Prof Pierre McDonagh

This systematic literature review enhances paradigmatic/metaphysic analyses by examining how value-based commitments, intellectual personae, and stances impact the diversity, relevance, and consideration of ethics in gender research published in the top-tier marketing journals over the past 30 years. Theoretical contributions: 1) explain how commitments to research values and practices constitute personae and particular stances towards research, 2) attribute value commitments to positivist/ quantitative as well as humanist/qualitative research, and 3) implicate stances that favor particular theories and procedures in the hierarchical development of gender research and its marginalization in our field. Recommendations elaborate the analytic, reflexive and administrative training and research activities that will foster and reward more relevant, accurate, and ethical research on gender in the marketing academy and in industry. This work is of interest to persons dealing with gender identities, communities, and social issues, those working for greater gender representation and participation in firms and civic organizations, and those concerned with leveraging better marketing research for a better world.

Abstract

What fuels capitalism and what stops it from collapsing? Does marketing communications support and sustain the economic and political status quo?

This book is not about describing the ways in which businesses can optimize the messages they put across or about adding to the marketing communicator’s toolkit. This book argues that marketing communications plays an increasingly important role in bolstering contemporary capitalism. Drawing on conceptualizations of the ‘market’ from political economy and sociology, it focusses on five logics that underpin and sustain the form of capitalism in which we live: the logic of competition, the logic of sustainability, the logic of individualism, the logic of objectivity, and the logic of distraction. It does this by exploring those arenas which are increasingly dominated by the communicative activities of business: sport, CSR, social media, statistics, and entertainment.

Bringing theories from marketing and consumer research, sociology, cultural studies, technology and media studies to bear on marketing communications, this book is necessary reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students and academics who wish to understand the broader role of marketing communications in the reproduction of contemporary capitalism.