ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the foundation myths of marketing as a discipline and as a profession, investigating how marketing sees itself. It argues that these foundation myths function rhetorically as persuasive narratives to define the scope and definition of marketing often in an oppositional manner. The chapter starts by examining the way that early marketing academics valorised the discipline’s apparent roots in economic theory and then goes on to discuss the ways in which debates over the discipline’s status as a science have affected marketing’s development, particularly its relationship to issues of persuasive communication. Central to this examination is a consideration of the way that marketing has sought to define itself as a science and the sometimes quite vociferous debates that have flared up around this issue, particularly between those promoting a ‘relativistic’ interpretation of marketing truth and those supporting a far more empirical, ‘realist’ one. This leads directly on to a discussion of the centrality of control in any consideration of marketing practice and theory. The description of marketers as ‘middle men’, which is common in the early literature, is examined in connection with the discipline’s relationship to the concept of control. The chapter argues that marketing has an ambivalent relationship with the idea of control, despite its obvious centrality to marketing practice.
