An extensive study of archival materials is used to examine the philosophic origins of marketing thought at two centers of early development, the University of Wisconsin and the Harvard Business School. Evidence suggests that the German Historical school of economics provided much of the philosophic foundation of the discipline.
The reification of macromarketing proceeds relentlessly as a necessary condition for the development of macromarketing science. But it can become an illusory science relevant unto itself and not to human concerns. To be truly a social science, human values have to be incorporated so that the by humans in the service of humans.
Marketing science studies are usable to the practitioner only by chance. That field has become too narrowly focused a discipline. To be usable, macromarketing studies must remain open to the poetics, the "art" of the field. A transcending mental construct is required, one that enhances, not destroys, our scientific heritage.
The title of Shelby Hunt's article (1989) is steeped in irony, given what follows in his text. His effort produces a caricature of reason and a surprising misunderstanding of the nature of reification in the social sciences. His is no critique; it is a diatribe pure and simple. I will not respond to Hunt's article on a line-by-line basis. That would be too depressing an exercise. Rather, I will address what appear to be major allegations. All but his last two, his rigor-relevance issue and his reification-realism issue, are dispensed with summarily because they are superficial.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.