The intensification of marketing activities in recent years has led the public to become much more aware of its role as consumers. Yet, the increased visibility of marketing materials and associated messages in everyday life is in contrast with the often little understood inner workings of the marketing profession itself, despite the widespread recognition of marketers as key agents in shaping the face of global capitalism.

Inside Marketing offers a theoretically informed critical perspective on contemporary marketing practice and its growing cultural, economic, and political influence worldwide. This book brings together leading scholars and practitioners from the fields of business, history, economic sociology, and cultural anthropology, to analyse the inner workings and outer effects of marketing as a material social practice, an ideology, and a technique. Their work raises some important and timely questions. How has marketing transformed the pharmaceutical industry and what are the consequences for our lives? How does marketing influence the way we think of progress and modernity? How has marketing changed the way we think of childhood? And how does marketing appropriate the creativity of consumers for profit?

This book offers scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners a theoretical and conceptual understanding of how marketing works as a cultural institution and as an ideology.

Detlev Zwick's profile page

Julien Cayla's profile page

Detlev Zwick is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, Canada. Before coming to Schulich, he was a visiting scholar at Aalborg University in Denmark and a visiting professor at American University in Washington, DC. His research on the cultural politics of marketing and consumption practices has been published widely in marketing, communication, media culture, and sociology journals, as well as in several edited collections. He received his Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Rhode Island. Julien Cayla is a Senior Lecturer at the Australian School of Business (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia) and a Visiting Associate Professor at Euromed Management (Marseille, France). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, where he majored in marketing and minored in cultural anthropology. His dissertation examined the way companies learn about culture in the context of their interactions with advertising agencies. This work received the prestigious Alden Clayton Prize, as well as the Sheth Foundation Prize. In his research, he draws on anthropological theories and methodologies to study global marketing issues. His research on global marketing has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of International Marketing, the Handbook of International Marketing and Advertising, and Society Review.

"The enduring contrast between the pervasive presence of marketing and the lack of empirical studies on its tools and practices has prevented us from understanding its effects on society. Inside Marketing fills the gap. Because they chose to follow marketers at work, contributors of this book show us how societies are ineluctably transformed into market societies and ordinary citizens into insatiable consumers. A must-read for anyone who worries about our future."

--Michel Callon, Professor of Sociology, Ecole des Mines de Paris

"This innovative collection of essays promises to move thinking in marketing in new, more integrative and more critical directions. The book represents an important contribution to helping us move away from thinking in narrow disciplinary terms and toward more unified thinking (with sociology and anthropology in particular) about marketing and business more generally."

--George Ritzer, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland