Flux: What Marketing Managers Need to Navigate the New Environment

David Soberman & Dilip Soman, Eds.Flux: What Marketing Managers Need to Navigate the New EnvironmentToronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012Reviewed by Howard A. DoughtyIn the Foreword to Soberman and Soman's collection of fifteen lively essays, Roger Martin, the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, takes what he deems to be a risk. While it is dangerous for a management school to show favouritism to one business discipline over another, I can claim that sentimentality drives me towards marketing.In that sentence dwell dangers beyond simple sentimentality. They are contained in the phrase scholarly business discipline. It is not necessary to don the habit of a medieval monk to be wary of the notion that business disciplines are in any serious sense scholarly. If nothing else, the term connotes disinterested inquiry into profound questions and the quest for at least provisional truths in traditional human studies and, by relatively recent promotion, the natural and social sciences as well.Business, on the other hand, may make instrumental use of the work of economists, psychologists and even ethicists when the going gets tough; but, it is hard to think of the study of interest rates, commodity markets, real estate transactions, product focus groups and advertising copy as authentically scholarly. And, among all the needed to succeed in business (with or without really trying), the field of marketing-whether in the effort to sell pre-owned vehicles, snack foods, fragrances, vacations or second-hand military hardware-seems especially far removed from poetics and aesthetics, the contemplation of justice and the good society, or reflections on the order of the celestial bodies and the creation of the heavens.That, at least, is a caricature of the bias of what are sometimes predismissed as traditional thinkers whose time, as we all know, has long since passed. The absent-minded professor of philosophy or literature is now only occasionally tolerated as an antique curiosity and minimally indulged in practical academic affairs within great research and teaching universities today.This, after all, is the twenty-first century. The ethos of the business world has permeated higher no less than any other aspect of the public sector. Commercialization of research is the premise upon which both government and private-sector funds are delivered to chemistry, engineering and computer science departments. Meantime, the measure of a quality undergraduate education in any field is an objective assessment of customer (formerly student) satisfaction with the experience of learning and the value added in terms of marketable skills among graduates.Within colleges and universities, which comprise the vast marketplace of mass and, now, universal education, we are witnessing the increased commitment to digitalized delivery systems for commodified curricula. Both training and even most liberal of the liberal arts are now being refashioned for online and blended courses in which actual attendance on a campus, much less in a classroom is no longer taken for granted.Innovation, defined mainly as the use of technological means to deliver pre-packaged learning modules to passive, isolated and uncritical students is the widely acclaimed way of the future. So broadly applicable is this vision of the future that few medium-sized or large-scale human organizations seem exempt. The same business principles are said to apply to commerce, industry, resource development, government and even NGOs. There is a presumption of scarcity and the implied inevitability of competition. The primacy of entrepreneurship is ubiquitous. Even among activist human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (not to mention any number of issue-specific or geographically focused groups) there is a merciless battle for the dollar donations of people inclined toward human mercy. …

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