ABSTRACT
In their analysis of the historical interplay of commercial mythmaking and free-market capitalism, in which new market ideologies are launched to counter crises of faith provoked by critical activists, Giesler and Veresiu (2012a,b) draw upon Foucault's (1978) concept of governmentality to trace the evolution of society's recent relationship to the market: protecting the state from the market in the seventeenth century yielded to protecting the market from the state in the eighteenth century, which in turn yielded to a triumphal hybridizing of the market in search of its ideal form in the twentieth century. The progression moves from a governing the market through a governing through the market to a governing for the market (Giesler and Veresiu 2012b: 1). Rather than anticipate the next activist response to be precipitated by the current crisis of faith in market triumphalism, we propose a provocation straight from the heart of academic marketing thought leadership itself, which builds upon the critical scholarship of recent years. Think of it as a governing beyond the market phase. In this volume, we ask what marketing can do to help harness the market to work in consort with other social institutions to realize the common good.
