Becoming 'Expert': an exploration into the social conditions and effects of subjectivity formation within the Marketing Academy

Abstract

Abstract

The marketing academy arguably holds an influential position within society, yet culturally speaking, very little is known about it; its people, processes or knowledge. Regardless of its privileged situation, we remain reflexively impoverished in terms of disciplinary self-understanding. This study, in some small way, hopes to change that. Indeed espousing and pursuing import around its scholarly intervention, this research instigates questions of a reflective nature, around marketing academia. More specifically, taking an anti-foundational perspective, it seeks to explore processes of knowledge production within the discipline.

Having reviewed current approaches to the evaluation of knowledge production from within marketing and beyond, this study comes to suggest a disciplinary lacking with regard to reflexive understandings, through marketing’s; (1) lack of consideration around knowledge as practice and (2) unsatisfactory consideration of the academic ‘subject’ therein.

With this in mind, it located a more precise interest around ‘the marketing academic’ and specifically, subjectivity formation, within a doctoral process of a major UK University. It was believed that this focus would provide a potentially revelatory means for generating new and responsible understandings into the conditions and effects of our disciplinary (re)production.

To this end, having theorised and analysed subjectivity formation through a Foucauldian lens (‘subjectification’, 1983) this study came to produce five main conclusions. These included suggestions that (1) ‘the self’ was constituted, not inherent (despite dominant evaluatory positions to the contrary), (2) subjective reproduction within the site included ‘independence’ and ‘knowledgability’ (3) the rhetoric of independence served to obscure power relations and everyday interactions within the doctoral process (4) problematic power relations, in part, defined the supervisory relationship, and that (5) effects of training were both positively and negatively experienced by informants.