Paradigms of Choice

Abstract

Marketing, like engineering, medicine and law, did not begin as an academic subject or a body of knowledge taught and learned for its own sake. Rather, its origins are linked to the practical concerns of business management and, in particular, with the establishment of regular, formalised patterns of economic exchange in order to make possible higher material standards of living. In spite of great increases in the complexity of social and economic life, the aims of marketing management remain broadly similar. Indeed, while all of these disciplines are now institutionalised within the established frameworks of education and research, they can still be legitimately regarded as technologies, as well as areas of scholarship. They are technologies firmly based upon bodies of systematic or scientific knowledge and enquiry or are in the process of becoming so.