Double, Double Toil and Trouble : On the Equivocal Magic of Marketing

Fifty years after the Ford report set business schools on the road to Big Science, the futility of that quest is becoming increasingly apparent. Management science is being blamed for the ills that are befalling the global economy. Although many academics maintain that the financial apocalypse is attributable to a "few bad apples," the principles that underpin practitioners' unethical behaviours must bear some responsibility. This paper argues that our scholarly shortcomings will not be overcome by "better" science but by abandoning Big Science for a worldview that is much closer to what managers actually do on a day-to-day basis. That worldview is essentially magical, ten key elements of which are outlined