ABSTRACT
Hitherto [wo]men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be.
Marx and Engels (1985)
To problematize the status of knowledge claims in marketing, it is argued that an ‘interesting’ (Davis, 1971) critical theory of marketing will assert the provisional and interested nature of such claims. In seeking to reveal the power relations embedded in the operations of such claims, critical marketing practice will unmask the subtle work of conventions that frame the conduct of research and teaching practice. The cornerstone of this argument is that institutions of marketing instigate regularities of conduct and experience that come to constitute its subjects: this can be taken as a form of oppression that produces docile subjects which are little more than the fictive inventions of competing
interests within the marketing academy. In critical management circles this is the ‘spin’ typically put on what is termed ‘marketing’. However, in this chapter we are seeking to open up disciplinary space in a positive manner, without the unhelpful declamation of ambitious critterati. In our view the point of importing critical theory into marketing is to foster sceptical reflexivity within our theorizing. Of course, raising questions about entrapment within dominant paradigms and other totalizing systems that function as interpretation is fair game for an academic discipline. And if it stimulates informed debate, we welcome it, although debate has been part of the discipline’s academic culture as long as we have been working in it: Can anyone remember the heated academic debates in the early 1980s about the early decision-support system that was known as the growth-share matric? So, although emancipation from the oppressive structures and strictures that bind scholars to institutionalized logics and norms may be the declared goal of the critical project, we suggest that the academic power games being played are strategic, interested, and elitist, masking claims to disciplinary territory and prestige. Clearly then, notions of emancipation are not only situated and utopian in character, but also undermined by the politics of representation that contain and enfold them.
