Constructions of marketing work: a critical Review.

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which marketing scholarship has engaged with the concept of marketing work. It seeks to demonstrate, through a critical review of the literature, that marketing research has largely kept its focus away from the mundane world of the practitioner and this has led to significant weaknesses in our understanding of what actually constitutes marketing work, and therefore, also, to confused conceptualisations of marketing. Centrally, the paper adopts Gummesson’s distinction between part-time and full-time marketers as a potentially helpful lens through which to approach the leaky boundaries of daily marketing work, using it to examine scholarly responses to the impact of co-creation, social media, datafication, artificial intelligence, and gender on marketing work.