Chapter 4: The academic discipline of Marketing
4.3 LCT analysis of the academic discipline of Marketing
4.3.5 Density
o 2008: “(Marketing is) the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large” (AMA, 2008, p.2).
These definitions reflect a progressive shift over the years away from considering Marketing solely from a narrow business perspective towards adopting a broader stakeholder and societal perspective. (The relevance of this for moral density will be outlined in Section 4.3.5).
Marketing at UKZN
Evidence of the rapid change that characterises Marketing is apparent at UKZN in the offering of Special Topics in Marketing, a module designed to allow for the inclusion of contemporary marketing issues and developments in the curriculum, as one of the required level-three undergraduate modules. Similar modules are also included in the postgraduate Marketing curriculum.
Management (Glenn, 2011). In the UK, growth in the Marketing academy has been “significant”
(Ferguson, 2008, p.10). O‟Brien and Deans point to a “noted and disproportionate increase in the number of students attracted to marketing” since the early 1980s and attribute this to the higher profile of the discipline (1995, p.51).
Unsurprisingly, therefore, student to staff ratios are generally high (Glenn, 2011). According to Maton (2005a), both massification and high student to staff ratios are reflective of higher material density (MaD+).
The breadth of the traditional Marketing curriculum also points to higher material density. In fact, Wellman (2010a) calls for substantial pruning of the traditional „overloaded‟ syllabus in order to ensure that “quality reigns over quantity” (p.130).
Marketing at UKZN
There were several references in the data to high student numbers and large class sizes, high student to staff ratios, and the large volume of content in the curriculum. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the student to staff ratio in the Faculty is twice the DoE norm for Business Management and Law (UKZN, 2009b).
…now you notice everyone’s doing Marketing (Kiara)
…it’s impossible with 250-plus (Kamini)
Erm…this year I’ve changed my study method [laughs]. All these years, ever since high school, when I study if there’s a lot of notes and…all I do is I sit with a whole lot of pages or books……and I rewrite everything. Continuously. I just write and write and write and write. And I highlight a lot. Um, I use, um, I use highlighters to separate points and I just…that’s how I learn; I just rewrite everything. This year I just can’t manage doing that – there’s just too much to write [in Marketing] (Amantha).
Such comments point to high material density (MaD+). Also, as noted by Maton (2005a), issues of quantity are often linked to those of quality and status, as is evident in the following quotes:
…you have so much of students because it’s the only thing people can get into, leaving school with little points… (Amantha)
…everybody finds it easy to get here (Kamini)
And we don’t have what we should have. The quality (Kamini)
…compared to an entire class of over 250…there’s probably only about maybe 50, or less, that’s actually okay. The majority is bad (Kamini).
Such issues will be discussed further in Chapter 5.
Moral density
The discipline in general
It is clear from the literature that Marketing is quite a divergent disciplinary community and that there are “a number of debates and contentions within the discipline” (Ferguson, 2008, p.21). In part, this may be because extensive theory borrowing from other disciplines has resulted in a
“plethora of competing academic theories” (Wellman, 2010a, p.121).
Although the managerial school is currently dominant in the discipline (Witkowski, 2010), this is by no means uncontested. The number of different schools of Marketing thought has over the years been claimed to be twelve (Sheth et al, 1988, in Lagrosen & Svensson, 2006), ten (Shaw &
Jones, 2005) and most recently fifteen (Lagrosen & Svennson, 2006), as reflected in Table 4.6.
Table 4.6: An updated framework of Marketing schools
Non-interactive Transactional Relational
Economic Commodity
Functional
Regional
Institutional
Functionalist
Managerial
Further research needed
Non- economic
Buyer behaviour
Activist
Macromarketing
Systems
Social exchange
Organisational dynamics
Services marketing
Industrial marketing
Relationship marketing Source: Lagrosen & Svensson, 2006, p.379
Perhaps in acknowledgement of the greater diversity of viewpoints in the discipline over the years, AMA definitions of marketing (see Section 4.3.4) show a progressively declining focus on a narrow managerial perspective over time in favour of broader stakeholder and societal perspectives. Similarly, the prevalent Western bias and specifically the “significant North American ethnocentricism evident within the discipline” (Kiel, 1998, p.25; Hemais, 2001; Easton, 2002) is also under challenge (see, for example, Burgess & Steenkamp, 2006).
Methodologically, the discipline is divided into „camps‟ (Bolton, 2005) which “often view one another as irrelevant or even adversarial” (MacInnis, in Bolton, 2005, p.15). As noted in Chapter 3, while quantitative research is prevalent, qualitative research is also represented, and there have been strong calls for the adoption of more qualitative approaches (see, for example, Tapp, 2004; O‟Driscoll, 2008).
It is thus not surprising that Marketing is characterised by a fragmentation of research interests (Wilkie & Moore, 2003; Holbrook, 2005). Like other business disciplines, there is also a lack of
consensus about what and how students ought to learn (Glenn, 2011), and whether education should be „about‟ or „for‟ business (Macfarlane, 1997a).
Indeed, “there is disagreement concerning even the basic focus of marketing” (O‟Shaughnessy &
Ryan, 1979, p. 154). Internal conflicts about whether Marketing should focus on discovery or application abound, leading to a science-technology dichotomy in the discipline (Rust, 2006).
“The marketing literature is only consistent in demonstrating the disagreement on the status of marketing as a science” (O‟Shaughnessy & Ryan, 1979, p. 156).
This lack of homogeneity of beliefs points to high moral density in Marketing (MoD+).
Marketing at UKZN
With regards to moral density in Marketing at UKZN, there was some indication of diversity of beliefs. The lecturers, who were asked to complete a curriculum self-assessment questionnaire during their interviews, gave common responses to only four of the twelve questions. There were differences of opinion on issues such as how they saw curriculum, knowledge, and their roles as lecturers (which will be discussed in Chapter 5). This is perhaps to be expected given their different backgrounds and experiences as both students and lecturers – for example, Kamini and Nisha had taught at the different universities that had merged to form UKZN and Michael was teaching at a university of technology. With regard to the students, Maxine and Amantha had both mentioned that Marketing gave them room to go beyond the prescribed material and to additionally draw on their personal perspectives and feelings.
However, in practice the Marketing curriculum at UKZN did not display much diversity.
We do very sophisticated, um, first world, um, American…Philip Kotler type Marketing most of the time (Michael)
…it is a bit sad…that our focus is only on, um, quantitative research (Kamini).
Several of the students (Nothando, Kiara, Ben, Maxine and Thuli) commented on the North American bias in their courses, which was largely due to the use of textbooks and associated teaching materials that were of American origin. The issue of cultural bias will be discussed in Chapter 5.
In light of the above, Marketing at UKZN can be described as displaying relatively low moral density (MoD-).
Differentiation
The interaction of material and moral density gives the degree of differentiation in the discipline.
With regard to the discipline in general, both material and moral density are high, indicating a high degree of diversity and thus a lack of coherence. Indeed, Hunt describes Marketing as “eclectic”
(2002, p.307). With regard to Marketing at UKZN, however, moral density is lower than that of the discipline in general.