities that expressly investigate racism since the former tends to obscure or ignore systemic issues of power, oppression, and privilege, thereby leaving inherent marketplace inequities largely intact and unquestioned (Grier, Thomas, and Johnson 2017). RIM seeks to establish and legitimize a cohesive critical perspective which foregrounds the reality of power, privilege and oppression, question existing marketing strategies and link them to an overall intersectional framework that can promote inclusive, just and liberatory marketplaces. This film chronicles RIM’s quest to counteract the current academic environment by innovating a transdisciplinary approach to the understanding of race in the marketplace that will produce a space within academia wherein RIM-related scholars and scholarship can thrive.