Chapter 5: Marketing education at UKZN
5.2 Discourses
5.2.2 Relevance
5.2.2.2 Relevance to the business world – „theory to practice‟
unlike specific firms or organisations, do not require a privileged, cultural (westernised) upbringing for them to be understood, even though they will differ across cultures” (2006, p.293).
through…okay, much more learning, I think. Er, but it will count in our favour if you, you know, you do bring in these speakers and…or, you know, take us out to a company, corporate environment…and you know, then we see for ourselves exactly what’s going to happen. And it’ll equip us more so that, you know, when we do end up going there, we won’t…it won’t be like, okay, we just came out, we don’t know what’s happening and, you know, it’s like we’re really inexperienced. So that would help (Kiara).
These sentiments resonate with those of participants in other studies of Marketing education. In Davis et al‟s (2002) study, most graduates reported that their Marketing education had under- prepared them for the jobs they were occupying in terms of skills, but had over-prepared them in terms of knowledge. There seems to be more focus in Marketing curricula on the transmission of knowledge and less on skill development (Cunningham, in Kelley & Bridges, 2005; Stringfellow et al, 2006; Lincoln, 2010).
This may be related to the belief, referred to earlier, that Marketing should be viewed as an academic (not vocational) discipline and should consequently maintain greater separation from the world of practice (Rotfeld, 1996; Hunt, 2002; Holbrook, 2005; Wilkie, 2007; Wellman, 2010a).
Too close a relationship with practitioners carries the danger that “fundamentals may be abandoned in favour of fads” and that the independence that has been the hallmark of universities may be compromised (Tapp, 2004, p.583). Distance is needed so that academics can bring a different perspective to the world of managers, which can be the basis for “constructive criticism or recommendations for change” (House, 1975, p.332). According to Weick:
Practitioners who chide academics for their naiveté regarding the „real world‟
are sometimes people who want their real world to be treated as if it were the real world. That is not the academic's job. The academic's job is to understand how an idiosyncratic individual world comes to be seen as a universal world and how vested interests work to convey this definition of universality.
(2001, p.74, emphasis in original)
Such concerns and considerations may have contributed to Macfarlane (1998) finding very little proof to support the idea that lecturers in business disciplines are eager to shape curricula to meet employers‟ needs, as noted in the previous chapter.
There are certainly challenges associated with the „workplace preparation‟ view. As noted in Chapter 4, Marketing is a broad area of practice that encompasses several possible career paths in both business and non-business contexts. This raises the question of which workplace Marketing education should be preparing students for. Given the long-standing dominance of the managerial school in the discipline, as outlined in Chapter 4, Marketing courses around the world are generally taught from a marketing management perspective (Catterall et al, 2002; Hackley,
2003; Tadajewski & Brownlie, 2008; Witkowski, 2010) - as is indeed the case at UKZN. This is something that Michael found troubling:
I…I actually think we’re sometimes doing a lot of the students a disservice. We should be doing, um, co-operative marketing, co-operatives, agricultural marketing, um, basic stuff like that. We do very sophisticated, um, first world, um, American……Philip Kotler type marketing most of the time. And we…we...and our examples will come from that…and that’s what we do and actually…I mean, I see where a lot of our students get placed…a lot of our students go back to where they grew up in the…in the…in the rural areas and they get jobs in the local council, something like that. They should be learning about…what is a co-operative? How does a co-operative work? What role does the co- operative play in the marketing process? What is distribution? How does distribution work there?
Apart from the relevance of the curriculum to such students, this also raises questions about the differential social access that students may have to marketing management practice and how this may impact on their being able to take on the disciplinary Discourse. Ben, who attended a rural school, indicated that he had not even been aware that Marketing was a possible area of study until he arrived at university because, at his school, career guidance about commercial jobs had focused solely on Accounting. But even Bongani and Maxine, who had both attended ex-Model C schools, had relatives or acquaintances working in marketing and themselves had part-time jobs in promotions, did not have a very clear idea of what marketing management entailed.85
Um, at the end of it all I would like to, like know what marketers do on a day to day basis, or like a marketing director. What he sits and does… Like, um, when they get information, what do they do with it? How long does it take for it to get processed?
I’m…like, um, maybe we’re still going to get to that point in Marketing… Like, you know what I think? I think in Marketing we should have like a week, like where it’s work experience. Where we’re taken to a workplace for like a week and we like actually shadow a marketer or a marketing director, so you can get like a better understanding of what marketing is all about ‘cos you’d get a…You know, like right now we’re thinking marketing is all about advertising and promotions and…but we might find when we get to the workplace it’s not all about that (Bongani).
This is not surprising, as marketing management is not an entry-level marketing job and their part-time work would not have given these students insight into the world of a marketing manager. And because students may have no other frame of reference for what marketing management practice entails, a potential consequence may be greater reliance on the reproduction of knowledge from textbooks. Thus the ability of their Marketing courses to provide insight into marketing management practice takes on greater significance. One way of doing this
85 Model C schools were formerly white schools.
would be for lecturers to draw on their own experiences. During their interviews, the lecturers had constructed themselves as “not an educationist…I‟m a marketing person” (Michael), as “more business people rather than actually teachers” (Nisha) and as not “just an academic” but one with
“street smarts” (Kamini). However, only Michael had had any industry experience prior to becoming a lecturer. (And interestingly, even his classroom practice tended to be quite textbook- focused). But House warns that academics should not be “a mere image of a stereotype practicing manager” because this would mean that they have “nothing to offer either practicing managers or the students who are studying to join their ranks” (1975, p.332). Another option would be building practitioner input and involvement into the courses. That this does not already happen may partly be due to the high degree of positional and relational autonomy that the academic discipline of Marketing enjoys, as revealed through the LCT analysis in Chapter 4.
However, a baseline study of the attributes of South African graduates from the perspective of employers, undertaken by HESA and the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA), concluded that “(t)he boundary between the university and business needs to become more porous” (Griesel & Parker, 2009, p.24).
So while the importance of practical application is espoused by the lecturers, there does not appear to be very much value attached to this in the courses. One example of this mentioned earlier is the relatively low weighting given to the application-based assignments in the third-year courses. Another example was provided by Nothando, who was successfully running a small marketing firm but not performing well on the Marketing courses, as the following comments indicate:
Honestly, I think like to be a Marketing student it’s so different. I don’t know, because maybe I’m using my example. Sometimes you may not be good in the class, in the classroom, like theory wise, but you have a better understanding of marketing but you can’t put it on paper… ‘cos, I think, like ‘cos I think some people can get like good marks, like great marks, but put them on the actual field, they wouldn’t be able to…
But what I’m saying is, yes, maybe that person could have gotten their 90s or whatever using their textbook, maybe they were really good at remembering things, the textbook.
But maybe they [referring to a company that is a sought-after employer among Marketing students] could leave somebody else because they don’t have those good marks - but maybe they could do something really good.
Several factors emerged during the interviews as possible challenges to incorporating more practical application into the Marketing courses. Undergraduate class sizes were large and lecturers had sole responsibility for their classes (there were no tutors or teaching assistants). All contact sessions took the form of large-group lectures, in venues that were not always conducive to practical work. Additionally, in order to make assessment manageable, there were few tasks
set during the semester. (In their smaller Honours classes, however, the lecturers‟ teaching approaches were quite different and practical tasks were included more often). The undergraduate curriculum structure was felt to be problematic, in that there was not enough time and space available to accomplish everything that the lecturers would have liked to.86 This also led to a content focus.
…in the case of the syllabus as well, there’s certain things that you have to go through, and you have to cover, so as much as we like to have application… (Nisha)
…it would be difficult to actually imagine them getting an application perspective if they don’t understand the basics or the framework… (Nisha)
…how do you get 250 students in a LAN [room]? Um, unless a [lecture] venue is equipped with the necessary equipment… (Kamini). 87
It may be that the fundamental nature of business curricula does not facilitate a focus on practical application. “Because of the breadth of the required business curriculum, undergraduate business students take many introductory courses in which classes are larger and instruction focuses more on the lower levels (knowledge and comprehension) of the cognitive domain” (Ulrich, 2005, p.273). At UKZN, students majoring in Marketing are indeed required to take introductory modules in a variety of business (and other) disciplines, as shown in Table 4.3.
In any case, as Wellman asserts:
it would be naïve to expect that any higher education institution could deliver a truly competent graduate practitioner and instead we must reconcile ourselves to producing, at best, Dreyfus and Dreyfus‟s (1986 cit Hodkinson and Isslett 1995) novice or advanced beginner. If nothing else, the vital part played by experience and exposure to the “real-world” of practice would be near impossible to deliver and the ability of education to develop or change individuals‟ deep seated traits is questionable.
(2010a, p.126; see also Lincoln, 2010)
This view is in line with Barr and McNeilly‟s finding that many company recruiters believe that some skills are “unattainable in the classroom setting“, leading them to place more emphasis on work experience and extracurricular activities as employability indicators (2002, p.171).
Practitioners, too, often indicate that “non-formal and social learning practices had dominated their professional formation” (Fenton-O‟Creevy et al, 2006, p.6). Additionally, Mintzberg argues that the object of undergraduate business education is “to educate people, not to give them a lot
86 See Table 4.3 for the undergraduate Marketing curriculum structure. Issues related to this structure will be discussed in more detail later in the chapter, in Section 5.2.3.
87 Local Area Network. A LAN room is a teaching venue equipped with computing devices and services.
of functional business stuff” and that offering a vocational area of study such as Marketing to an 18-year-old student is a „travesty‟ (in Glenn, 2011, no page). Also, the heavy emphasis that is placed on application and practice gives rise to a false image of managers as “action oriented rather than thoughtful” whereas both action and reflection are crucial for success (Tapp, 2004, p.581). While Kiel asserts that the primary task of Marketing lecturers should be to teach students
“the tools and techniques of thinking within a marketing context” (1998, p.27), Ramocki contends that in addition to strategies for thinking, transfer strategies also need to be incorporated into Marketing pedagogy because “the ability to transfer marketing knowledge into various environments and situations is extremely important to our students” (2007, p. 11). Accordingly, the South African business community has called for graduates to have “some kind of extended exposure to the work place while at university” (Griesel & Parker, 2009, p.24).
The discourse around „workplace relevance‟ was very prevalent in the data at UKZN , which is not surprising as it relates to wider discourses about the relevance of university education to the achievement of the country‟s socio-economic goals, as noted in Chapter 4, especially in the context of high levels of unemployment. This discourse leads students to construct teaching practices as inappropriate and irrelevant to their future workplace needs and may contribute to some extent to their disengagement from such practices, as shown in the next section.