Marketing, Rhetoric and Control

3Control and the Discourse of Marketing Science

In order to investigate how marketing may be seen as a form of rhetoric it is first necessary to establish how exactly marketing sees itself. Of course, like any academic discipline, marketing has evolved over time—but marketing is also a very young discipline with recognisable marketing courses at US universities becoming established only around 1915 (Hagerty, 1936) and the discourse regarding its identity can be summarised in a few core narrative streams. The first of these is the discipline’s status as science or practice (or even art) and this has been a point of debate almost since the establishment of marketing as a discrete subject of scholarship. The second narrative concerns the relationship ...