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Article
Publication date: 15 February 2016

Stefan Schwarzkopf

This paper aims to chart the influence of McCarthyism and of FBI surveillance practices on a number of prominent American social scientists, market researchers, opinion pollsters…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to chart the influence of McCarthyism and of FBI surveillance practices on a number of prominent American social scientists, market researchers, opinion pollsters and survey research practitioners during the post-war years. Hitherto disparate sets of historical evidence on how Red Scare tactics influenced social researchers and marketing scientists are brought together and updated with evidence from original archival research.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper draws on the existing secondary literature on how social research practitioners and social scientists reacted to the unusually high pressures on academic freedom during the McCarthy era. It supplements this review with evidence obtained from archival research, including declassified FBI files. The focus of this paper is set on prominent individuals, mainly Bernard Berelson, Samuel Stouffer, Hadley Cantril, Robert S. Lynd, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Herta Herzog, Ernest Dichter, but also the Frankfurt School in exile.

Findings

Although some of the historiography presents American social scientists and practitioners in the marketing research sector as victims of McCarthyism and FBI surveillance, it can also be shown that virtually all individuals in focus here also developed strategies of accommodation, compromise and even opportunism to benefit from the climate of suspicion brought about by the prevailing anti-Communism.

Social implications

Anyone interested in questions about the morality of marketing, market research and opinion polling as part of the social sciences practiced in vivo will need to pay attention to the way these social-scientific practices became tarnished by the way prominent researchers accommodated and at times even abetted McCarthyism.

Originality/value

Against the view of social scientists as harassed academic minority, evidence is presented in this paper which shows American social scientists who researched market-related phenomena, like media, voters choices and consumer behaviour, in a different light. Most importantly, this paper for the first time presents archival evidence on the scale of Paul F. Lazarsfeld’s surveillance by the FBI.

Details

Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, vol. 8 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1755-750X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 16 November 2015

Ron Fullerton

This paper aims to show the genesis of motivation research in work done from the 1920s through 1954, especially with the growth in reception of European “depth psychology”. This…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to show the genesis of motivation research in work done from the 1920s through 1954, especially with the growth in reception of European “depth psychology”. This has been followed up by Fullerton (2013).

Design/methodology/approach

Standard historical methodology – heavy reliance on sources written at the time (primary resources), avoidance of anachronism, heavy use of contemporary quotations, efforts to explain and interpret.

Findings

Motivation research dates to the 1920s with the work of Paul F. Lazarsfeld and others. It grew rapidly in the USA, part of the great expansion of the behavioral sciences, and amidst a zeitgeist of growing discontent with older psychologies and of Economic Man.

Originality/value

This paper takes motivation research back to its origins for the first time, placing it clearly in line with contemporary intellectual developments.

Details

Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, vol. 7 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1755-750X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 16 January 2009

Ronald A. Fullerton

During the 1920s and into the 1930s, German‐language work on consumer behavior led the world; for example, segmentation was clearly discussed from the late 1920s. The purpose of…

343

Abstract

Purpose

During the 1920s and into the 1930s, German‐language work on consumer behavior led the world; for example, segmentation was clearly discussed from the late 1920s. The purpose of this paper is to show how marketing thought in Germany and Austria reached a peak even as the environmental substructure that sustained it was being seriously eroded by political and economic changes that forever consigned it to a peripheral position upon the world stage.

Design/methodology/approach

The design of the study is a critical historical one relying heavily upon documents produced during the period discussed. Statements are weighed and evaluated.

Findings

The paper finds that very impressive, at times world‐leading, work was being done in the 1920s and early 1930s, particularly in the areas of segmentation and what would later become known as consumer behavior. Much of what later became known as Motivation Research, or example, was pioneered in Germany and Austria before 1934.

Research limitations/ implications

The primary implication is that a great deal of marketing thought developed outside the USA, sometimes drawing upon US marketing thought, in other cases developing completely independently. A second implication is that marketing thought can be weakened by political and economic conditions, as Germany and Austria painfully experienced.

Originality/value

This is the first study to explore historical German and Austrian marketing thought in a cross‐cultural manner, comparing and contrasting them with thought developed elsewhere.

Details

European Business Review, vol. 21 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0955-534X

Keywords

Content available
Book part
Publication date: 8 September 2022

Stephen Turner

Abstract

Details

Mad Hazard
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80382-670-7

Article
Publication date: 18 August 2014

Donncha Kavanagh

The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolution of marketing’s philosophical conversation over the past 120 years, focusing on the emergent meaning of the notion that…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolution of marketing’s philosophical conversation over the past 120 years, focusing on the emergent meaning of the notion that marketing should become more “scientific”.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper focuses on the US academic marketing literature, primarily journal articles and books published in the first half of the 20th century.

Findings

The Aristotelian distinction between techné, epistemé and phronesis provides a rich basis for framing philosophical discussion in marketing, and should supplant the art-science debate and Anderson’s distinction between science1 and science2. Prior to 1959, the marketing journals provided a forum for phronesis, though this diminished as the academic marketing community largely abandoned the inductive, contextual approach in favour of a deductive, “scientific” methodology. The Ford Foundation played an important role in effecting this change.

Practical implications

The paper highlights the importance of forums where practitioners can reflect on the ethical and social implications of their practices and then work to enhance these practices for the greater social good.

Social implications

Questions the value of distinctions between marketing theorists and practitioners and the consequential focus of marketing journals.

Originality/value

Advances the concept of phronesis in the marketing literature and distinguishes it from epistemé, which has dominated academic marketing discourse over the past 60 years.

Details

Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, vol. 6 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1755-750X

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 12 October 2011

Helgard Kramer

Following Lakatos' strategy of a rational reconstruction of science, I present a concrete example of the rise and decline of a research program from the history of the social…

Abstract

Following Lakatos' strategy of a rational reconstruction of science, I present a concrete example of the rise and decline of a research program from the history of the social sciences: the authoritarian character studies of the Frankfurt School. The first version of the authoritarian character studies of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research was based on a Marxist social and psychoanalytic theory, and included an initial empirical survey. The preliminary results of this survey motivated the Institute's just-in-time emigration from Germany in 1932, and at the same time do not fit into the later theory of the authoritarian character (1936). The second version of the authoritarian character studies (1950) gained the status of a social psychological paradigm, but soon turned into a declining research program, which came to a complete stop around 1968 as far as the Institute of Social Research was concerned. Internal and external factors combined to bring about the sudden end of the authoritarian character studies.

Details

The Diversity of Social Theories
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-821-3

Article
Publication date: 1 August 1998

Miriam Catterall

During the 1980s, market research practitioners and academic marketing researchers witnessed a growing interest in qualitative research. A review of the practitioner and academic…

10295

Abstract

During the 1980s, market research practitioners and academic marketing researchers witnessed a growing interest in qualitative research. A review of the practitioner and academic literature on qualitative market(ing) research reveals the commonalities and the differences in the ways each group represents, thinks about and practices qualitative research. Areas where both groups might benefit from sharing ideas and information and from closer links generally are discussed.

Details

Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, vol. 1 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1352-2752

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 8 November 2011

Ronald A. Fullerton

The paper's aim is to explain historical methodology in a marketing context.

1158

Abstract

Purpose

The paper's aim is to explain historical methodology in a marketing context.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper draws on the author's personal experience, being trained in the history method and using the historical method.

Findings

An awareness of time contexts and complex change is essential, so too is an appreciation of primary sources (as defined by historians). Reading the present into the past (anachronism) is to be avoided, and the interpretation and explanation of events are essential to good history.

Originality/value

The paper represents the author's own personal experience.

Details

Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, vol. 3 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1755-750X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 February 1972

JAMES F. MCNAMARA

This paper is devoted to the topic of how mathematics might be more efficiently used in educational administration. The position taken here is that mathematics is a branch of…

5394

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the topic of how mathematics might be more efficiently used in educational administration. The position taken here is that mathematics is a branch of philosophy whose subject matter is a set of abstract entities and identified operational rules. It is a vocabulary of symbols that can be used to label objects and, more importantly, a set of grammatical rules for using the vocabulary. The paper begins with a review of some recent developments reported in the social science literature on the uses of mathematics in political science, sociology and economics, and ends with some illustrations of how these developments could lead to similar applications in both the practice and theory domains of educational administration.

Details

Journal of Educational Administration, vol. 10 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0957-8234

Book part
Publication date: 10 April 2017

Gerald Mollenhorst, Christofer Edling and Jens Rydgren

In this chapter, we focus on the social integration of young immigrants in Sweden who themselves and/or one or both of their parents came from Iran or former Yugoslavia. In…

Abstract

In this chapter, we focus on the social integration of young immigrants in Sweden who themselves and/or one or both of their parents came from Iran or former Yugoslavia. In particular, we look at the share of alters in their core networks who are of the same parental national origin and how this has changed within a period of four years. To explain network changes, we consider the parental national origin similarity among them, changes in opportunities to meet network members, and important life events.

We analyzed two waves of survey data collected in 2010 and 2014 from 1,537 individuals who live in Sweden and who were all born in 1990, including 325 immigrants from Iran, 447 immigrants from former Yugoslavia, and 805 native Swedes. The results indicate that: (a) the share of parental national origin similar alters in the core networks of immigrants significantly increases over time, (b) first-generation immigrants in particular increasingly associate with others who are of the same parental national origin, (c) important life events hardly result in network changes, and (d) schools and work places are social contexts that enhance the social integration of immigrants, because in these contexts immigrants meet and engage in personal relationships with individuals who do not share their parental national origin.

1 – 10 of 149