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Indigenous theory development in marketing: the foundational premises approach

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Abstract

Marketing’s intellectual health requires indigenous theory development. However, marketing is a discipline that, almost exclusively, imports its concepts and theories from other disciplines and applies them to marketing issues. Articles that either develop indigenous marketing theory or use such theory as a foundation for empirical research are notably absent from marketing journals. A major reason for the absence of indigenous marketing theory is the lack of well-developed procedures and approaches for developing theories and writing conceptual articles. This article proposes, explicates, and illustrates with a concrete example (i.e., service-dominant (S-D) logic) an approach to theory development in marketing that is labeled the “foundational premises, inductive realist approach.” Although this approach is not an algorithmic procedure for theory development, it can provide a valuable conceptual framework for furthering the development of indigenous marketing theory.

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The author thanks the editor and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a draft of this article.

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Correspondence to Shelby D. Hunt.

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Hunt, S.D. Indigenous theory development in marketing: the foundational premises approach. AMS Rev 10, 8–17 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13162-020-00165-w

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