1) What is the status of sustainability marketing in the curriculum? This question highlights whether or not sustainability marketing is found in existing marketing curricula. This is interrogated in chapter three of the thesis relating to the marketing curriculum status survey.
2) What are stakeholder perspectives on curriculum transformation as it relates to sustainability marketing?
This question interrogates the various people involved in the design, teaching and assessment of marketing curriculum such as academics and heads of schools in universities, as well as marketing practitoners, former student practitioners and higher education specialists. These perspectives are evidenced in chapter four.
70 Therefore critical investigators enter into an investigation with their assumptions on the table, so no one is confused about the epistemological and political baggage they bring with them.
Critical theorists become detectives of new theoretical insights, searching for new and interconnected ways of understanding power and oppression and the ways they shape everyday life and human experience (Kincheloe & Mclaren, 2008).
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3) Why do stakeholders have such perspectives? This question aims to uncover how incompatible stances about sustainability in marketing can be debated, contested or harmonised. These debates and contestations appear in chapter five and chapter six of the thesis.
This research study has therefore used Kinchloe and Mclaren’s (2008) ‘ways to irritate’
dominant forms of power, to provide evocative and compelling insights. These ways included critical enlightenment; critical emancipation; the rejection of economic determinism; the critique of instrumental or technical rationality; the concept of immanence; a reconceptualised critical theory of power: hegemony; a reconceptualised critical theory of power: ideology and a reconceptualised critical theory of power: linguistic/discursive power. Each of these was considered in the context of the ontological, epistemological and methodological relevance to this study.
Critical enlightenment in the context of critical theory analyses competing power interests between groups and individuals in a society (Kincheloe & Mclaren, 2008). Within this context the academic discourse of marketing would favour the maintenance of existing marketing theory. This would be evidenced in the review of the existing marketing curriculum, which was encountered in the document analysis. Consequently, critical emancipation attempts to expose the forces that prevent individuals and groups from shaping decisions that crucially affect their lives and it afford them a greater degrees of autonomy and human agency (Kincheloe & Mclaren, 2008). The introduction of the sustainability-marketing concept within the case study analysis allowed for an alternate perspective to be presented.
This would bare testimony as to why the participants would feature as ‘Apologists’, ‘Social Marketers”’ or ‘Reconstructionists’.
The rejection of economic determinism where economic factors are not accepted as the dictate of all human existence (Kincheloe & Mclaren, 2008) was also interrogated in the case study analysis. In particular, the social value of marketing was considered within the framing of the
‘triple E’ concept of economy, ecology and (social) equity’.
The critique of instrumental or technical rationality is considered one of the most oppressive features of contemporary society where rationalist scholars are interested in method and efficiency and as researchers’ focused more on method and technique, countering logical empiricism (Kincheloe & Mclaren, 2008).
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The technical rationality of participants was interrogated and featured strongly in the case analysis as participants were asked to question their assumptions about the academic paradigms of marketing with specific reference to the nature, core concept, scope and primary responsibility of marketing.
The concept of immanence helps us get beyond egocentricism and ethnocentricism and work to build new forms of relationship with diverse peoples and to use of human wisdom to effect a better society (Kincheloe & Mclaren, 2008). Here, the case studies served to identify how the broad-based concept of sustainability could be filtered into a marketing curriculum to potentially effect such change.
A reconceptualised critical theory of power: Hegemony suggested that power is ambiguous and the constituent of human existence that works to shape the oppressive and productive nature of the human tradition (Kincheloe & Mclaren, 2008)71. These authors further asserted that all of us are hegemonised as our field of knowledge and understanding is structured by a limited exposure to competing definitions of the socio-political world. It is in this very context that the participants were asked to consider how or what part sustainability played in the context of marketing and the dominant social paradigm.
According to Kincheloe & Mclaren (2008), a reconceptualised critical theory of power:
ideology suggested that the formation of hegemony cannot be separated from the production of ideology, where ideological hegemony involves the cultural forms, the meanings, the rituals and the representations that produce consent to the status quo and an individual’s particular place within it72. This was particularly evident in the document analysis where the course outlines and institutional handbooks were consulted. A specific slant toward economic concepts of marketing theory was evidenced in the marketing curriculum, which lent support to the power of the dominant social paradigm in marketing theory.
71 There are the productive aspects of power such as the ability to empower. Gramsci’s notion of power occurs through social psychological attempts to win people’s consent to domination through cultural institutions such as the media, the schools, the family and the church.
72 Moves beyond to uncover coercive manipulative behaviour, identify that hegemonic ideology is a critical form of epistemological constructivism and is how people come to view their worlds (Kincheloe & Mclaren, 2008).
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The other consideration in relation to critical theory in marketing related to a reconceptualised critical theory of power: linguistic/discursive power73. In an educational context, for example, legitimated discourses of power insidiously tell educators what books may be read by students, what instructional methods may be utilised and what belief systems and views of success may be taught (Kincheloe & Mclaren, 2008). The document analysis and the participant responses in the case studies alluded to the power of marketing discourses that supported the pursuance of the marketing concept. In fact, the case studies uncovered how participants viewed the marketing curriculum and what they thought was important to the marketing curriculum.
The discussion in this chapter thus far, has focused on outlining the epistemological orientation of this study and how the qualitative lens used negated the need to focus purely on a logical empiricist perspective to marketing research. This was done to justify the need to consider pluralistic approaches to research that resulted in the study being framed within a critical marketing research paradigm. In so doing, the critical research paradigm was further probed through the use of Kinchloe and Mclarens’s (2008) viewpoint of power in the critical research paradigm. This chapter will now focus on the specificities of the research design and methodology used in the data production process which occurred in two phases, each of which employed different research methodologies in obtaining data. Consequently, phase one of the research study will be discussed followed by phase two.