ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a discussion of a few basic concepts and views, such as marketing, marketing history, periodization of marketing history and modern marketing. It also provides a clarification of the relationship between entrepreneurship, marketing management and its thought, followed by a general overview of the history of marketing literature before the Second World War in the USA in order to identify the historical position of managerial literature. It is well known that there existed three classical approaches or schools from the early twentieth century to the Second World War; that is, the commodity, the institutional and the functional schools of marketing, as classified by C. S. Duncan. The institutional approach 'leads to a consideration of the various types of middlemen or agencies engaged in the marketing of goods and services' in order to identify what types of middlemen existed, what types of commodities they handled and how they operated. The chapter also presents an outline of this book.
