Marketing academics have recently been exhorted to embrace postmodernism, the so‐called “new perspective on life and the human condition that is sweeping across the globe”. Using postmodernism′s own tools of playfulness, paradox and irreverence – in the shape of the multiplex cinema as...

There has been considerable recent discussion about the relevance of critical theory to management discourse and its implications for the education of managers. Within this debate, marketing, and by implication, marketing academics, have been extensively criticised by those outside the...

An introduction to the special issue “A taste of paradise”. Discusses the various representations of paradise over time and asserts that these have always reflected the society that produced them. Stresses that marketing is unavoidably implicated in our perceptions of paradise. Refers to the...

Looks at the current state of marketing through the mediating eyes of Milton, Machiavelli, Monet and Mussorgsky. Mussorgsky’s emotional and relational music Pictures at an Exhibition is used as a interlinking inspirational pastiche of characters and events as we promenade and observe some of...

In 1864 two famous novelists: Erckmann and Chatrian co‐edited a fiction called L’Ami Fritz . Very quickly this work had a tremendous success. It was the story of a fellow named “Fritz Kobus” who was living in Alsace. He could be seen as the stereotype of how the “collective...

Edward Bellamy’s famous 1888 best‐seller Looking Backward imagined a paradisal world where social and economic problems of poverty, strife, class, and war were eliminated through a Utopian political economy based on socialist principles. What makes Bellamy’s thought compelling for...

The last decade has seen much soul‐searching within the Marketing Academy as it struggles to address what Brown has described as the discipline’s “mid‐life crisis”. Magee terms this tendency “metanoia” and observes that no less a work than “Dante’s Inferno begins with lines...

Postmodern conditions and re‐evaluations of marketing theory are prompting a re‐consideration of marketing strategies and methodologies. This paper is concerned with research issues arising from these changes and uses the case of retailing financial services as an illustration. Groups of...

Most conventional research methodologies both in consumer and business‐to‐business marketing are modernist in nature, but their applicability in an increasingly postmodern business setting is decaying. Postmodern conditions are particularly prevalent in the business‐to‐business arena...

A key concern in debates about local government structure has centred around the competing claims for democracy, usually seen to require small units based on recognised communities of interest, and those of administrative efficiency or the instrumental requirements of the centre, usually seen to...