Negotiating Change in Marketing Systems: A Collection of Essays

The majority of marketing literature – both academic and practitioner oriented – tends to focus on two key actors in the marketplace: the consumer and the producer. In particular, the literature foregrounds mutually beneficial processes of value creation that take place as the two parties engage in various exchanges and transactions. Although a fruitful endeavor, this transaction-oriented approach relegates to secondary status the plethora of other marketplace participants and members of society that also affect and are affected by the focal transaction. Indeed, any exchange between producers and consumers will not exist in a vacuum, but will influence (and be influenced by) myriad social and institutional processes, such as changing cultural, social, and regulatory norms and structures. This dissertation focuses precisely on these complex interrelationships. Over the course of three essays, I examine how market actors are influenced by, respond to, and shape the broader institutional and social context in which they are embedded. Using marketing systems as an enabling theory, I illustrate how markets are complex systems embedded in social and cultural environments. In marketing systems, change is seldom isolated and confined to a given part of the system, but rather has a ripple effect on other system participants and antecedents. Marketers, consumers, policymakers, and other system participants act and react to one another, each seeking to exert their influence on the marketing system with a particular goal or desired outcome in mind.