Search results

A series of online searches of the Harvard University Library System – which includes the Baker Library, Houghton Library and the Radcliffe Institute’s Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library – on the History of Women in America revealed nearly 1,000 archive and manuscript holdings on advertising and related topics. This paper aims to investigate the extent of these holdings, to assess their value to advertising and marketing historians and to explore their potential for encouraging future research on under-investigated topics and questions.

Described are the extensive and valuable special collections and other holdings related to advertising, business and marketing of the Harvard Library System. Also described are the availability of the holdings and recommendations for accessing and studying the collections and artifacts.

The research reported here supports an overall conclusion that the Harvard Library System holds an important place among the world’s repositories of valuable historical advertisements and marketing ephemera. The research also supports four specific conclusions regarding the historical value of Harvard’s collections and archives. First, some of the collections offer access to artifacts and items from an under-investigated period – the first half of the 19th century. Second, many of the collections are international in scope. Third, the collections represent a wide array of 19th century non-periodical advertisements and ephemera, such as trade cards, posters and theatrical playbills. Fourth, and most important, the collections offer significant potential for addressing, among other under-investigated topics, the important role of women in the development of modern advertising theory and professional practices.

A prior search for the world’s largest and most historically significant archives and collections of advertisements and marketing ephemera (promotional objects or media executions created for a one-time, limited purpose) revealed a handful of library and museum collections of exceptional size or topical importance meriting further investigation. This paper adds to an extensive line of research published in the marketing and advertising historical literature exploring and describing the breadth, depth and historical value of the world’s important collections of historical advertisements and ephemera.

Introduces the notion of Distributed Competence and Performance Base Learning. Notes that cannot always learn for the future and asserts that DC ensures that people learn for the present. Provides examples of Distributed Competence Intervention and Performance Base Learning in practice.

Considers the relations between warfare, gender and marketing, and asks “Are we witnessing the feminization of marketing?” Draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) conception of warfare to illustrate contemporary patriarchal organization of society, war and marketing. Some might argue that a shifting balance of power in society and in marketing is reflected in developments such as relationship marketing and postmodern marketing which signal a shift away from “male” values, and that we are currently witnessing the resurgence of more “feminine” values. Concludes that despite these grand claims, prevailing “patriarchal” relations of power are still intact.One could argue that such developments are further acts of appropriation of the “female” space. That said, this space can never be totally appropriated. To locate the “female” principle, one must look beyond the regulating structures of society and the academy to the fringe, for this is the domain of the war machine, a territory which cannot be fully occupied by the forces of the social.