Joint CRIS/Marketing Group Seminar

Speaker: Mark Tadajewski, Honorary Professor of Marketing, Royal Holloway University of London, Editor of Journal of Marketing Management

Venue: Moore Building, Glass Meeting Room

Abstract:

This paper reorients the conceptual architecture of marketing theory. It is proposed that marketing is the generative dynamic that economists and sociologists seek to explain the centrality of habit in everyday life. Questioning the arguments proffered by these twin disciplines, we submit that these processes of habit formation are not ‘undesigned’ or ‘hidden’, but perfectly visible and articulated by theorists and practitioners alike. These debates were complex. We outline their ‘strategic logic’, tracking the constitutive function of the discourse of habit. We unravel the theorised processes of habit formation as these are emplaced at the subconscious level and conceptualised via the ‘subconscious self’. Theoretically, we account for these power relations by uniting the concepts of biopolitics and anatomo-politics in terms of ‘bio-anatomopolitics’. Marketing, therefore, must be considered a disciplinary vehicle oriented toward habit creation and the destabilisation of inertia.