Practitioner Accounts and Knowledge Production: An Analysis of Three Marketing Discourses

Responding to repeated calls for marketing academicians to connect with marketing actors, we offer a discourse analysis of the ways in which managers portray their practices. Focusing on the micro-discourses and narratives that marketing actors draw upon to represent their work, we argue that dominant representations of marketing knowledge production present a number of critical concerns for marketing theory. We also evidence that the often promoted idea of a need to close the gap between theory, as a dominant discourse, and practice, as a way of doing marketing, is problematic to pursue. We suggest that a more fruitful agenda resides in the development of a range of polyphonic and creative micro-discourses of management, promoting context, difference and individual meaning in marketing knowledge production.