Alan Bradshaw, University of London, and Mark Tadajewski, University of Strathclyde, published “Macromarketing Roundtable Commentary–The Export of Marketing Education” on September 20th, 2011 in the Journal of Macromarketing’s OnlineFirst collection. Dr. Bradshaw kindly provided the following commentary on the article.
In the UK it is increasingly common for postgraduate students of marketing to be recruited from across the globe, and in particular from notionally “developing” economies such as India and China. This practice raises questions across a variety of issues; it can smuggle discourses of subalternaity into the classroom, it can construct marketing education as an agent of globalisation, it can undermine commitments to maintaining criticality in our subject areas, it can result in all manners of pedagogical challenges, it can raise huge amounts of money for universities and re-constitute marketing education as an object for export. To my mind, these are issues that get to the heart of marketing education in an age of ever-increasing commercialisation of universities and general neo-liberalism.
To explore the phenomenon, myself and Mark invited a group of inter-disciplinary scholars for a roundtable discussion in Royal Holloway, University of London. We asked the participants to construct short statements outlining their positions and together they form, I hope readers will agree, a series of fascinating accounts and analyses about marketing education not just as a subject for teaching and learning, but also as a product for export at a time of globalisation, neo-liberalism and political-economic transformations.
We hope that this commentary will be of interest to anybody who teaches or learns marketing as well as a broader audience who are interested in political economy, globalisation and the role of the university
To view other articles in the OnlineFirst collection, please click here. For more information about the Journal of Macromarketing, please follow this link.
