Call for Papers: Themed issue/section on tobacco industry transformation

Background

The tobacco industry has generally been viewed as a pariah industry, principally because its core product causes millions of avoidable premature deaths worldwide, and because it has a history of actions that promote the interests of the industry and undermine tobacco control efforts to the great detriment of population health. Recently, some tobacco companies have moved into producing and selling reduced harm nicotine delivery products (e.g., e-cigarettes, heat-not-burn products) and espoused a new narrative: that they are moving away from producing and selling hazardous tobacco products. Philip Morris International (PMI) has been a leading proponent and since 2018 has variously claimed to be building a ‘smokefree future’, ‘unsmoking’ the world and helping smokers to ‘unsmoke’. This raises questions about whether a transformed tobacco industry is possible, if it is what a transformed tobacco company would look like, and whether there is evidence that the tobacco industry is transforming in any meaningful sense.

Brief description

This themed issue / section will consist of a collection of original articles critically exploring the idea of tobacco industry transformation. We invite submission of papers exploring relevant issues. These might include:

• Exploring the conceptualisation of tobacco industry transformation and how progress towards transformation should be evaluated
• Providing case studies of contemporary tobacco industry communications, strategies and actions which provide tests of the proposition that the industry is or isn’t transforming
• Investigating industry actions and related corporate social responsibility activities such as companies promoting sustainability, human rights, and equal opportunities employment practices
• Discussing the ethics and feasibility of tobacco industry transformation and possible pathways by which it could be achieved
• Discussing the wider implications of actual/claimed/perceived ‘tobacco industry transformation’ for tobacco control practice and research.

Impact

This themed issue/section will inform whether and how the tobacco control community should respond to and engage with the tobacco industry transformation narrative and with tobacco companies that claim to be transforming. Critically assessing the validity of the industry’s transformation narrative will be important as sections of the industry are likely to increasingly use this framing in order to position themselves as legitimate stakeholders in debates about how to end the smoking epidemic and the nature and direction of tobacco control policies.

Manuscripts must be submitted through the Nicotine & Tobacco Research submission system (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ntr) by 01 September 2022. We anticipate that the themed issue will publish in mid/late 2023.

Submission of a manuscript does not guarantee its acceptance. All manuscripts will be reviewed by the Nicotine & Tobacco Research editorial staff and referees and must meet the standards for publication in Nicotine & Tobacco Research.

Nicotine & Tobacco Research home page and instructions for authors: https://academic.oup.com/ntr.

For this themed issue/section, Nicotine & Tobacco Research will not consider for publication papers submitted by tobacco industry employees or affiliated organisations, including organisations that themselves receive funding from or that are fully or partially owned by a tobacco company.  Nor will we consider papers by authors who accept tobacco industry funding, including funding for research costs, for all or part of any author’s salary, or other forms of personal remuneration.

Deputy editor: Richard Edwards, University of Otago

Guest editors: Sarah Hill, The University of Sydney and Michael Chaiton, University of Toronto 

For any questions, please contact Richard Edwards [email protected]