ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how scholars have approached—or eschewed—an opportunity to explore a rich area that has many key facets left to examine. Terms such as business to business, trade publications and Business-to-business media (B2B) were used to search scholars’ bibliographies of research on the magazine form, including Google Scholar, the Communications Abstracts database and journal-retrieval services. The identified sources cover B2B as a journalistic and publishing sector and as a referent for studies of the larger society, in the United States and elsewhere. Digital transformation has also birthed new forms of B2B communication: blogs, chat, video, interactive tools, e-commerce. Global B2B brands can offer opportunities to compare technological dispersion, through adoption and diffusion studies. After the 2007 recession, though, small companies snapped up titles at sharply discounted prices as giant publishers exited traditional B2B media. B2B also provides a window on traditional research disciplines such as gender studies.
