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In this chapter, I respond to the thoughtful and insightful critical discussions of my book, The Politics of Our Selves, offered by Colin Koopman, Johanna Meehan, and Christopher Zurn. After distinguishing between the interpretive, conceptual, and practical–political aims of the book, I defend my interpretive claims vis-a-vis Foucault and Habermas against criticisms raised by Koopman and Zurn, clarify my understanding of the conceptual aim of the book in response to Koopman's critique, and indicate how my approach to the practical–political questions about overturning gender subordination raised by Zurn and Meehan can be developed further.

Amy Allen's book, The Politics of Our Selves, advances feminists beyond current stalemates that insist that to acknowledge the importance of Habermas's normative insights, is to deny the significance of Foucault's description of the impact that power has on subject formation. In this article I describe Allen's position and suggest its strengths and importance, criticize some of Allen's arguments and offer suggestions for advancing the direction of Allen's argument.

The contributions included in this volume provide critical assessments of both a range of traditions in social theory, and of their current relevance. In addition, they represent endeavors to apply, refine, integrate, or advance particular traditions in order to enhance our ability to analyze conditions of social life in the twenty-first century and to confront a variety of related challenges. Several of the contributions present efforts to combine the application, refinement, integration, and advancement of particular theoretical traditions. Thematically, they cover several areas in social theory and a spectrum of perspectives, including poststructuralism, feminist theory, and especially critical theory. Chapters address such issues as the authoritarian personality; charisma; the relationship between power, agency, and subjectivity; self-estrangement; pragmatism; and globalization.

The burden social theorists must be willing to accept, respond to, and act upon pertains to the difficulties that predictably accompany all efforts to convey to nontheorists the unwelcome fact of heteronomy – that as actors, we are not as autonomous as we were told and prefer to assume – and to spell out what heteronomy in the form in which it has been shaping the developmental trajectory of modern societies means for professional theorists. I introduce the concept of “vitacide,” designed to capture that termination of life is a potential vanishing point of the heteronomous processes that have been shaping modern societies continuing to accelerate and intensify in ways that prefigure our future, but not on our human or social terms. Heteronomy pointing toward vitacide should compel us as social theorists to consider critically both the constructive and destructive trajectory that social change appears to have been following for more than two centuries, irrespective of whether the resulting prospect is to our liking or not. In this context, the classical critical theorists of the early Frankfurt School, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, pursued what turned out to be an evolving interest in rackets, the authoritarian personality, and the administered society – concepts that served as foils for delineating the kind of theoretical stance that is becoming more and more important as we are moving into an increasingly uncertain future.

This paper aims to offer practical, data-led guidance for the decolonisation of marketing strategy, especially as it relates to customer engagement. It does so with an acute understanding of the constraints of brand legitimacy.

The findings of this paper are informed both by a conceptual unpacking of institutional, decolonisation and customer engagement literature, as well as an empirical methodology that presents an embedded single case study of a top-ranking banking brand, using in-depth qualitative interviews as well as content analyses of brand communications.

The paper examines the notion of institutional brand legitimacy alongside the decolonisation of customer engagement. It offers five empirically driven decisions that marketers must consider when they attempt to decolonise their customer engagement strategies. These revolve around a decolonised bottom-up approach; establishing new biases for customer insights; the management of opposing forces; being strategically transformative; and going beyond diversity.

A single brand case study is offered that uses a relatively small sample of interviewees and does not include customers of the brand. Further research is therefore needed to reflect other organisational contexts and stakeholders. Just so, the paper specifically looks at the ways in which decolonisation and institutional legitimacy intersect for customer engagement. Further studies that focus on other organisational concepts impacted by decolonisation would be thought-provoking.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first empirical investigation that offers practical guidance for the decolonisation of marketing strategies – as it relates to customer engagement or any other facets of marketing.