Critical Marketing : Issues in Contemporary Marketing

Focusing on a new and developing field, this text provides an overview of the development of marketing thought and the emergence of critical marketing. It covers a range of topics important to a critical marketing or contemporary issues in marketing course, including a number of topics (e.g. postcolonialism and marketing) previously not examined in detail in marketing.

This intellectual bulldozer of a book attacks the all too prevalent mindset that views marketing as essentially a managerial function best studied from a logical positivist perspective. In its place the editors champion a far broader view of marketing’s complex role in today’s world, a view that only tools and insights from historical analysis and critical thought, in all its many forms, can provide. Students and graduates of marketing programs that all too often provide an unduly and unjustifiably restricted view of what’s intellectually good, true, and beautiful should find this book a truly “mind blowing” learning experience.

Stanley J. Shapiro, Professor of Marketing (Emeritus), Simon Fraser University

Critical Marketing: Issues in Contemporary Marketing is an urgently needed and field-leading contribution to this growing area. Key authors offer detailed, scholarly and historically framed perspectives on the many dimensions and traditions of critical scholarship in marketing. The Editors provide authoritative analytical comment in a text which not only sums up the field but advances it. This book is essential reading for the serious Marketing scholar.

Professor Chris Hackley, Royal Holloway University of London.

Marketing is central to our everyday lives. As an academic subject its popularity has been steadily growing for the last thirty years. In this space of time, it has become increasingly fashionable to gesture to the uncritical, managerialist focus of the discipline. By contrast, this book makes the case that marketing has actually been critical in the sense of a Frankfurt School version of ‘unmasking critique’ for most of its history. The key concern underwriting this collection is to rethink the way that we understand the development of marketing theory and practice, as it took place in the past and the directions that we would like it to move in the future. The contents critically interrogate the history of marketing and consumer research, highlighting the elision of productive avenues for research and practice in relation to the biological basis for consumer behaviour and the forgotten dimensions of the cognitive revolution. It also includes chapters which explicitly connect marketing activities to the society in which they take place.

The topics examined include:

• Sustainable marketing
• Anti-globalisation challenges to marketing
• Ecofeminism
• Post colonialism and marketing practice
• The interconnection of cultural studies and Consumer research