ABSTRACT
Marketing is largely a positivistic and managerially prescriptive academic discipline. Knowledge production has been framed, at least since the 1960s, by a positivistic understanding of science and a managerialistic worldview. The emphasis has been on prescribing marketing practices to organizations and not on studying marketing as practice (see, for instance, Arndt 1985; Hollander 1986; Hunt 1976; Skålén et al. 2008). In an attempt to counterbalance the positivistic and managerial hegemony, critical perspectives were introduced into marketing toward the end of the 1980s (see, for instance, Arndt 1985; Fuat Fuat Firat et al. 1987; Murray and Ozanne 1991). In the middle of the 1990s, Alvesson and Willmott conducted an overview of critical research within the management disciplines, summarizing the status of critical research into marketing thus: ‘marketing is perhaps the sub discipline of management to which CT [Critical Theory] (and related intellectual traditions) can contribute most, and yet it is also in this specialism that the infl uence of critical analysis is weakest’ (Alvesson and Willmott 1996: 128). Most contemporary commentators seem to argue that critical marketing research has still not really kicked off.1 Although frameworks for pursuing critical research into marketing have been introduced (see, for instance, Arndt 1985; Brownlie et al. 1999; Burton 2001; Hackley 2009; Saren et al. 2007a; Skålén et al. 2006; 2008; Tadajewski and Brownlie 2008), and although a critical analysis of marketing texts and the discipline’s history has been conducted (see, for instance, Brownlie and Saren 1997; Hackley 2003; Marion 2006; Morgan 2003; Skålén et al. 2006; 2008; Skålén and Fougère 2007; Tadajewski 2006), few, if any, systematic empirical studies of marketing practice have been conducted from a critical perspective. In the words of Brownlie and Hewer (2007: 59): ‘It is now time to put critical aspirations into action’, which is something that I intend to do in this book.
