Marketing And Social Construction

Marketing is at the centre of the business education boom: a million or more people worldwide are studying the subject at any one time. Yet despite widespread discontent with the intellectual standards in marketing, very little has changed over the past thirty years. In this ground-breaking new work, Chris Hackley presents a social-constructionist critique of popular approaches to teaching, theorising and writing about marketing. Drawing on a wide range of up-to-date European and North American studies, Dr Hackley presents his argument on two levels. First, he argues that mainstream marketing's ideologically driven curriculum and research programmes, dominated by North American tradition, reproduce business school myths about the nature of practically relevant theory and the role of professional education in management fields. Second, he suggests a broadened theoretical scope and renewed critical agenda for research, theory and teaching in marketing. Intellectually rigorous yet comprehensible, this work will be of vital importance to all those interested in the future of teaching and research in business and management.

Presents a social-constructionist critique of popular approaches to teaching, theorising and writing about marketing. Drawing on a range of European and North American studies, this book suggests a broadened theoretical scope and renewed critical agenda for research, theory and teaching in marketing.

Placing the modernization of China in a historical context, Social Construction in Contemporary China provides a powerful argument that social construction is instrumental for the country's modernization process and a key factor in China’s national rejuvenation. A wide range of topics and issues related to social construction are covered, including people's livelihood and social undertakings, income distribution, urban and rural communities, community organizations, social management, social norms, reforms of social institutions and systems, social restructuring and the process of social construction. In addition to well-informed and insightful analyses of these subjects that draw on the country's historical experiences, contributors also provide policy suggestions on how to tackle problems and respond to challenges. Its breadth and depth make this volume a valuable addition to the growing body of literature on this important topic.

The social media and the proliferation of mobile and home electronic devices have led to dramatic changes in how consumers access cultural expressions (whether via purchase or sharing) and the way firms select, (re)produce and market cultural expressions. Technological innovation has driven changes that have profound implications for our society. The printing press converted manuscripts into tradeable goods and the gramophone did the same for musical performances. Both also introduced intermediaries into the market, namely, the publisher and the record label, who acquired sufficient power to influence governments and legislation regulating intellectual rights. In a similar way, the Internet and the digital technologies that ride on this highway have paved the way for yet another dramatic change. However, the balance of power has now shifted towards creators and consumers, who, as they socially construct the market for cultural expressions, are also reshaping legislative and economic aspects of the intellectual property regime. This book addresses questions of access to cultural expressions, the historical evolution of authors’ rights, the current Spanish intellectual property regime and the social construction of music markets. It also proposes a contextual theory regarding access to music and a social interpretation of music access patterns. It concludes with a discussion of the issues raised in the previous chapters, focusing particularly on the core issues of access to culture, incentives to creativity and the selection, (re)production and marketing of cultural expressions. The separation of the rights of creators and the rights of producers is suggested as a way to enhance incentives to creation while improving access to cultural expressions. This book will be of particular interest to social science researchers seeking interdisciplinary insights into the social construction of markets from the economics, management, marketing, law and sociology perspectives.

An anniversary edition of an influential book that introduced a groundbreaking approach to the study of science, technology, and society. This pioneering book, first published in 1987, launched the new field of social studies of technology. It introduced a method of inquiry—social construction of technology, or SCOT—that became a key part of the wider discipline of science and technology studies. The book helped the MIT Press shape its STS list and inspired the Inside Technology series. The thirteen essays in the book tell stories about such varied technologies as thirteenth-century galleys, eighteenth-century cooking stoves, and twentieth-century missile systems. Taken together, they affirm the fruitfulness of an approach to the study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions, and they demonstrate the illuminating effects of the integration of empirics and theory. The approaches in this volume—collectively called SCOT (after the volume's title) have since broadened their scope, and twenty-five years after the publication of this book, it is difficult to think of a technology that has not been studied from a SCOT perspective and impossible to think of a technology that cannot be studied that way.

Narration can be conceptualized as conveying two or more events (or an event with a situation) that are logically interrelated and take place over time and have a consistent topic. The concept includes every storytelling text. The advertisement is one of the text types that includes a story, and the phenomenon conceptualized as advertising narration has gained new dimensions with the widespread use of digital media. The Handbook of Research on Narrative Advertising is an essential reference source that investigates fundamental marketing concepts and addresses the new dimensions of advertising with the universal use of digital media. Featuring research on topics such as branding, mobile marketing, and consumer engagement, business professionals, copywriters, students, and practitioners will find this text useful in furthering their research exposure to evolutionary techniques in advertising.

Gender, Branding, and The Modern Music Industry combines interview data with music industry professionals with theoretical frameworks from sociology, mass communication, and marketing to explain and explore the gender differences female artists experience. This book provides a rare lens on the rigid packaging process that transforms female artists of various genres into female pop stars. Stars -- and the industry power brokers who make their fortunes -- have learned to prioritize sexual attractiveness over talent as they fight a crowded field for movie deals, magazine covers, and fashion lines, let alone record deals. This focus on the female pop star’s body as her core asset has resigned many women to being "short term brands," positioned to earn as much money as possible before burning out or aging ungracefully. This book, which includes interview data from music industry insiders, explores the sociological forces that drive women into these tired representations, and the ramifications on the greater social world. This book is for Sociology of Media and Sociology of Popular Culture courses.