- Email: [email protected]
Reframing marketing as a social science: A look back at the Special Session in Dublin
ARTICLE IN PRESS Australasian Marketing Journal ■■ (2016) ■■–■■
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Australasian Marketing Journal j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s e v i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / a m j
Commentary
Reframing marketing as a social science: A look back at the Special Session in Dublin Roger Layton * University of New South Wales, Australia
A R T I C L E
I N F O
Article history: Available online Keywords: Re-framing marketing Systems thinking Marketing futures
A B S T R A C T
The debate as to whether marketing is a science, or perhaps a social science, is of long standing. It has however been put to one side by the need to respond to the growing needs of marketing managers. It is now timely to think again about marketing, re-framing it in a systems setting, and linking it to the increasing urgency of informed policy responses to system wide, often global issues. A change like this will take time but if marketing is to remain relevant we need to start now. © 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy.
1. Introduction In the Macromarketing 2016 Conference in Dublin a special session led by Michaela Haase and Michael Kleinaltenkamp was devoted to exploring a question raised earlier in the year in a paper by Roger Layton (2016): Is marketing a management technology, a societal provisioning system, or the study of seller and buyer decision processes in increasingly complex contexts, or …. or, should it first of all be thought of as a discipline within the social sciences? These questions are given increasing urgency as we consider the role that marketing could and should play in contributing to the many challenges surfacing in human communities in both developing and developed countries, challenges that are shaped by widely different cultural, political, economic and technological environments. The opening address in the Dublin meeting by the president of the Macromarketing Society, Gene Laczniak, highlighted a number of these challenges including a growing inequality in economic outcomes, concerns about increasingly vulnerable groups within different communities, privacy concerns in a digital age, the challenges of sustainable consumption, the need to include longer term path dependent consequences in considering strategic choice, problems arising from market failure, and the weaknesses of a “free market” ideology in an increasingly complex world. In each case, marketing could and should have a contribution to make in finding answers. The extent and usefulness of the response depend on how we see the discipline of marketing — is it a management technology, a societal provisioning system, the study of seller and buyer
* E-mail address: [email protected].
decision processes in increasingly complex contexts, or … or, should it first of all be thought of as a discipline within the social sciences? Much depends on the way we think of our discipline. As Helge Loëbler pointed out in his commentary, marketing knowledge should not only support marketers and managers it also should support customers and citizens in general. The possibility, even hope, that marketing may encompass much more than management, is not new. In the Parlin Memorial Lecture given to the American Marketing Association in 1957, Peter Drucker (1958: p252) noted that Charles Coolidge Parlin “contributed as a Founding Father toward the development of marketing as a social discipline,” helping us to “understand marketing as a dynamic process of society through which business enterprise is integrated productively with society’s purpose and human values.” Drucker noted that “marketing is thus the process through which economy is integrated into society to serve human needs.” In the 1965 Fall Conference celebrating the Golden Anniversary of the AMA, where the theme was “Marketing and Economic Development,” the cochair of the conference, Thomas Staudt (1965: p4), noted that the purpose was to “more sharply perceive marketing’s ultimate purpose and capacity to serve the constituent society.” He went on to observe (p5) that “the matter of the economic growth rate that can be sustained by a market system under alternative programs and policies is of equal significance and relevance to both the developed and developing nations and links us together in a common band of scholarship.” Reavis Cox (1965) in the same conference called for “thorough and comprehensive comparisons of domestic marketing systems” (p146), drawing on what he hoped might be universals, “generalizations about marketing that can be applied to any society of which we have any knowledge.” Charles Slater, a keynote speaker, in keeping with the call by Reavis Cox, cited the Latin American Food Marketing Study then under way at Michigan State University as intending to establish the relationship between marketing efficiency
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ausmj.2016.08.003 1441-3582/© 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy.
Please cite this article in press as: Roger Layton, Australasian Marketing Journal (2016), doi: 10.1016/j.ausmj.2016.08.003
ARTICLE IN PRESS R. Layton / Australasian Marketing Journal ■■ (2016) ■■–■■
2
and economic development. A little later, in 1968, Malcolm McNair, a leading professor in the Harvard Business School, defined marketing as “the creation and delivery of a standard of living.” This, however, was about as far as this initial effort in reframing and widening marketing thought was able to go. The dynamism and growing complexity of the social, economic and technological environments faced in those years by American managers, and by those in many developed countries, meant that marketing scholarship had to focus on identifying, developing and teaching the skills that management urgently needed. The third era in marketing thought identified by Wilkie and Moore (2003), featuring an overt commitment to marketing-as-management, and explicit reliance on the behavioural and quantitative sciences, was about to begin.
2. The narrowing of marketing scholarship While managerial issues dominated marketing scholarship over the next 50 years, wider issues were not completely ignored. In part this was due to social concerns about the impacts of marketing decisions. These could be seen in Ralph Nader-inspired consumerism, in issues of deceptive advertising, in product safety worries, and in greater legislative interest in framing policy initiatives ranging from enhancing competition in markets to resolving everyday consumer issues. In part these wider concerns were evident in the growth of two sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, streams of thought which helped to keep alive Parlin’s dream of marketing as a social discipline. The first of these two streams was the emergence of distinct, often interdependent, schools of thought separate from but sometimes drawing on the mainstream of managerial marketing scholarship (Layton and Grossbart, 2006; Wilkie and Moore, 2006). These emerging schools included macromarketing, quality of life studies, consumer culture theory, marketing and development theory, social marketing, historical research in marketing, and the study of ethical choice and distributive justice in marketing systems. The second stream of thought emerged from scholarship in adjacent social sciences that bore directly on trade or exchange related phenomena especially in areas such as anthropology, sociology, history, economics and psychology that touched on issues that might otherwise have been seen as the domain of marketing. Both streams had the effect of reshaping and sometimes tightening the boundaries of marketing (Layton, 2016). This trend was strengthened by the growth of cognate managerial specializations in areas such as organizational design, corporate strategy, new technologies in information management, developments in media networks and communication strategies, together with overlaps in legal studies (including for example franchising systems), financial markets and systems, and the growth of wide ranging studies in corporate responsibility. The net effect overall has been a distinct narrowing of the field of marketing studies with serious implications for both research and teaching.
3. Redefining or renaming marketing? The possibility of renaming marketing may well be an option. This was canvassed by several participants in the Special Session, with Cliff Shultz noting that marketing was, to most observers, simply about “sellin’ stuff.” One possibility raised by a commentator some years ago was agorology (Mittelstaedt et al., 2006); another suggested marketology, and others have proposed market studies. The problem is real, but from my point of view while the first suggestion has for me a distinct appeal reaching back as it does into history, it may lack impact in a contemporary world; the second is somewhat forced, and the third perhaps may be too general. Time will tell!
The redefining of marketing could however proceed, albeit slowly. As Pia Polsa noted, it has for some years been under way in the American Marketing Association with a gradual shift from business activities to a wider set of activities, institutions and processes, and from customers to society at large. While helpful, this is still at odds with the views held by scholars in most of the emerging areas of marketing. In this wider context, what should a workable definition of marketing permit, directly or indirectly? I suggest that it must be inclusive — linking in depth research in many fragmented fields with each other and with marketing as a whole. Coverage must include voluntary, value-based exchange wherever and whenever it occurs — from hunter gatherer communities to high tech cities, from local networks to national and international market systems, from ancient history to contemporary (and possibly) future markets. And it must allow consideration of system wide dynamics, including generalized evolution in time and space from small beginnings to large scale networks, where equilibrium is seen as special case; inequality in endowments as well as inequality in outcomes is taken as givens; consider blends of self-interest, mutuality and altruism as underlying drivers; bring politics, power and influence into focus; accept dynamic uncertainty; and explore values, ethics, fairness and quality of life at micro, meso and macro levels in widely varying exchange settings. My sense is that there is a definition meeting these requirements implicit in the detail of each of the emerging fields of marketing thought and in the pushing of boundaries between marketing and adjacent social disciplines. It could be something along these lines: Marketing is the study of the behaviors, practices and structures that form, grow and adapt in human communities as individuals, households, groups and entities engage in voluntary, generalised value based market exchange within and between communities. This seems to include much of the work done in the wideranging emerging fields of marketing; from meaning-making in consumer culture theory to the evolution of marketing systems at all levels from micro to macro; quality of life is implicit in value based outcomes; ethics (or the lack thereof) is implicit in the behaviours, practices and structures that form, grow and adapt over time; the resulting structures or marketing systems may be markets in vice as well as markets in virtue; social marketing is evident in generalized value based exchange where both economic and social values are central, and exchange is not just a product of self-interest, but joins self-interest with mutuality and altruism; and, of central importance, the management, both positive and normative, of groups, networks and corporate entities, together with customers, corporate and consumer, is included in the behaviours, practices and structures that generate the key elements of marketing systems and thus of markets. But does the definition, or something along these lines, work for links to adjacent disciplines? The key here is that it identifies a specific, limited set of social phenomena as the subject matter of marketing, phenomena that while of interest to many social sciences are not central to any. As Layton (2016) pointed out, archaeologists are interested in exploring the everyday life of communities and cultures from long ago — and might both contribute to and benefit from a reformed view of marketing. Anthropologists, who have studied in detail human communities in very different cultural and economic settings have begun to take a deeper interest in market exchange, sometimes thought of as mundane, but emerging as important in shaping the evolution of the marketing systems that dominate everyday life. What is exchanged becomes of importance, and it is here that the idea of mutuality in exchange, where it is not just self-interest at work, but a desire for human interaction where ideas flow, behaviours are shaped and
Please cite this article in press as: Roger Layton, Australasian Marketing Journal (2016), doi: 10.1016/j.ausmj.2016.08.003
ARTICLE IN PRESS R. Layton / Australasian Marketing Journal ■■ (2016) ■■–■■
3
social practices evolve. Historians are becoming increasingly interested in the ways that networks of exchange develop and the roles such networks play in shaping the growth of religions, states and empires. Sociologists and psychologists have always been close to marketing scholars, contributing for example insights into choice behaviours, the workings of trust, power and influence, understandings of the reach and dynamics of social networks, the day to day mechanisms of social exchange, and much else. It is economics and economists however that have contributed much to marketing, including a deeper understanding of the workings (and limitations) of self-interest, the evolution and impacts of institutions, the formation and growth of new markets, the simulation of evolving markets using agent based modelling, and the econometrics essential in gaining insights into complex social systems; and it is in the interchange of economic and marketing scholars that the insights needed to many of the issues raised above might be formed. I should also mention the new worlds of complexity science and the older worlds of ecology, as both are central to understanding the development and possible shaping of the social systems implicit in the president’s address. At issue here, as Michaela and Michael have pointed out, is “what can we contribute to the study of these phenomena?” As a number of commentators have pointed out, borrowing from adjacent disciplines is not without risk and concern. Bob Mittelstaedt pointed out that sometimes the concepts that marketing scholars have appropriated have moved on significantly in the original discipline, and that we need to be aware of these and similar concerns. Stan Shapiro has pointed to the debates occurring in many social sciences that go to the fundamentals of scientific enquiry into social systems. We need to be alive to these concerns, but I suspect that if we are to contribute to a meaningful debate on the complex social issues faced by human communities, we must help manage the gaps between disciplines to the advantage of all.
themselves in the dramatic reshaping of higher education that is looming in many parts of the world. An important difficulty faced by scholars interested in the wider view of marketing suggested here is that of getting published in the journals that matter in academic promotion. One possibility that would also bring attention to publications (books, articles, presentations…) that would otherwise escape notice might be to establish an email publication appearing perhaps twice yearly listing the top 10 books and papers wherever published in the last three years or so that are seen by a distinguished board or group of scholars to contribute significant insights to a wider understanding of marketing. This might be the kind of incremental change needed to set things moving in the right direction. I am sure there are many better suggestions! My second proviso stems from a growing feeling that academia is facing disruptive change in the relatively near future. The impacts of digital technology on teaching and research, the introduction of massive online courses that attract thousands of students, the rethinking of teaching space, the need to reshape academic administration to reflect new funding and research priorities (often associated with the kinds of social issues I noted earlier), and the changing politics of higher education where, for example, priorities shift between vocational and higher education, all point to opportunities to reshape business schools and faculties to reflect shifting discipline frontiers. There may be opportunity in all these for marketing to redefine its future. To conclude, I would like to thank my colleagues from many parts of the world for their willingness to help in exploring these issues, and, in particular, I would like to thank Roger Marshall, Michaela and Michael, the Australasian Marketing Journal and the Macromarketing Society for making it all happen.
4. Should marketing be thought of as a social science?
Cox, R., 1965. The search for universals in comparative studies of domestic marketing systems. In: Bennett, P.D. (Ed.), Marketing and Development, Proceedings, Fall Conference. American Marketing Association, Chicago. Drucker, P.F., 1958. Marketing and economic development. J. Marketing 22 (January), 251–259. Layton, R.A., 2016. There is more to marketing than you might have thought! AMJ 24 (1), 2–7. Layton, R.A., Grossbart, S., 2006. Macromarketing: past, present and possible future. J. Macromarketing 26 (2), 193–213. McNair, M.P., 1968. Marketing and the social challenge of our time. In: Cox, K., Enis, B.M. (Eds.), A New Measure of Responsibility for Marketing. American Marketing Association, Chicago. Mittelstaedt, J.D., Kilbourne, W.F., Mittelstaedt, R.A., 2006. J. Macromarketing 26 (2), 131–142. Staudt, T.A., 1965. Opening assembly remarks 50th anniversary AMA symposium. In: Bennett, P.D. (Ed.), Marketing and Development, Proceedings, Fall Conference. American Marketing Association, Chicago. Wilkie, W.L., Moore, E.S., 2003. Scholarly research in marketing: exploring the “4 Eras” of thought development. J. Public Policy Mark. 22 (Fall), 116–146. Wilkie, W.L., Moore, E.S., 2006. Macromarketing as a pillar of marketing thought. J. Macromarketing 26 (2), 224–232.
As I reflect on the comments made by participants in the Special Session and later in this issue of the AMJ it seems to me that it is not for us to assert marketing is or should be regarded as a social science — it must be something we earn through action. My feeling is that opening the doors to a wider understanding and acceptance of marketing amongst marketing scholars is of critical importance if we are to contribute to social debates in ways that matter. Perhaps the definition I have suggested, or something like it, is the way forward. This, however, is much easier said than done. Should change be incremental as Stan Shapiro has suggested? The answer is certainly “Yes”, but with two provisos — the first is that we do need to be seen to act in a way that attracts attention, and the second is that we should be ready to seize any opportunities that might present
References
Please cite this article in press as: Roger Layton, Australasian Marketing Journal (2016), doi: 10.1016/j.ausmj.2016.08.003
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Australasian Marketing Journal j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s e v i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / a m j
Commentary
Reframing marketing as a social science: A look back at the Special Session in Dublin Roger Layton * University of New South Wales, Australia
A R T I C L E
I N F O
Article history: Available online Keywords: Re-framing marketing Systems thinking Marketing futures
A B S T R A C T
The debate as to whether marketing is a science, or perhaps a social science, is of long standing. It has however been put to one side by the need to respond to the growing needs of marketing managers. It is now timely to think again about marketing, re-framing it in a systems setting, and linking it to the increasing urgency of informed policy responses to system wide, often global issues. A change like this will take time but if marketing is to remain relevant we need to start now. © 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy.
1. Introduction In the Macromarketing 2016 Conference in Dublin a special session led by Michaela Haase and Michael Kleinaltenkamp was devoted to exploring a question raised earlier in the year in a paper by Roger Layton (2016): Is marketing a management technology, a societal provisioning system, or the study of seller and buyer decision processes in increasingly complex contexts, or …. or, should it first of all be thought of as a discipline within the social sciences? These questions are given increasing urgency as we consider the role that marketing could and should play in contributing to the many challenges surfacing in human communities in both developing and developed countries, challenges that are shaped by widely different cultural, political, economic and technological environments. The opening address in the Dublin meeting by the president of the Macromarketing Society, Gene Laczniak, highlighted a number of these challenges including a growing inequality in economic outcomes, concerns about increasingly vulnerable groups within different communities, privacy concerns in a digital age, the challenges of sustainable consumption, the need to include longer term path dependent consequences in considering strategic choice, problems arising from market failure, and the weaknesses of a “free market” ideology in an increasingly complex world. In each case, marketing could and should have a contribution to make in finding answers. The extent and usefulness of the response depend on how we see the discipline of marketing — is it a management technology, a societal provisioning system, the study of seller and buyer
* E-mail address: [email protected].
decision processes in increasingly complex contexts, or … or, should it first of all be thought of as a discipline within the social sciences? Much depends on the way we think of our discipline. As Helge Loëbler pointed out in his commentary, marketing knowledge should not only support marketers and managers it also should support customers and citizens in general. The possibility, even hope, that marketing may encompass much more than management, is not new. In the Parlin Memorial Lecture given to the American Marketing Association in 1957, Peter Drucker (1958: p252) noted that Charles Coolidge Parlin “contributed as a Founding Father toward the development of marketing as a social discipline,” helping us to “understand marketing as a dynamic process of society through which business enterprise is integrated productively with society’s purpose and human values.” Drucker noted that “marketing is thus the process through which economy is integrated into society to serve human needs.” In the 1965 Fall Conference celebrating the Golden Anniversary of the AMA, where the theme was “Marketing and Economic Development,” the cochair of the conference, Thomas Staudt (1965: p4), noted that the purpose was to “more sharply perceive marketing’s ultimate purpose and capacity to serve the constituent society.” He went on to observe (p5) that “the matter of the economic growth rate that can be sustained by a market system under alternative programs and policies is of equal significance and relevance to both the developed and developing nations and links us together in a common band of scholarship.” Reavis Cox (1965) in the same conference called for “thorough and comprehensive comparisons of domestic marketing systems” (p146), drawing on what he hoped might be universals, “generalizations about marketing that can be applied to any society of which we have any knowledge.” Charles Slater, a keynote speaker, in keeping with the call by Reavis Cox, cited the Latin American Food Marketing Study then under way at Michigan State University as intending to establish the relationship between marketing efficiency
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ausmj.2016.08.003 1441-3582/© 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy.
Please cite this article in press as: Roger Layton, Australasian Marketing Journal (2016), doi: 10.1016/j.ausmj.2016.08.003
ARTICLE IN PRESS R. Layton / Australasian Marketing Journal ■■ (2016) ■■–■■
2
and economic development. A little later, in 1968, Malcolm McNair, a leading professor in the Harvard Business School, defined marketing as “the creation and delivery of a standard of living.” This, however, was about as far as this initial effort in reframing and widening marketing thought was able to go. The dynamism and growing complexity of the social, economic and technological environments faced in those years by American managers, and by those in many developed countries, meant that marketing scholarship had to focus on identifying, developing and teaching the skills that management urgently needed. The third era in marketing thought identified by Wilkie and Moore (2003), featuring an overt commitment to marketing-as-management, and explicit reliance on the behavioural and quantitative sciences, was about to begin.
2. The narrowing of marketing scholarship While managerial issues dominated marketing scholarship over the next 50 years, wider issues were not completely ignored. In part this was due to social concerns about the impacts of marketing decisions. These could be seen in Ralph Nader-inspired consumerism, in issues of deceptive advertising, in product safety worries, and in greater legislative interest in framing policy initiatives ranging from enhancing competition in markets to resolving everyday consumer issues. In part these wider concerns were evident in the growth of two sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, streams of thought which helped to keep alive Parlin’s dream of marketing as a social discipline. The first of these two streams was the emergence of distinct, often interdependent, schools of thought separate from but sometimes drawing on the mainstream of managerial marketing scholarship (Layton and Grossbart, 2006; Wilkie and Moore, 2006). These emerging schools included macromarketing, quality of life studies, consumer culture theory, marketing and development theory, social marketing, historical research in marketing, and the study of ethical choice and distributive justice in marketing systems. The second stream of thought emerged from scholarship in adjacent social sciences that bore directly on trade or exchange related phenomena especially in areas such as anthropology, sociology, history, economics and psychology that touched on issues that might otherwise have been seen as the domain of marketing. Both streams had the effect of reshaping and sometimes tightening the boundaries of marketing (Layton, 2016). This trend was strengthened by the growth of cognate managerial specializations in areas such as organizational design, corporate strategy, new technologies in information management, developments in media networks and communication strategies, together with overlaps in legal studies (including for example franchising systems), financial markets and systems, and the growth of wide ranging studies in corporate responsibility. The net effect overall has been a distinct narrowing of the field of marketing studies with serious implications for both research and teaching.
3. Redefining or renaming marketing? The possibility of renaming marketing may well be an option. This was canvassed by several participants in the Special Session, with Cliff Shultz noting that marketing was, to most observers, simply about “sellin’ stuff.” One possibility raised by a commentator some years ago was agorology (Mittelstaedt et al., 2006); another suggested marketology, and others have proposed market studies. The problem is real, but from my point of view while the first suggestion has for me a distinct appeal reaching back as it does into history, it may lack impact in a contemporary world; the second is somewhat forced, and the third perhaps may be too general. Time will tell!
The redefining of marketing could however proceed, albeit slowly. As Pia Polsa noted, it has for some years been under way in the American Marketing Association with a gradual shift from business activities to a wider set of activities, institutions and processes, and from customers to society at large. While helpful, this is still at odds with the views held by scholars in most of the emerging areas of marketing. In this wider context, what should a workable definition of marketing permit, directly or indirectly? I suggest that it must be inclusive — linking in depth research in many fragmented fields with each other and with marketing as a whole. Coverage must include voluntary, value-based exchange wherever and whenever it occurs — from hunter gatherer communities to high tech cities, from local networks to national and international market systems, from ancient history to contemporary (and possibly) future markets. And it must allow consideration of system wide dynamics, including generalized evolution in time and space from small beginnings to large scale networks, where equilibrium is seen as special case; inequality in endowments as well as inequality in outcomes is taken as givens; consider blends of self-interest, mutuality and altruism as underlying drivers; bring politics, power and influence into focus; accept dynamic uncertainty; and explore values, ethics, fairness and quality of life at micro, meso and macro levels in widely varying exchange settings. My sense is that there is a definition meeting these requirements implicit in the detail of each of the emerging fields of marketing thought and in the pushing of boundaries between marketing and adjacent social disciplines. It could be something along these lines: Marketing is the study of the behaviors, practices and structures that form, grow and adapt in human communities as individuals, households, groups and entities engage in voluntary, generalised value based market exchange within and between communities. This seems to include much of the work done in the wideranging emerging fields of marketing; from meaning-making in consumer culture theory to the evolution of marketing systems at all levels from micro to macro; quality of life is implicit in value based outcomes; ethics (or the lack thereof) is implicit in the behaviours, practices and structures that form, grow and adapt over time; the resulting structures or marketing systems may be markets in vice as well as markets in virtue; social marketing is evident in generalized value based exchange where both economic and social values are central, and exchange is not just a product of self-interest, but joins self-interest with mutuality and altruism; and, of central importance, the management, both positive and normative, of groups, networks and corporate entities, together with customers, corporate and consumer, is included in the behaviours, practices and structures that generate the key elements of marketing systems and thus of markets. But does the definition, or something along these lines, work for links to adjacent disciplines? The key here is that it identifies a specific, limited set of social phenomena as the subject matter of marketing, phenomena that while of interest to many social sciences are not central to any. As Layton (2016) pointed out, archaeologists are interested in exploring the everyday life of communities and cultures from long ago — and might both contribute to and benefit from a reformed view of marketing. Anthropologists, who have studied in detail human communities in very different cultural and economic settings have begun to take a deeper interest in market exchange, sometimes thought of as mundane, but emerging as important in shaping the evolution of the marketing systems that dominate everyday life. What is exchanged becomes of importance, and it is here that the idea of mutuality in exchange, where it is not just self-interest at work, but a desire for human interaction where ideas flow, behaviours are shaped and
Please cite this article in press as: Roger Layton, Australasian Marketing Journal (2016), doi: 10.1016/j.ausmj.2016.08.003
ARTICLE IN PRESS R. Layton / Australasian Marketing Journal ■■ (2016) ■■–■■
3
social practices evolve. Historians are becoming increasingly interested in the ways that networks of exchange develop and the roles such networks play in shaping the growth of religions, states and empires. Sociologists and psychologists have always been close to marketing scholars, contributing for example insights into choice behaviours, the workings of trust, power and influence, understandings of the reach and dynamics of social networks, the day to day mechanisms of social exchange, and much else. It is economics and economists however that have contributed much to marketing, including a deeper understanding of the workings (and limitations) of self-interest, the evolution and impacts of institutions, the formation and growth of new markets, the simulation of evolving markets using agent based modelling, and the econometrics essential in gaining insights into complex social systems; and it is in the interchange of economic and marketing scholars that the insights needed to many of the issues raised above might be formed. I should also mention the new worlds of complexity science and the older worlds of ecology, as both are central to understanding the development and possible shaping of the social systems implicit in the president’s address. At issue here, as Michaela and Michael have pointed out, is “what can we contribute to the study of these phenomena?” As a number of commentators have pointed out, borrowing from adjacent disciplines is not without risk and concern. Bob Mittelstaedt pointed out that sometimes the concepts that marketing scholars have appropriated have moved on significantly in the original discipline, and that we need to be aware of these and similar concerns. Stan Shapiro has pointed to the debates occurring in many social sciences that go to the fundamentals of scientific enquiry into social systems. We need to be alive to these concerns, but I suspect that if we are to contribute to a meaningful debate on the complex social issues faced by human communities, we must help manage the gaps between disciplines to the advantage of all.
themselves in the dramatic reshaping of higher education that is looming in many parts of the world. An important difficulty faced by scholars interested in the wider view of marketing suggested here is that of getting published in the journals that matter in academic promotion. One possibility that would also bring attention to publications (books, articles, presentations…) that would otherwise escape notice might be to establish an email publication appearing perhaps twice yearly listing the top 10 books and papers wherever published in the last three years or so that are seen by a distinguished board or group of scholars to contribute significant insights to a wider understanding of marketing. This might be the kind of incremental change needed to set things moving in the right direction. I am sure there are many better suggestions! My second proviso stems from a growing feeling that academia is facing disruptive change in the relatively near future. The impacts of digital technology on teaching and research, the introduction of massive online courses that attract thousands of students, the rethinking of teaching space, the need to reshape academic administration to reflect new funding and research priorities (often associated with the kinds of social issues I noted earlier), and the changing politics of higher education where, for example, priorities shift between vocational and higher education, all point to opportunities to reshape business schools and faculties to reflect shifting discipline frontiers. There may be opportunity in all these for marketing to redefine its future. To conclude, I would like to thank my colleagues from many parts of the world for their willingness to help in exploring these issues, and, in particular, I would like to thank Roger Marshall, Michaela and Michael, the Australasian Marketing Journal and the Macromarketing Society for making it all happen.
4. Should marketing be thought of as a social science?
Cox, R., 1965. The search for universals in comparative studies of domestic marketing systems. In: Bennett, P.D. (Ed.), Marketing and Development, Proceedings, Fall Conference. American Marketing Association, Chicago. Drucker, P.F., 1958. Marketing and economic development. J. Marketing 22 (January), 251–259. Layton, R.A., 2016. There is more to marketing than you might have thought! AMJ 24 (1), 2–7. Layton, R.A., Grossbart, S., 2006. Macromarketing: past, present and possible future. J. Macromarketing 26 (2), 193–213. McNair, M.P., 1968. Marketing and the social challenge of our time. In: Cox, K., Enis, B.M. (Eds.), A New Measure of Responsibility for Marketing. American Marketing Association, Chicago. Mittelstaedt, J.D., Kilbourne, W.F., Mittelstaedt, R.A., 2006. J. Macromarketing 26 (2), 131–142. Staudt, T.A., 1965. Opening assembly remarks 50th anniversary AMA symposium. In: Bennett, P.D. (Ed.), Marketing and Development, Proceedings, Fall Conference. American Marketing Association, Chicago. Wilkie, W.L., Moore, E.S., 2003. Scholarly research in marketing: exploring the “4 Eras” of thought development. J. Public Policy Mark. 22 (Fall), 116–146. Wilkie, W.L., Moore, E.S., 2006. Macromarketing as a pillar of marketing thought. J. Macromarketing 26 (2), 224–232.
As I reflect on the comments made by participants in the Special Session and later in this issue of the AMJ it seems to me that it is not for us to assert marketing is or should be regarded as a social science — it must be something we earn through action. My feeling is that opening the doors to a wider understanding and acceptance of marketing amongst marketing scholars is of critical importance if we are to contribute to social debates in ways that matter. Perhaps the definition I have suggested, or something like it, is the way forward. This, however, is much easier said than done. Should change be incremental as Stan Shapiro has suggested? The answer is certainly “Yes”, but with two provisos — the first is that we do need to be seen to act in a way that attracts attention, and the second is that we should be ready to seize any opportunities that might present
References
Please cite this article in press as: Roger Layton, Australasian Marketing Journal (2016), doi: 10.1016/j.ausmj.2016.08.003