Relevance,responsibility, critical performativity,testimony and positive marketing: contributing to marketing theory,thought and practice

In this commentary, I chart recent changes at the Journal of Marketing Management (JMM). These include the introduction of a senior editorial board, a revised main editorial board and a modified team of associate editors. The new deputy editor is welcomed. The exemplary performance of the JMM in scholarly league-tables is registered. From this, a case is made for the pluralisation of the concepts of relevance and impact. In doing so, the emergent literature on critical performativity is unpacked. I highlight a missed opportunity in this material, namely, the potential for academics to act as critical commentators on industry practice in the courtroom. Developing the ideas associated with critical performativity leads to the scrutiny of new concepts in marketing. One of importance is positive marketing. This regressive manoeuver is critiqued; as is macromarketing narcissism. Following Dunne et al., I make a plea for more responsible academic practice. Developing logically from these ideas, a number of new potential avenues for contributing to the JMM are sketched. These include special sections and research notes among others.     

THE HEALTHCARE VOUCHER: EMERGENCE,FORMATION AND DISSEMINATION

Market‐inspired healthcare reforms have been introduced in Sweden: Freedom of Choice in Healthcare in 1989 and the National Healthcare Guarantee in 2005. After the general election 2006 the idea of the Healthcare Voucher has followed. Built on a theoretical framework composed of Foucault's concept of 'discursive formation' supported by Butler's concept of the ‘performativity of discourse’ the purpose is to analyse the emergence, formation and dissemination of this idea into healthcare in Sweden. The Voucher is disseminated in a form reminiscent of a chain linking a series of texts, referring to each other and building on each other's formulations strengthening each other's messages. It circulates under designations such as healthcare voucher and money and seems to be disseminated by being combined with 'freedom of choice' forming the theme customer choice. The Healthcare Voucher then becomes a means of being able to realise an idea of a political nature, building markets in healthcare. The paper offers a way of analysing how ideas influence the policy agenda, in particular for the voucher/s. Distinctions could be made between the voucher idea and 'money following the patient' in quasi markets. A critical issue in introducing choice and competition, not explored here, is the issue of ‘cream skimming’.     

Feminism’s fourth wave: a research agenda for marketing and consumer research

Abstract

Three waves of feminism each reveal a very different relationship with marketing. This commentary considers these relationships in the light of what is now frequently being hailed as the fourth wave, a resurgence of feminism that is driven by younger women who harness the power of the Internet and social media to challenge gender inequity. The commentary looks at what distinguishes the fourth wave from its predecessors and highlights key areas in marketing and consumer research where feminist perspectives are sorely required.     

The ‘performativity thesis’ and its critics: Towards a relational ontology of management accounting

This paper explores accounting's mediating role in bringing theoretical statements from economics into life. It addresses the so-called performativity thesis that claims that economic theory does not just observe and explain a reality, but rather shapes, formats and performs reality. Accounting mediates in that process by creating cognitive boundaries that embed societal practices in economic theory. However, the performativity thesis is not without criticisms. Its main criticisms concern a lack of proof of the thesis; an overestimation of the power of economics to extend beyond the virtual; and a lack of a critical stance. In order to bring more nuance in the discussion on the performativity thesis the paper reflects on evidence from the field of accounting. The review of accounting studies reveals how accounting, to different degrees, is implicated in strategic and operational activities in markets and organisations and how it is a performative mechanism of economisation. Moreover, in order to accentuate the ‘good’ in society and to challenge the ‘bad’, the paper suggests a further development of (critical) management accounting research into the performativity of both economics and other social theories. A relational ontology of management accounting that is in politics and that is sensitive to ‘unlocalisable’ virtual powers of social-historical formations of management accounting may be developed.     

Political markets? Politics and economics in the emergence of markets for biodiversity offsets

This paper analyses the relationship between politics and performativity of economics in the emergence of markets for biodiversity offsets. While the role of economics in constructing markets has been demonstrated by sociology and social studies of science, it has also become apparent that politics plays an important role in the material outcome of economic experiments. Two case studies of the creation of markets for biodiversity offsets are analysed, in the United States and England. The findings suggest that the creation of both markets is rooted in the language, concepts and models of economics. Politics, on the other hand, functions as a mediator of the material expression of those models. Through this mediation effect, similar economic models are performed differently, resulting in a variety of markets. This suggests that the material outcomes of processes of market creation are not defined at the outset, but can be influenced by political processes.     

Engaging the audience through videography as performance

ABSTRACT

The audience is an important part of videography, but its role tends to be seen as passive and unengaged. The audience’s experience is often guided in videography, with intended reaction made clear. Yet such an approach to the audience does not make use of the possibilities of videography for inciting active interaction and incorporating multiple interpretations. Previous research has suggested that videography has potential for interventional influence on audiences by taking on the performative turn in research. Developing more deeply the notions of performance and performativity in the context of videography, this paper proposes that one way to activate audiences, interact directly with them and engage them in meaning-making is to approach videography as performance. To provide practical suggestions for creating such performance, the paper contextualises videography as a recording medium, thus establishing its ontological position and ties to other media.     

Lessons from the field: reflecting on a tourism research journey around the ‘celtic’ periphery

The challenge within the tourism academy to acknowledge the situated nature of knowledge within the research process is intensifying. Drawing on a multidisciplinary body of reflexive narratives and recent work in tourism that acknowledges the personal influences that construct knowledges, this paper embraces this challenge by offering an autobiographic narration of field work in Ireland, Scotland and Cornwall. Food tourism is employed as a conceptual vehicle to pursue a more culturally focused, critical tourism investigation, thereby contributing to work that extends tourism research beyond the sphere of management and business. Drawing on research involving in-depth interviews with (food) tourists and participant observation, it is suggested that tourism knowledge is constructed at the micro-level, directly shaped by seemingly insignificant or overlooked moments. The paper illustrates how personal aspects of field work (gender, age, ethnicity, personal insecurity, loneliness and physical demands), combined with overcoming more practical issues (weather and transport logistics), should inform the contextual foundations of any empirical research; it from these moments where tourism knowledge is truly cultivated. Underpinned by qualitative methodological literature within a framework of critical realism, it urges others to embark upon a similar reflexive journey in order to develop tourism research into a robust sphere of academic enquiry.     

Seeing the market: performative sensemaking and the case of advertising agencies and their clients

ABSTRACT

How do market intermediaries help other market actors see the market and their opportunities for action within it? This article introduces a theoretical framework of performative sensemaking to explore this question using the case of advertising agencies and their clients. Drawing on 12 months of participant observation and 81 interviews conducted across four general market American advertising agencies, the article illustrates how advertising practitioners provide their clients with visions of what the market is and what opportunities for action lie within it, developing advertising campaigns to match that vision. These performed accounts of the market are dynamically negotiated and socially embedded, reflecting the identities of the clients, their target audiences, and the intermediaries themselves. Because intermediaries dramaturgically perform these interpretations of the market for their client in micro-level interactions, they must also deal with contestation and negotiation over their visions of the market.     

Tourism as public culture: Horne's ideological commentary on the legerdemain of tourism

In 1992 Donald Horne–respected Australian author of The Lucky Country, The Great Museum… and The Public Culture…–produced an entertaining but enlightening work (The Intelligent Tourist) on the role and function of tourism as the modern form of secular pilgrimage. In this text, Horne perceptively explored tourism as public culture –the fashions by which governments and interested parties capture national capitals, towns, villages, museums, art galleries, ancient temples, monuments, festivals and other interpreted performances in order to project the celebrated narratives and/or the ordinary vistas of a given people, its places, and its pasts. In 1994, King reviewed Horne's examination of the makebelieve of public culture in tourism, but appears to have overlooked much of the subtle insight with which Horne examined the objectifications and inspected the commodifications of contemporary tourism, and the exteriority of various tourism presentations. Horne's powerful scrutiny of intelligence-making in the articulations of tourism warrants fuller critique; this current paper therefore recrystallises Horne's work to highlight not only the skilled legerdemain of tourism practitioners in manufacturing preferred versions of public culture, but also the rich and acerbic insight that Horne himself brings to analyses of the ideological ‘power’ of invented presentation in tourism. Thereby, the paper attempts to distill a number of large issues on evocative material symbolism that Horne insists are central to the normalisations at work today in the projected public culture of post-modern ‘nationalist’ tourism, where that representation of tourism serves as a coding machine in the interests of certain or various priviliged groups.Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.