The high-quality academic books, upper-level student texts and journal articles on our Business, Management and Economics list offer fresh perspectives on the economy, the future of work and organisations, and the relationship between business and addressing global social challenges.
The list is home to a number of series including Organizations and Activism and Feminist Perspectives on Work and Organization, all of which are edited by leading scholars from the field, along with our journals in the area: Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice, Work in the Global Economy and Global Political Economy.
Business, Management and Economics
This chapter describes a market research presentation. Here, market researchers present their analysis to a global brand. Examining this presentation rhetorically, the chapter argues that marketers use artistic images and artistic practices to create a sense of sociality with their clients. In so doing, computational data and marketing science gives way to personal interactions between marketers and their clients.
This chapter explores how market researchers analysis data. It describes a meeting in which a team of marketers work with an academic researcher to make sense of their survey results. In the meeting, the discussion focuses on telling a story. This done by looking for a key ‘stat’ and a ‘headline’ finding.
This chapter describes the relationship between marketing researchers and their clients. It present ethnographic observations of a research project for a large global brand. It argues that in this project, marketing researchers assume their clients are organizational decision-makers who face too much uncertainty. Their job, they assume, is to help these organizational decision-makers. To explain this, the chapter turns to organizational theory and uses the concept of uncertainty absorption to understand marketing in action.
This chapter reviews three foundational ethnographies of marketing organizations. It looks at studies by Rosen, Moeran, and Alvesson. The chapter positions these studies in the structural functionalist paradigm and argues that they form a coherent ethnographic theory of marketing.
This chapter introduces the concept of marketing science fiction. It reviews the history of marketing and the emergence of marketing science and creative marketing. The chapter suggests that while digital technologies support marketing science research, in practice they are combined with artistic practices from the creative marketing tradition. Cluley calls this ‘marketing science fiction’.
This chapter describes the discourses of Marketing Art and Marketing Science. Analysing ethnographic studies of marketing, it shows how these two discourses help us to understand what happen in marketing practice. The chapter argues that marketing workers use these discourses to structure their work.
This chapter explores how marketers analysis computation data. Focusing on the analysis of facial coding advertising studies, the chapter shows how data science methods create surplus data that researchers do not have the capacity to consider, and also creates empty signifiers that lack meaning such as the shapes displayed on a chart. To make sense of this data for their clients, marketers engage in what the author calls marketing outsight. They hide surplus data and give mean to empty signifiers through analytic practices such as chartism. Here, they assume that movements on a line graph are meaningful and in need of explanation.
This chapter reviews the concept of marketing science fiction and relates it to wider discussions of marketing, technology, and society. The chapter argues that critical accounts based on concepts such as surveillance ignore marketing practice and place too much emphasis on computational technologies. The chapter also explores how to end ethnographic studies of marketing practice.
This book explores data science in practice through an ethnographic study at a global marketing technology and research firm.
The book shows that, while businesses have embraced data science methods to understand markets and consumers, in practice they produce too much information. Consequently, they must be combined with creative practices that simplify and make sense of analytics. Cluley shows that in the age of data science, business is increasingly artistic. In this case, marketing science is more like marketing science fiction.
This is essential reading for understanding contemporary data-driven business and marketing as well as social and economic relations in the age of surveillance capitalism, with lessons for academics and students of marketing, technology and data science.
This chapter steps into a marketing organization. It describes what it is like to go to work in marketing. We learn about the lives of marketing workers, the way their work is managed and organized, and how they interact with each other. It provides a unique glimpse at marketing in the wild.
