Ideas take ten years to migrate from the edge to the centre of academic disciplines. Postmodernism is no exception. The concerns and crises that many postmodern marketers were predicting in the mid-1990s are now exercising the leading lights of marketing scholarship. This paper proffers a potted...

Innovations in retailing are characterised by, first, a hostile reaction from established organisations and, second, by a distinctive pattern of evolution. This article presents an integrated theory of retail change which is used to describe the development of the retail warehouse, one of the...

Samuel Beckett, the peerless Irish playwright, is widely regarded as the epitome of art for art's sake aestheticism. He hated salesmanship of any kind, famously describing it as “mercantile gehenna.” Yet, despite his anti-business reputation, Samuel Beckett is a perfect role model for our...

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...

Purpose – The literary world is an elitist enclave, where anti-marketing rhetoric is regularly encountered. This paper aims to show that the book trade has always been hard-nosed and commercially driven. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is less a review of the literature, or a...

Harry Potter is one of the most amazing consumer crazes of recent years (Blake 2002). So much so, that there can't be a single person anywhere who hasn't heard of 'the boy who lived' and the best-selling books that bear his name (Rowling 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2003). To date, five books in the...

These days, every self-respecting travel writer feels obligated to serve a tour of duty in Ireland (Belfrage 1988; McCrum 1999; O ’R ourke 1989; Theroux 1985). This Irish literary pilgrimage has become so jaded that recently one inspired scribbler sought to rejuvenate the genre by hitchhiking Around...

Few cities in the UK lack an ‘authentic’ Irish bar, be it O’Neill’s, Scruffy Murphy’s or Shifty O’Shea’s. Theme pubs, like theme parks, theme hotels and theme restaurants, are very big business. Yet the marketing academy seems somewhat reluctant to investigate such establishments,...

By employing a research approach, known as subjective personal introspection - the critical "I" four co-researchers wrote extensive autobiographical essays on their responses to an advertisement for Caffrey's Irish Ale. By delving in the shamelessly subjective this paper draws out the main...

Much has been written about Service-Dominant Logic, Vargo and Lusch’s vaunted contention that service isn’t an add-on to goods but goods are tangible reminders of service. Most of these writings are conceptual rather than empirical, however. This paper adds an empirical dimension to SDL by...