Pushing the Boundaries, Sketching the Future Paul Hewer (University of Strathclyde) and Mark Tadajewski (Durham University) Our vision for the Journal of Marketing Management (JMM) has always been aligned to those of past editors (Baker, 1984-1999 and Hart, 1999-2010) in that we envisioned a Journal that is ambitious in content and innovative in approach and style. A Journal with its feet firmly embedded in the present; sensitive and true to where it has come from; but still open to its possible future(s), with a responsibility to stand at the forefront of marketing thought. A steady ship if you like, within the turbulent seas of academic endeavour and responsibility. In this respect the 30th Anniversary issue grants us an excellent opportunity to celebrate the achievements of those who continue to aspire to publish in the Journal and the vision they bring to this endeavour of charting and rethinking marketing knowledge. In our first talk at the Academy of Marketing (2011) we placed emphasis on the importance of the Journal for the marketing community as a whole. The papers in the anniversary issue are a testament to the hard work and aspiration of this community. We hope the papers will continue to inspire our audience of academics, students and practitioners and act as thought-pieces to rethink marketing practice. We open with Cova and Cova who chart the burgeoning work that is now conducted under the Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) banner. Such work aspires to bring insights from social theory for the understanding of contemporary consumption. In this regard, CCT is as much a community of practitioners as it is a philosophy and methodological toolkit for the understanding of consumption and its consequences. In this paper Cova and Cova highlight the main characteristics of this approach, its preferred contexts of applications and the metaphors of the consumers that it puts forward to challenge existing understanding of consumer behaviour. As Cova and Cova suggest: “…the power of CCT resides in its ability to look beyond managerial implications and suggests a kind of market intelligibility that should enable managers and other stakeholders to reorient their market actions without necessarily having to rely on simplistic or reductionist toolkits.” Although the authors are not blind to the fact that such a vision can also lead to, what they term, an ‘overheroicization’ of consumers and thereby underestimating “capital’s desire to maintain control over production and consumption, as well as producers and consumers by adapting its techniques of surveillance”. Our next contribution deals with the changing social and technological environment, rethinking and reflecting upon Russell Belk’s seminal earlier studies of the extended self. In this paper Belk makes a case that the concept of the extended self still has utility even given changing environmental circumstances. He stresses we are still very much reliant on the body as the centre of our self-conception and traces how this influences the way we engage in the presentation of self in online forums. Despite the ability to engage in Proteus-like self- transformation, many of us produce avatars and other forms of self online in ways not dissimilar to our actual, physical selves.