Is the branch of science, which is concerned with deepening the understanding of the customer needs in the market environment of businesses and finding solutions of marketing problems through micro-research perspective. Marketing studies uses scientific methods in order to consider the practical marketing issues, which affect businesses – in a scientific manner. At university-level, this means considering the methodology of marketing studies. However, a marketing scientist with a strong instrumental-technical background is also trained to carry out critical research into all kinds of marketing phenomena under intellectual directions such as interdisciplinarity, praxis, theoretical openness, historical depth, systemic and dialectic for advancing macro-critical perspective of marketing and consumer research through the adoption of macro and critical approaches ( Dholakia, 2012 ).
Published in Chapter:
The Evolution of Consumerism in the Marketing Education: A Critical Discussion Based on Mezirow's Critical Reflection
George S. Spais (Graduate Technological Educational Institute of Western Greece, Greece)
Copyright: © 2014
|Pages: 33
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-5880-6.ch003
Abstract
The chapter examines how consumerism- one of the primary key themes in marketing and business courses- has evolved the last decade and envisages the shape of these set of courses in the future. From the 1,935 words for 20 key-concepts counted in 141 online course descriptions in English of the last 10 periods delivered by Business and Management Schools or Business/Marketing Academic Depts. of 88 Universities and Colleges, “Marketing,” “business,” “ethics” and “social responsibility” were included in 100% of the course descriptions analyzed, indicating their coverage by all courses. In order to investigate the five (5) research objectives, HCA was adopted for an exploratory analysis based on single-linkage clustering method to reveal natural groupings of the key concepts within a data set of word counts that were not apparent and then multiple linear regression analyses were conducted. The trend analyses indicated prospects for the increasing focus around specific topics. The interpretation of the research results based on the assumptions of Mezirow's critical reflection provided very strong recommendations.