From AMSR

Sep 14

Call for Papers: Special Issue of AMS Review – Advancing the Sales Discipline through Conceptual and Theoretical Contributions
The applied nature of the sales discipline necessitates sales researchers to focus on bridging the theory-practice gap by leveraging sales theory to generate actionable insights for emergent personal selling and sales management challenges (Rutherford and Friend, 2025). While addressing issues that are relevant for today’s dynamic marketplace is important for sustaining the practical relevance of the sales discipline (Reibstein et al. 2011), developing theoretical contributions is equally important for shaping how the field conceptualizes, explains, and predicts sales phenomena (Madhavaram 2024). Indeed, original and useful theoretical contributions remain “the currency of our scholarly realm” (Corley and Gioia, 2011. P.12). Particularly, “it is theoretical contributions that drive impact” (Hartmann et al., 2020, p. 221). In fact, the most cited papers in the sales discipline across different journals tend to be conceptual or theoretical in nature (e.g., Andzulis et al., 2013; Singh et al., 2018; Weitz and Bradford,1999; Weitz et al., 1986), although such papers represent a significantly smaller percentage of publications in the literature.

However, while sales-adjacent disciplines have devoted considerable attention toward broadening and strengthening their theoretical foundations through conceptual scholarship (Hulland 2020; Hunt and Menon, 1995; Jaakkola, 2020; MacInnis 2011), sales research has placed comparatively greater emphasis on empirical advancement than theoretical development. As a result, sales scholarship risks becoming methodologically rigorous yet theoretically incremental, limiting its ability to explain, predict, and shape emerging sales phenomena.

Without constant theoretical renewal, applied disciplines like sales risk becoming overly descriptive and limited to addressing narrow or temporary managerial problems (Rapp et al., 2020). Accordingly, the purpose of this special issue is to stimulate renewed attention toward strengthening the conceptual and theoretical foundations of sales scholarship. As such, this special issue seeks contributions that move beyond conceptual description and provide meaningful theoretical advancement through novel constructs, mechanisms, relationships, integrative frameworks, boundary conditions, or theory extension across a broad range of topics pertinent to the sales discipline.

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