Marketing Research Traditions: Toward Theoretical Unification or Pluralism?

Abstract

Theories of marketing and their future directions are increasingly discussed topics. A significant theme is whether we can construct a unifying logic for the marketing discipline (Vargo and Lusch 2004), or whether marketing should be seen as a theoretically pluralistic field (Möller and Halinen 2000). This issue is first addressed by examining the characteristics of marketing as a scientific domain. Next, a selected set of research traditions or schools of marketing (marketing management, services marketing, marketing channels, interaction and network approach in business marketing, relationship marketing) are described in terms of their intellectual goals and metatheoretical assumptions. This evaluation suggests that the fundamental aspects in assessing the explanatory value, limitations, and relative closeness of research traditions are the assumptions they make about: (i) marketing exchange relationships, (ii) the context of this exchange, and (iii) the actors carrying out the exchanges, in addition to their epistemological and methodological bases. Lastly, the results are used to argue for the adoption of theoretical pluralism in the marketing discipline.