Marketing Discourse

A Critical Perspective

Per Skålén, Martin Fougère, Markus Fellesson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134116379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

The marketing discipline has been dominated by managerial research that has never really been counterbalanced by a systematic critical analysis which is problematic given the assumed legitimization of the managerialism that has ensued. This book is an attempt to rest the balance, articulating a social critique and evaluation of marketing.

The book offers a critical survey of the most important contributions to managerial marketing discourse from the earliest twentieth century onwards, covering traditions of research such as scientific selling, marketing management and service marketing and drawing from Michel Foucault's understanding of power and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Discourse Theory. The analysis reveals that managerial marketing discourse has promoted a government of organizations that is centred around the customer and that the shifts and turning points in this rationality through time signify more fundamental shifts in emphasis in the type of power promoted by marketing discourse and the subject positions is ascribes to people.

1 Introduction

Academic marketing discourse can be approached from two basic perspectives. On the one hand, marketing can be perceived as focusing on issues of consumption and thus as preoccupied with understanding consumer choices on the market and how organizations might gain knowledge about and affect these choices. On the other hand, marketing can be perceived as a managerial discourse focused on prescribing a certain management of organizations that is ‘marketing orientated’. Even though we acknowledge that managerialism and consumerism co-exist and are to some extent intertwined with each other in marketing discourse, it remains possible to make a distinction between them and to focus upon one of these two issues (Hunt 1976).

In this book we analyse the history of ideas of managerial marketing discourse. We focus upon analysing academic managerial marketing discourse from the time it was being established as an academic discipline in the early twentieth century to the present day. When managerial marketing discourse is approached from a historical and managerial perspective, it is quite evident that major changes have taken place in its articulation. In the early twentieth century the managerialism of marketing was only implicitly articulated within the perspectives that dominated academic marketing discourse. But there also existed explicit articulations of managerialism in marketing from around 1910 based on Frederick Taylor’s scientific management (Taylor 1911). Taylorism influenced articulations of selling most, as exemplified by the work of Charles Hoyt.

One of the most successful sales managers of my acquaintance has often said that in selling, method is 80 per cent, and men or salesmen only 20 per cent. He does not mean by this that one need not have good men. He means that the methods under which these men are employed and directed are the most important factors. He believes in making a sales plan, or in sales planning, and then in working that plan. He has the same idea as the exponents of scientific management, such as was developed by Frederick W. Taylor. These men believe that most of the responsibility is up to the management, and not up to the men.

(Hoyt 1929[1912]: 11)

In the period 1930–60 the managerialism of marketing was developed and refined. The Academy of Marketing and its major journal, the Journal of Marketing, played a leading role in this re-articulation and elaboration. This trend reached a peak in the late 1950s with the launch of the marketing concept. Robert J. Keith (1960) summarized the managerial rationality of the marketing concept:

No longer is the company at the center of the business universe. Today the customer is at the center. Our attention has shifted away from problems of production to problems of marketing, from the product we can make to the product the consumer wants us to make, from the company itself and the market place.

(Keith 1960: 35, emphasis in original)

The marketing concept gained a hegemonic position in marketing discourse in the 1960s. However, in the 1970s a few marketing practitioners and academics argued that existing marketing practices were inapt for management and marketing in the rapidly growing service sector – it was claimed that existing practices were suited for organizations producing goods, not organizations that offered services (Grönroos 1978; Shostack 1977). A fundamental idea informing the re-articulation of managerial marketing discourse that followed within the emerging service marketing¹ field was that customers’ evaluations of services are dependent not only on the substance of the offering (which was believed to be the case for products) but also on how it was delivered by the personnel (Grönroos 1982, 1984; Parasuraman et al. 1985). Therefore it was believed to be of vital importance to manage the personnel from a customer perspective, and this managerial rationality was soon broadened to include all organizations. The rationale behind this broadening was the belief that all organizations in some way or another offer services and thus have personal relationships with their customers. This led Christian Grönroos, one of the leading names in service marketing, to recently argue:

To manage service quality a customer consciousness has to permeate all business functions. An interest in customers must be extended to everyone …who has a direct or indirect impact on the customer’s perception of quality.

(Grönroos 2006:322)

A critical project

Since its emergence in the early twentieth century, managerial academic marketing discourse has thus been gradually rearticulated from focusing mostly on the management of salesmen in the early days to prescribing a rationality for managing every organizational function and type of employee within today’s service marketing. Mainstream marketing scholars generally perceive this evolution in terms of progress. Accordingly, the ‘success story’ of managerial marketing, the reasons for it and the discipline’s future direction are frequently reported and discussed in mainstream marketing textbooks (Brassington and Pettitt 2000; Jobber 2004; Kotler and Keller 2006), scholarly books (Hunt 1991; Webster 2002) and academic articles (Grönroos 1994; Keith 1960; Kotler and Zaltman 1971; Levitt 1960; Vargo and Lusch 2004; Webster 1992). Mainstream academic marketing discourse, which is a modernistic discourse dominated by positivism, functionalism and essentialism (Anderson 1983; Arndt 1983; Brown 1995; Hunt 1976, 1983, 1994), constantly reproduces rather than questions the managerialism of marketing (Brown 1995; Hackley 2003; Marion 1993, 2006; Morgan 2003). The modernistic and managerial understanding of the history of marketing has never really been counterbalanced by a more systematic critical analysis. In fact, not even those schools of marketing that portray themselves as ‘reflexive’, such as ‘marketing history’ or ‘macro-marketing’, have articulated a definitive social critique of managerial marketing (Morgan 2003).

In our view this lack of critique is problematic. It is problematic because marketing has not only turned into a general managerial discourse but its managerialism is also invested with power based on truth claims that are legitimated by its position as an academic discipline and expertise (Hackley 2003; Marion 2006). This has turned marketing into an important source of power for legitimizing, producing and reproducing not only consumerism but also the managerialism that characterizes contemporary society and its organizations (Brownlie et al. 1999; du Gay 1996). Through its undisputed place in business schools and executive training, its permeation of management guru literature (Furusten 1999) and its never-ending presence in our (post)modern environment (Brown 1995), marketing discourse has a huge impact on the management of private (du Gay and Salaman 1992; Hochschild 1983) and public organizations (Clarke and Newman 1997; Fairclough 1993). Discourses invested with such power must be fundamentally evaluated, critically analysed and reflected upon if we are to understand what they do or may do to societies and human beings. In order to articulate such a social critique of marketing discourse – which is one of the main aims of the present book – marketing needs to be perceived as political discourse invested with power rather than as a positive science.

Since mainstream marketing scholars have been unable to articulate a critical self-reflexive discourse (Alvesson 1994; Alvesson and Willmott 1996; Burton 2001; Morgan 2003) our point of departure is taken outside the boundaries of academic marketing. Within the framework of the established tradition of Critical Management Studies (CMS) we have been inspired by the work of Michel Foucault and particularly his notion of governmentality. Foucault’s work has been much drawn upon to analyse managerial discourse within CMS (for overviews see Alvesson and Willmott 1996, 2003; Grey and Willmott 2005). For example, Foucault’s conceptualization of power as embedded in knowledge has been used to understand how managerial discourse produces subjectivities and/or attributes certain subjectivities to people (Covaleski et al. 1998; Townley 1993, 1994) and his notion of resistance has been used to understand how workers formulate counter-discourses to these managerialistic initiatives (Covaleski et al. 1998; Kelemen 2000; Knights and McCabe 1999). From a CMS perspective, the main alternative to a Foucauldian approach would be a critical theory (CT) analysis.² Both Foucauldian and CT forms of analysis are rooted in Marxian analyses and are thus preoccupied with uncovering hidden power structures and aiming at emancipation. The main difference between them is that CT approaches propose emancipation through promoting a certain worldview (Alvesson and Willmott 1992, 1996), unlike Foucauldian approaches. With Foucault we believe that promoting a particular normativity is not necessarily desirable, not least because of the risk of being unable to see the potentially perverse power effects of this new normativity.

Governmentality and critique

In order to introduce the notion of governmentality it might be a good idea to take the point of departure in Foucault’s notion of power since we see the former as contingent on the latter (Foucault 1977, 1981a, 2000a). To Foucault, power is not something that someone has and he accordingly rejects agency-orientated definitions of power (Clegg et al. 2006; Lukes 1974). Rather, in Foucault’s view, power is embedded in discourse and the same goes for knowledge and, consequently, truth. Knowledge is thus intrinsic to power and vice versa. Immanent to regimes of ‘power/knowledge’ are particular subject positions that attribute identities to people that they eventually might make a part of themselves (Foucault 1977, 1985a; Knights and Willmott 1989).

We see governmentality analysis as a form of power/knowledge analysis but the notion of governmentality emphasizes that discourses invested with power/ knowledge, such as marketing, foster government of people through ascribing certain mentalities to them and through advising them how to make these mentalities a part of themselves. With Dean (1999), we can see governmentality as derived from the terms ‘government’ and ‘mentality’. But it is also possible to argue, as Townley (1994:6) does, that Foucault introduced the term governmentality as ‘a neologism derived from a combination of “government” and “rationality”‘. Government is understood as any more or less calculated direction of human conduct based on certain rationalities (ways of knowing) furthering certain mentalities (ways of thinking) (Foucault 1981a, 1985a, 2000a, 2000c) embedded in discourses such as marketing. People govern themselves and others towards what they believe to be the truth and the right way to be, that is, towards a particular subjectivity. A central quest for the analysis of government is to explicate these subject positions and the subjectivity-producing governmental rationality embedded but often hidden in discourse. Discourse does not, however, determine a ‘real’ subjectivity. Consequently, an analysis of discourse from the standpoint of governmentality explicates what identities a particular discourse elicits, not what the eventual identities of people end up being (Dean 1999). Emphasis is put on what possibilities a particular discourse gives to people in constructing themselves when they choose ways of conducting themselves. Accordingly, a governmentality perspective also focuses on subjection, understood as working ‘through the promotion and calculated regulation of spaces in which choice is to be exercised’ (Dean 1995:562), which is often facilitated by producing knowledge that suits particular ends. Government, hence, is not seen as coupled to the state but rather as dispersed in society and discourse – it does not have a clear centre.

Compared to mainstream academic marketing research,³ the governmentality approach suggests a totally different form of analysis. Rather than producing or reproducing knowledge, a governmentality analysis is preoccupied with what knowledge produces – the subjectivities it fosters and the subjection it prescribes – and how it produces these effects – the managerial practices and technologies suggested. Thus, rather than prescribing new ways of managing organizations, as is usual in mainstream managerial marketing research, a governmentality analysis focuses on what type of management the prescriptions embedded in marketing discourse suggest. And rather than being the goal and the end point of the analysis, marketing discourse, its practices and associated technologies are turned into the very object of analysis.

A governmentality analysis is also much distanced from the notion of critique within positivistic and functionalistic marketing discourse. Positivism prescribes that research should start by problematizing and articulating a ‘critique’ towards existing knowledge, and based on this ‘critique’ create hypotheses, empirically test them and develop new theory with ‘better’ explanation power with the aim of ensuring cumulativity. Accordingly, such an approach to research never really questions the foundations of marketing and is unable to articulate a self-reflexive social critique. A governmentality analysis, on the other hand, is well suited to accomplish this latter type of critique. In developing his notion of critique, Foucault took his point of departure in the increasing governmentalization of society from the fifteenth century onwards (Foucault 1997; Townley 1994), manifested by the de-coupling of governmental discourse from the religious centres (secularization) and by the diffusion of ‘the art of governing’ within and across discursive and societal domains. As a counter-movement to this governmentalization and in tandem with it, Foucault argued that a political and moral attitude was born in Europe, which constitutes the central meaning of the concept and activity of critique; namely, ‘the art of not being governed quite so much’ (Foucault 1997:29). Critique is thus understood as an articulation of counter-discourse, a kind of resistance towards and deconstruction of hegemonic governmental discourse (cf. Laclau 1993; Laclau and Mouffe 1985).

In order to add precision to and elaborate on his notion of critique, Foucault (1997) contended that government has three important anchoring points: Christianity, Law and Science. These all formulate certain truth claims and thereby govern society by subjectifying people in a particular manner. Foucault (1997:32) argued that ‘critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effect of power and question power on its discourses of truth …critique would essentially insure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth’. Foucault’s conception of critique can be understood as a questioning of truth in order to avoid the individualization and totalization of modern power structures that regimes of government such as marketing prescribes (Foucault 2000a). This form of critique is thus dependent upon a detailed analysis of the regime of government that is the object of critique.

Marketing discourse

Based on Foucault’s work, several approaches for analysing discourse have been developed (see Fairclough 1992, 2001; Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Phillips and Jørgensen 2002; Potter and Wheterhell 1987). Even though it is possible to see differences between them, they all share the idea that language and discourse do not only represent the world but they also produce the world. Discourse analysts thus have a performative⁴ view on language and discourse. Generally discourse can be defined as ‘a particular way of talking about and understanding the world (or an aspect of the world)’ (Phillips and Jørgensen 2002:1). Our particular conceptualization of discourse and discourse analysis is based on the work of Laclau and Mouffe (1985), where discourse is understood as rather fixed structures of signs that give meaning and determine what can be said within the particular institutional and societal domain that it regulates. But Laclau and Mouffe (1985) do not have a structuralist conception of discourse. Rather, one of their central ideas is that discourse is contingent. The discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) emphasizes the fact that discourse is always characterized by struggles over meaning between different articulations.

Analyzing managerial marketing discourse as we do implies that we focus on traditions, discursive practices and technologies that directly or indirectly produce and reproduce its managerialism. We primarily (but not exclusively) analyse managerial marketing discourse through its representation in academic texts. Focusing on academic marketing discourse is in line with one of Morgan’s suggestions for further critical marketing research (Morgan 2003). Accordingly, our main sources are not only scholarly articles and books that have problematized and redirected the managerialism of marketing but also the works of marketing historians, influential textbooks and texts produced by regulative organizations such as the American Marketing Association. This does not imply, however, that our critical discourse analysis addresses academic research only. Rather, by focusing on academic texts we believe it is possible to say something about managerial marketing discourse in general, an argument that would most probably be contested by most marketing historians. Adopting economics as their model, where economic theory is granted the role of ‘driving’ practice, marketing historians usually make a sharp distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ since they hold that marketing ‘theory’ has been unable to drive ‘practice’ (see Hollander et al. 2005:32). This distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ is premised on the power/knowledge of a modernism and positivism that is prevalent within mainstream marketing research, holding that academic knowledge is able (and meant) to formulate general and objective truths about a material world independent of discourse. A logical function of this position is that ‘practice’ should strive to mirror marketing, economics or any other ‘true’ ‘theory’ (see Harvey 1990). Therefore ‘theory’ is posited as a driver of ‘practice’ and when ‘practice’ is found to not resemble ‘theory’, which often is the position held by marketing scholars (Brownlie and Saren 1991; Hollander et al., 2005; Hunt 1983, 1994; Wind and Robertson 1983) – despite the fact that the relationship between academic discourse and the marketing discourse operating in organizations is still yet to be systematically empirically studied (Marion 1993) – it is argued that the link between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ is weak.

But the behavioural and social sciences are never purely scientific, as mainstream marketing scholars seem to believe. They are rather forms of ‘expertise’ closely related with certain professional roles such as those of psychologists, social workers, economists or marketers. In discussing psychology from this perspective, Rose argues that:

By expertise is meant the capacity of psychology to provide a corps of trained and credentialed persons claiming special competence in the administration of persons and interpersonal relations, and a body of techniques and procedures claiming to make possible the rational and human management of human resources in industry, the military and social life more generally.

(Rose 1996:11)

We would claim that marketing, in the same way as psychology, is a form of expertise that has shaped organizations, their members and the society at large. However, since we perceive marketing as an expertise rather than a science in the positivistic understanding of the term, to us marketing will never have a totalizing effect on reality, unlike what many mainstream scholars seem to think. Organizations and their members will never be replicas of the prerogatives that academic marketing discourse prescribes, simply because its ‘truth’ is contingent, because other discourses make competing ‘truth claims’ and because actors have the possibility to resist marketing through drawing on or articulating alternative discourses (Covaleski et al. 1998; Kelemen 2000; Knights and McCabe 1999). Indeed, the few marketing scholars who have adopted a performative view of language and discourse, such as Cochoy (1998; see also Brownlie and Saren 1997), take the position that practitioner and academic marketing discourse are inter-mingled with each other and constitute a unified discourse. As Cochoy (1998:217, 218, footnote 1) argues, marketing is a performative science – ‘a science that simultaneously describes and constructs its subject matter’ – and such ‘sciences are truly disciplines, in the double meaning of the word: in their case, one cannot separate science from practice, the discipline–knowledge from the discipline– control since, by definition, these sciences arise in and trough practice’. Since neither ‘practice’ nor ‘theory’ is given a privileged position in this way, it is possible to see marketing as a unified discourse. Accordingly we wish to deconstruct the dichotomy between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. Several claims can be made in favour of our position: the persons that have redirected marketing discourse often have been academics and practitioners, central research streams in marketing are often founded on inductively genera...