Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
An important contribution to the growing literature on critical marketing, this book helps readers to connect the previously disconnected intellectual approaches to marketing.
The authors provide a critical reading of marketing discourse - from its first formulations in the beginning of the twentieth century, via its maturity in the marketing management era, to its present formulation in the service management literature.
Using original analysis, this provocative (re-)writing of the history of marketing, is an invaluable tool for those researching, teaching and studying in the areas of marketing theory, history of marketing and marketing and culture.