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1 – 10 of 162This 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.
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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…
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.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a biographical sketch of Pauline Arnold focusing on her pioneering contributions to the field of market research.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide a biographical sketch of Pauline Arnold focusing on her pioneering contributions to the field of market research.
Design/methodology/approach
Archival source material included the Pauline Arnold Collection at the University of Minnesota and the Lucy Sallick Papers including correspondence, unpublished documents, and the transcript of a 1995 oral history interview with Matilda White Riley, who was Pauline Arnold's stepdaughter. Primary historical source material includes the scholarship, both published and unpublished, of the subject. An important primary, published source for this study is the periodical, Market Research, to which Arnold contributed under the auspices of the Market Research Corporation of America from 1934 through to 1938.
Findings
Pauline Arnold's contributions to the field of market research are documented.
Originality/value
Pauline Arnold has been cited as having made important but neglected contributions to market research, including her advocating an understanding of customers' motives, needs, and wants. However, there is no published account of Arnold's life and work.
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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.
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The paper aims to look at some of the problems commonly associated with qualitative methodologies, suggesting that there is a need for a more rigorous application in order to…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper aims to look at some of the problems commonly associated with qualitative methodologies, suggesting that there is a need for a more rigorous application in order to develop theory and aid effective decision making.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper examines three qualitative methodologies: grounded theory, ethnography, and phenomenology. It compares and contrasts their approaches to data collection and interpretation and highlights some of the strengths and weaknesses associated with each one.
Findings
The paper suggests that, while qualitative methodologies, as opposed to qualitative methods, are now an accepted feature of consumer research, their application in the truest sense is still in its infancy within the broader field of marketing. It proposes a number of possible contexts that may benefit from in‐depth qualitative enquiry.
Originality/value
The paper should be of interest to marketers considering adopting a qualitative perspective, possibly for the first time, as it offers a snap‐shot of three widely‐used methodologies, their associated procedures and potential pitfalls.
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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…
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.
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In my years as a student of Mary Morgan and later as her junior peer, I observed that one concept prompted her to react with caution and skepticism. That common notion was…
Abstract
In my years as a student of Mary Morgan and later as her junior peer, I observed that one concept prompted her to react with caution and skepticism. That common notion was “influence.” In this chapter, I follow her cues to ask what are the legitimate grounds for claims of influence in historical explanation. Morgan’s writings have made us aware that the story of social science cannot be captured in simple reckonings of influence, and that long chains of actions are required to seat an idea in the mind, and longer still to set it to paper. My contribution to problematizing influence is to list the pitfalls of its uncritical use but also, once suitably redefined, its potential contribution to analysis. To illustrate my claims, I propose a test case, to study the “influence of Mary Morgan.”
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The purpose of this paper is an archival study of images taken from cruise brochures available in New Zealand from the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century. The…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is an archival study of images taken from cruise brochures available in New Zealand from the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century. The investigation adds to previous work undertaken on cruise ship posters and to the discussion surrounding how cruise lines motivated customers to purchase a cruise.
Design/methodology/approach
An archival approach was taken. The aim of the research is to explain how images used in the brochures have their origin in the mid-twentieth century concept of motivational research. In doing so, the work of Veblen (1899), Lazarsfeld (1935) and Packard (1957, 1959) are used as a foundation to illustrate how more recent commentators, such as Gad (2016) and Jamieson (1983), can be evoked.
Findings
Analysis of the images presented builds upon previous work done on cruise ship posters. Previous examinations used mid-twentieth century posters to show how the ship was slowly being eroded. The current work illustrates how the brochure evolved to entice consumers to purchase. Analysis of the images suggests that motivational theory is alive and well within the cruise industry.
Research limitations/implications
This study is constructed around the archival holding of the National Maritime Museum of New Zealand. As such, the study does not include information that does not form part of this holding.
Practical implications
New Zealand underwent large structural, economic and social change between 1984 and 2000. During that time, there was growth of income inequity. This provided some with greater disposable income for leisure and travel. While the following survey concerns cruise ship brochures, an examination of airline, resort and hotel advertising may be worthy of a companion study.
Originality/value
The cruise ship brochure available to New Zealand customers in the last quarter of the twentieth century demonstrated the ship is not centre stage. In this regard, the following work adds to previous work conducted using posters and an understanding of the evolution of cruise ship advertising in emergent modern markets.
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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.
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