Expanding Disciplinary Space: On the Potential of Critical Marketing

Douglas Brownlie, Paul Hewer, Mark Tadajewski

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415816151
• eBook ISBN: 9781317850212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Expanding disciplinary Space: On the Potential of Critical Marketing provides an introduction to the major perspectives in critical marketing studies. It contains theoretical reflections on critical marketing whilst building on the key concepts and ideas, which are vital to the subject, through detailed empirical studies. An international collection of marketing experts discuss the eclectic character and potential of the critical turn within marketing theory and practice. Chapters explore topics such as marketing academia, consumer research, political marketing, marketing ethics, postcolonial epistemic ideology in marketing, marketing theory, and marketing for community development. The text is essential reading for all those interested in contemporary developments in marketing theory and practice irrespective of the discipline from which they originate.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Marketing Management.

Thinking ‘Communities of Academic Practice’: on space, enterprise and governance in marketing academia

Douglas Brownlie, University of Stirling, UK
Paul Hewer, University of Strathclyde, UK
Mark Tadajewski, University of Leicester, UK

Abstract The paper introduces the ideas that have inspired this special issue on the production of disciplinary space. It locates those ideas with regard to contemporary themes within the cut and thrust of disciplinary institutions in marketing and the practices they authorise, particularly those that shape the production and distribution of knowledge product. In the spirit of critical inquiry, we frame the discipline reflexively. This helps us to understand marketing academia as a shifting confederation of ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger 1998), recursively organising itself around negotiated visions of how an invisible, yet representative and influential academic institution reveals itself to itself, through conducting our academic conduct. It introduces the papers and arranges them in a contingent order. This is achieved through imputing to the papers practices that seek to expand available conceptual space, making it available for further development.

INTRODUCTION

In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously. They are all forced, and it is the duty of every honest man to ignore them.

(Kundera 1985, p. 180)

Those of us with an interest in historicising the development of marketing thought over the last century will understand that debate has been part of the evolving culture of the discipline as long as members of its invisible college have coveted scientific status. Historically such debate has been framed by philosophy of science considerations, drawing on a narrow understanding of science as a social practice. Strong claims have been made about the importance to the scientific development of the discipline of the accomplishment of truth and objectivity effects through intersubjectivity.

This has given us tiresome and often bad-tempered debates about the status of competing knowledge claims, contradicting heroic generalisations about scientism in marketing as a disinterested social practice. Such debates are typically expressed in terms of the combative rhetoric of overwrought epistemological imperatives mobilised by opposing camps of realists and relativists. The unfortunate and possibly unintended outcome of such pious effort has been to close down debate, as if its end had been arrived at and the various epistemological options fuelling debate, bootstrapped once and for all! Fortunately, such premature closure of debate has not always had the effect of blocking-off opportunities for innovative thought and scholarship, despite seeming to impose a dull mechanical conformity to scientistic parameters used to rationalise the adjudication of topics, analytics and research contributions.

The urge to open up disciplinary debate and to expand horizons of scholarly perspective and interest has simmered on, typically making space for ideation on the periphery of the mainstream. And over the years various new communities of academic practice have emerged there, often against the grain of the prevailing cultural system and its discourses of knowledge production and distribution.

From an institutional perspective the content of those debates is of less importance than the conduct they make visible and the scholarly principles they embed, especially in terms of building the confidence and status of the discipline and the recognition accorded its research and pedagogy. The debate has generated much-needed disciplinary capital while providing some enterprising academic practitioners of marketing philosophy with the basis of a long and lucrative career as experts in the application of specific analytics and their supporting rhetoric. And although those contentious and intense debates may no longer be so interesting or profitable, the function of open debate remains central to the academic enterprise driving the ongoing development of the discipline, even if the form it takes is morphing once again with the unmarked passing of the critique of postmodernism. Indeed, in advocating that “the leading [marketing] journals should actively solicit articles that creatively and insightfully address the concerns of senior marketers [practitioners], even if they do not introduce a new methodology or advance basic theory”, Reibstein, Day and Wind (2009, p.3) are reminding us that, not only do journals have a pivotal role to play in constructing and circulating the conditions that shape academic leadership among the community of marketing scholars, they also have a key responsibility to make space available to the various constituencies and stakeholders with an interest in enterprising academic conduct.

The conduct of debate is one of the emblematic practices that speak to the health of the economy of knowledge production and distribution in marketing, cultivating as it does new scholarly vistas and with them novel formations of academic perspective and practice. In this way the ongoing production of disciplinary space can be seen to be symptomatic of the health of marketing academia and of the vibrancy or otherwise of the various communities of academic practice that constitute it. However, this argument assumes that within the wider community of marketing academia the urge is shared towards more inspectable and accountable practices of knowledge representation and enterprise, so that the resources of the institutions of marketing scholarship are equally available and accessible to the various communities of academic practice within the discipline shaping the formation of markets for marketing knowledge. As a close reading of Wenger (1998) suggests, such communities of academic practice can be theorised as learning communities, akin to those we seek to assemble in our classrooms: in other words “social systems of shared resources by which groups organize and coordinate their activities, mutual relationships, and interpretations of the world” (ibid, p.13). Marketing scholars will be aware of the vibrant cohesiveness of some of those communities of academic practice and how, although participants may be spread around the globe, they are “informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise” (Wenger and Snyder 2000, p. 139). Collective practices of connectivity and knowledge-making are facilitated through various conferences and seminars and email networking and other on-line activities. Thus, we could say that the packaged products of elite journals represent only the tip of a massive iceberg of academic practice and enterprise.

As you may know by consulting the pages of the elite journals in marketing, retailing and consumer research, there is an unsettling uniformity and formulaic character to the elite knowledge products being made available for consumption. Yet, those channels of distribution of marketing knowledge-product are embedded within a diverse ecology of knowledge-making enterprise in which a wide range of academic ‘taskscapes’ cultivate diverse talents that jostle for access to resources of disciplinary capital for their academic brands. What is clear is that those channels operate a highly selective policy of space provision guided by the strategic marketing imperative of maintaining high-impact Journal Citation Reports (JCRs). And high-impact JCRs require perceived high-impact topics and analytics that position themselves with regard to the pipeline of previously published knowledge products distributed by that journal and in some interesting cases that pipeline largely consists of numerous citations made to papers previously published in the same journal. By means of such strategic impactology the puzzle-solving of normal science can come to function as if it wore the mantle of leading-edge thought in the discipline. But, the confusion of elite-journal-branded product with leading edge thought in marketing academia is a category error that is frequently made whenever self-appointed guardians of marketing academia take it upon themselves to occupy scarce elite journal space to tell the rest of us, syllogistically, what the problem is and what must be done, as most recently exemplified by Reibstein, Day and Wind (2009). To survive, communities of academic practice competing in the elite sport of knowledge-making, must conform to the received view of elite journal knowledge product, otherwise they will fail to compete successfully for preferential access to the ecology of space provision cultivated by elite journals. But, as Reibstein, Day and Wind (2009) also observe, “Currently, there seems to be little taste among the top-tier journals for thoughtful, rigorous conceptual articles that suggest new research directions” (ibid, p.3). It seems that perhaps the crisis of marketing academia is not one of knowledge production, but of the institutionalised habits of vision and leadership framing the character of knowledge products sufficient to the gift of access to elite journals.

Critical marketing starts with critique of the conditions that frame such conduct and its implications for the wider constituencies that academic practitioners serve through enterprising practices of research and pedagogy. The point of embracing critical theorising is to foster well-informed sceptical reflexivity in our scholarly practice at a time when the overweening ambitions of a culture of publish or perish accountability are seeking to further determine the character of knowledge production through seeding discourses of bibliometrics, league tables and the ‘buzz-metrics’ and ‘impactology’ that goes with them. This special issue invited papers that sought to contribute to the expansion of critical discourse in marketing through stimulating interest in how dominant logics, paradigms, models, frameworks, algorithms, rhetoric and other totalising knowledge systems enable the work of academic enterprise while serving the vested interests of power within the marketing academy and its legitimating institutions.

The emerging community of academic practice that is critical marketing claims that its contribution to this development lies in carrying forward the project of reflexive theory building, scepticism and debate within the discipline through helping to cultivate other communities of academic practice (Wenger, McDermot and Snyder 2002). For instance, in seeking to problematize the status of knowledge claims, it is argued that critical reflection on theory and practice in the discipline would unpack the provisional and interested nature of knowledge claims: it would seek to reveal power relations embedded in such claims, unmasking the work of privilege and of geopolitical, cultural and sexual conventions that frame the conduct of research and teaching practice. Early interest in how marketing discourse functions as polity is found in the cognate fields of macro-marketing and consumer research. Support for critical inquiry within those domains may have been limited to the study of broad societal topics drawing on particular methodologies, but it has framed marketing and consumption more widely within debates about gender, poverty, sexuality, ethnicity and quality of life. Both groups have always been relatively sympathetic to critical investigations of societal topics, sharing the goal to examine the impact of marketing on society and society on marketing so to indicate shortcomings in policies framing market conduct and performance. In the current difficult economic climate several thematic topics may suggest themselves to you as targets for critical inquiry in the light of the apparent failure of markets. This is not only a starting point for critical thinking, but moreover for critical inquiry AND critical pedagogy.

MAKING SPACE

The first act of making space was taken by the editor of the Journal of Marketing Management. She was persuaded to make available the equivalent of about 90,000 words of print space for authors to debate critical perspectives and their potential to expand the available disciplinary space of marketing in an era of encroaching bibliometric accountability and its strange bedfellow elite scholarship and celebrity infused citation counts.

As you can see, that space is now fully occupied by contributions that examine how it might be that critical theorising could make it possible to see and say different things than we are accustomed to; to interrogate our understanding anew, perhaps revealing new insights, or reminding us of past insights now forgotten. In this way we explore critical marketing’s claim to open up collective disciplinary space for new voices and new sources of disciplinary capital, encouraging pluralism within marketing and consumer research that not only draws on the wider social sciences and humanities, but also turns a sceptical gaze on institutionalised claims to power. And all this in the dawning era of elite marketing ‘scientists’ desperately seeking greater distinction through managing upward their citations and impact. Given the emerging culture of ‘impactology’ and the ecology of elite scholarship it cultivates, the enterprise of critical marketing is in danger of being reduced to toothless dissent at best, or dangerous affectation at worst – the mystifying product of a “rainy climate, sleazy housing and a diet of lukewarm beer and dripping pork, where it feels good to feel so bad”, as viewed from the stately gilded splendour of happy Stockholm by Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, one of that manicured city’s many Sunday anarchists and ‘desafinado’ blues crooners (de Monthoux 2006, p.146).

THE PAPERS

Contributors tackle a variety of issues in an attempt to open new space for the development of disciplinary capital in marketing. Our arrangement of the papers draws loosely on Foucault’s notions of ‘archaeology’ and ‘genealogy’ in knowledge production and governmentality (Deans 1999). We use those ideas to orchestrate the spatial flows opened up by the group of papers. Accordingly the first three papers appear under the archaeology theme, mainly because in different ways they touch upon how conceptual possibilities defining the boundaries of thought in marketing are contingent upon entrenched positions within contemporary marketing institutions. There then follows a group of papers arranged under the genealogy theme. In addition to suggesting ways in which given lines of thought in marketing are contingent and not inevitable, they also point to ways in which the conditions of marketing thought could change, transforming ways of knowing in marketing. The final group of papers gathers together problem-centred work that illuminates the potential of various conceptual arrangements through situating specific empirical sites within their defining geometries.

Archaeological

In his contribution Hackley looks at the seemingly paradoxical status of the marketing discipline. On the one hand, external observers and commentators see marketing as a relatively homogenous group of practices, and marketing scholars as intent on providing ever more effective tools with which to plumb consumer subjectivity and subconscious, while the discipline itself has both managerial and social scientific aspirations. For Hackley the development of the discipline reveals two “parallel universes of disciplinary space”: one sees marketing as an instrumental, managerial “science”; the other adopts a more critical stance, questioning accepted ways of thinking about marketing and contesting the closure of disciplinary space around the positivistic vision of marketing “science” that characterises the elite marketing journals.

Bettany and Woodruffe-Burton respond to the call by penetrating what they describe as the “unspeakable relation between researchers and researched”, understanding researcher reflexivity as a practice. They debate its potential to “work the limits” of research, find space for reflexivity as more than a depoliticised set of design techniques or methodological imperatives. They also offer guidelines for researchers who might want to practise reflexivity and get “finite and dirty”.

Shankar also appreciates the value of reflexivity and pluralism in marketing research. Looking at the development of the discipline and the emergence of interpretive approaches, along with critical marketing and consumer culture theory, he reviews the contribution of each. He advises against intellectual elitism, arguing that the isolationism it would encourage risks insights and arguments being ignored. According to Shankar a ‘mature’ marketing discipline values insights generated from the variety of different paradigmatic positions to be found in the discipline.

Genealogical

The paper by Ekström and Hjort draws our attention to the importance of broadening our appreciation of what it means to consume. This paper demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary work, in this case the exchange between welfare research and consumption research. The authors explore the topic of economic scarcity within affluent societies through the theoretical lens of inclusion and exclusion, participation and inequality, to challenge the hegemony of so-called free choice, an idea that the economic downturn and notions of the ‘credit crunch’ has brought into sharp relief.

The paper by Maclaran, Miller, Parsons and Surman calls our attent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Thinking ‘Communities of Academic Practice’: on space, enterprise and governance in marketing academia
• 2. Parallel universes and disciplinary space: the bifurcation of managerialism and social science in marketing studies
• 3. Working the limits of method: the possibilities of critical reflexive practice in marketing and consumer research
• 4. Reframing critical marketing
• 5. Hidden consumers in marketing – the neglect of consumers with scarce resources in affluent societies
• 6. Praxis or performance: does critical marketing have a gender blind-spot?
• 7. Veblen and Darwin: tracing the intellectual roots of evolutionism in consumer research
• 8. Critical brand poetics: “from The M at the End of the Earth”
• 9. Towards a critical political marketing agenda?
• 10. How far can we push sceptical reflexivity? An analysis of marketing ethics and the certification of poverty
• 11. Service marketing and subjectivity: the shaping of customer-oriented employees
• 12. Disciplining the discipline: understanding postcolonial epistemic ideology in marketing
• 13. Marketing theory: Breaking the siege of incrementalism
• 14. Beyond critical marketing
• 15. The critical participant
• 16. Modes of engagement for critical marketing: oppositional, revivalist and therapeutic
• 17. Figuring knowledge and desire in critical marketing: Lacan’s four discourses
• 18. And the beat goes on! Critical marketing for community development
• Index