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Research on sales and ethics: Mapping the past and charting the future

  • Original Empirical Research
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Abstract

The scholarly literature at the intersection of sales and ethics is vast and, therefore, difficult to summarize. To explore the state of the sales–ethics landscape, the authors apply probabilistic topic modeling to a dataset composed of 293 journal articles published from 1980 to 2022. The critical examination of the results leads to a framework that identifies 32 topics and groups these topics into five high-level topic areas. Building on these topics and topic areas, the authors explore where future research on sales and ethics should focus, using in-depth interviews with 30 scholars and 15 practitioners. The results of these interviews reveal important implications for sales and ethics and overarching research questions regarding (1) understanding existing realities, (2) understanding new realities, and (3) advancing research practices. In doing so, this study provides a platform for much-needed research and scholarly discourse on sales and ethics.

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Data Availability

The data serving as the corpus of Study 1 originate from articles copyrighted by journals the authors institutions subscribe to and therefore cannot be shared publicly. The participants of Study 2 did not give consent for the recording or transcript to be shared publicly. Therefore, data of Study 2 are not available.

Notes

  1. Decisions about search and screening procedures inherently require tradeoffs between fit to the review topic and exhaustiveness. Prioritizing fit to the topic results in a review that accounts for fewer articles, but articles more closely fitting the review topic. Prioritizing exhaustiveness results in a review that accounts for more articles, but articles less fitting the review topic. Recognizing this, Hiebl (2021) points out that comprehensiveness should not be equated with capturing all research articles but rather all relevant research articles with the research question and search criteria determining what articles are relevant. Our focus leads us to prioritize fit to the topic since doing so allows us to identify the topics and topical structure of the specified literature intersection more accurately.

  2. Three practitioner interviewees requested that we do not record their interviews due to the sensitivity of ethical issues. For these interviews, we rely on the notes we took to inform our analysis.

  3. We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this question.

  4. Take our paper as an example. While we, the authors, are somewhat diverse in terms of experiences, values, attitudes, and behaviors, we are not diverse in terms of surface characteristics such as gender and ethnicity as well as the associated life experiences. How has our lack of diversity in these variables biased our interviews and analysis, and thus the results presented in this paper? We do not know. However, we have to assume that the questions we asked, the coding we conducted, and our write-up were subject to our blind spots resulting from our lack of diversity on these surface characteristics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Muma College of Business, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue BSN 3403, Tampa, FL, 33620, USA

    Nathaniel N. Hartmann

  2. College of Business, California State University Monterey Bay, 100 Campus Center, Seaside, CA, 93955, USA

    Heiko Wieland

  3. Oakland University, 275 Varner Drive, Rochester, MI, 48309-4485, USA

    Brandon Gustafson

  4. C.T. Bauer College of Business, University of Houston, 4250 Martin Luther Kind Blvd, Houston, TX, 77204, USA

    Johannes Habel

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Hartmann, N.N., Wieland, H., Gustafson, B. et al. Research on sales and ethics: Mapping the past and charting the future. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-023-00961-3

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