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.

In this conceptual guided tour of contemporary public administration, Jong S. Jun challenges the limitations of the discipline which, he argues, make it inadequate for understanding today's complex human phenomena. Drawing on examples and case studies from both Eastern and Western countries, he emphasizes critical and interpretive perspectives as a counterforce to the instrumental-technical rationality that reduces the field to structural and functionalist views of management. He also emphasizes the idea of democratic social construction to transcend the field's reliance on conventional pluralist politics. Jun stresses that public administrators and institutions must create opportunities for sharing and learning among organizational members and must facilitate interactive processes between public administrators and citizens so that the latter can voice their problems and opinions. The future role of public administrators will be to transcend the limitations of the management and governing of modern public administration and to explore ways of constructing socially meaningful alternatives through communicative action and the participation of citizens.

This latest book by one the world′s leading protagonists in the field will be welcomed not just by psychologists but by students, academics and professionals interested in social constructionism across a wide range of subjects. Social Construction in Context explores the potentials of social constructionist theory when placed in diverse intellectual and practical contexts. It demonstrates the achievements of social constructionism, and what it can now offer various fields of inquiry, both academic, professional and applied, given the proliferation of the theory across the social sciences and humanities. First order issues of concern within the academic world, objectivity, truth, power and ideology, are now being augmented by widespread developments in practice - therapeutic, pedagogical, organizational and political. This book looks closely at these developments and examines both the positive potentials and limitations of social constructionist theory when applied to a variety of domains. It has been written in an accessible and scholarly manner making it suitable for a wide-ranging readership.

"The impact of technology on society is clear and unmistakeable. The influence of society on technology is more subtle. The 13 essays in this book have been written by a diverse group of scholars united by a common interest in creating a new field - the sociology of technology. They draw on a wide array of case studies - from cooking stoves to missile systems, from 15th-century Portugal to today's Al labs - to outline an original research program based on a synthesis of ideas from the social studies of science and the history of technology. Together they affirm the need for a study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions"--Back cover.

This illuminating book explores the theme of social constructionism in legal theory. It questions just how much freedom and power social groups really have to construct and reconstruct law.