Guest editorial

Citation

Shaw, E.H. and Wilkinson, I.F. (2011), "Guest editorial", Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Vol. 3 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jhrm.2011.41203aaa.002

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Volume 3, Issue 1

You may not have heard of Don Dixon and wonder why a special issue of this journal should be devoted to him. As you get to know more about him through the articles and commentaries that follow you will come to appreciate his depth and breadth of scholarship as well as his maverick character. He did not seek the limelight and is rather embarrassed and aggravated by the attention generated by this special issue. But, Don has many admirers who, fortunately for this special issue, ignored his protests. We ignored them because ultimately this is not about Donald F. Dixon, per se, but about his ideas. And Don’s ideas about marketing thought, from its beginnings in Ancient Greece, certainly warrant reflection.

As a maverick academic force in marketing, Don has offered a profound and rich understanding of the heritage of marketing and has provided a consistent and rigorous general systems perspective of marketing. Don began his academic studies majoring in Economics at Brown University. He received his MBA and did his doctoral course work in marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania during the time Wroe Alderson and Reavis Cox held sway and when a revolution in marketing thought was taking place. He completed his PhD at the University of London’s Graduate School of Economics under Basil Yamey.

The dominant US framework in marketing from the turn of the twentieth century up to the 1950s emphasized description and classification of marketing functions, institutions and commodities. During the 1950s and 1960s, lead by Alderson (1957), these traditional approaches to marketing thought were being transformed into an emphasis on explanation and theory building focusing on marketing management and systems thinking.

The opening article by Donald F Dixon, “Wroe Alderson’s Marketing Behaviour and Executive Action Inserted into Reavis Cox’s marketing theory course at Wharton 50 years ago: a student’s reaction” provides witness to this historic turning point in marketing thought and serves to highlight the kinds of changes and also the narrowing in thinking taking place at the time. It was originally written in 1958, a time of dramatic change in the way the doctoral seminar on Marketing Theory, taught by Reavis Cox, at Wharton was reshaped after the impact of Alderson’s (1957) book: Marketing Behavior and Executive Action (MBEA). This paper has never been published before, and Dixon agreed to make some introductory comments to put it into context. It came to our attention, a few years ago only because Don was clearing out his files and, now to his regret, shared the essay with us. It provided the impetus for us to propose and edit this special issue. The significance of the manuscript is in the impact on marketing thought and theory before and after the publication of MBEA. As Dixon regarded the change in content, “All I remember is being quite angry at what happened with the Cox course once I had carefully compared the two versions” (personal communication 2009).

The changes in the seminar, based on Alderson’s book, herald the beginning of the move towards a managerial view of marketing rather than viewing the firm’s activities as a part of the larger marketing system. Don railed against this at the time and championed a general systems approach in which the firm was a part of the marketing system, which in turn was a sub-system of the socio-economic system. From the perspective of a hierarchy of systems, the marketing activities of a firm are necessarily embedded-in and influenced by the larger marketing, economic and social systems, of which it is a part. To Dixon, this provides a more balanced and informed perspective regarding the nature of marketing tasks and problems that allows it to be linked to the theories of other social sciences. Moreover, the marketing systems framework generates more profound insights into the nature of marketing in the firm, the household, the channel and the aggregate marketing system, as well as society. A systems perspective provides the underlying framework from which to view and analyze the role of all actors in marketing, including the firm. The micromarketing management approach is an inside out view, which overemphasizes applying technology and underemphasizes conceptual understanding.

The comments to this paper by Wilkinson, addresses the question raised at the end of Dixon’s paper: Is marketing management all there is? He argues, all normative theories of action are based on some underlying descriptive or positive theory of how and why things happen, but the marketing management approach leaves these largely underdeveloped or only developed from the perspective of one actor, the firm, as the primary actor doing things to others in a stimulus response manner. Marketing management, in short, is something firms do to consumers. A point Don continually emphasized, anticipating today’s greater focus on networks, cooperative strategies and the co-production of value with consumers and others. The narrowly focused agenda on marketing management, Wilkinson argues, has restricted the scope and relevance of mainstream marketing theory, neglecting various areas that have been taken up by other disciplines than marketing, such as strategic purchasing, supply chain management, business networks and led to a one sided view of relationship marketing.

The remaining articles in this special issue comprise an account of Dixon’s contributions to marketing thought or build upon some of his theoretical work, such as systems, value, services and households. In “The timeless intellectual contributions of Donald F. Dixon,” Robert D. Tamilia discusses a number of Dixon’s seminal areas of research, including his contribution to the history of marketing thought, to marketing systems thinking, to channels, to market exchange and to buying and selling activities. Tamilia notes that although Dixon primarily emphasized macromarketing, he was not hostile to marketing management, but recognized the limitations of such a narrow approach as a framework for understanding the whole of marketing. Indeed, several articles in this issue apply Dixonian macromarketing thinking to micromarketing issues of firms and households.

Bert Rosenbloom and Boryana Dimitrova present Dixon’s systems perspective to understanding marketing as an alternative to the marketing mix framework in their article: “The marketing mix paradigm and the Dixonian systems perspective of marketing.” They show that marketing provides benefits to society as a whole and not just to business firms and their customers. Further, this broader perspective addresses larger issues, such as do the poor pay more, that do not arise when viewing marketing from standpoint of the firm.

“Giving voice to marketing’s intellectual heritage: Dixon’s view of marketing as value creation,” by Stephen F. Pirog III and Michael F. Smith, notes that much of the cause of definitional difficulties and rediscovered concepts in contemporary marketing thought arises from ignoring the ideas of scholars who came before. (It is often more of a truism than a joke that many faculty regard history as something that was written before they became a doctoral student.) The authors discuss some of Dixon’s less known articles to explore the distinction and significance of the value in use and value in exchange dichotomy; and how it leads to marketing as the provision of services before there was a services dominant logic. They also show how Dixon clarified the confusing segmentation versus differentiation issue that has bedeviled marketing authors for more than half a century.

Carol Kaufman-Scarborough, in her work “Households: a systematic unit of analysis through history” combines Dixon’s early writings on disadvantaged and inner city households with his later work on systemizing household production functions. She then extends these two Dixon research streams to explore how productive household processes may become underutilized to the point of becoming non-productive, particularly in the case of “homeless households.”

Contributions to the Explorations & Insights section reflect on Don Dixon the man and scholar and his impact on the academic development of people and places around the world. Ian Wilkinson reflects back on his years working with Dixon on various projects including their book The Marketing System and the leading role Don played. He shows the impact of Dixon’s depth of scholarship and breadth of reading and how this lead to a logically complete nested systems perspective. One that places marketing in the firm in the context of other micro and macromarketing systems and, in so doing, provides a clear intellectual roadmap of marketing issues, problems and theories. Ian also reveals something about Don the man and his relentless search for understanding and how this manifests in a robust yet, caring style of debate that is, at the same time, stimulating, frustrating and enlightening. In particular, he focuses on Don’s long term, dedicated commitment to researching the history of marketing thought and to challenging much of the conventional wisdom in marketing.

Roger A. Layton remembers Dixon as the visiting academic who in 1969 came to the University of New South Wales in Sydney to spend his sabbatical, during the very early years of the development of the School of Marketing. Don came to follow up on his research about developments in petrol distribution systems and to see how this was playing out in Australia. Roger had recently been appointed to the first Chair in Marketing in Australia and came from a background in statistics and market research. As Roger observes, Dixon’s systems approach found a welcome and sympathetic audience and this had a significant impact on the way marketing education and research developed in Australia, largely under the leadership of Roger Layton.

A long-term friend and research partner, Keith Blois, based at Oxford University, sees Don as his mentor. In this piece, he describes his early interactions and research collaboration with Dixon. Keith shows how Don’s writings and systems perspective broadened and deepened his understanding of marketing and how they revealed the rather narrow focus of much contemporary theory, restricted as it was to a 4Ps approach to marketing management and to a limited intellectual heritage. This appealed to Keith, originally an economist, who had contributed to an extended view of the firm with his early concept of vertical quasi-integration (Blois, 1972). Keith comments, like others in this special issue, on the depth and rigor of Dixon’s scholarship. He also tells us more about Don the gentleman; how he recognized a personal crisis and, with care and sympathy, offered his help in ways that were both human and scholarly at the same time.

In a fascinating piece of scholarship, Mark Tadajewski analyzes Dixon’s book collection and its intersection with Don’s published work. He argues that Dixon’s inspiration and ability to make connections, where others might overlook them, resulted from his reading both extremely broadly and also deeply. He then shows how Dixon’s historical research addresses contemporary issues and is still critical reading for new generations of marketing students.

Eric H. Shaw reflects back to his time as a doctoral student sitting in Dixon’s Seminar on the History of Marketing Thought and Theory – twice! The depth and breadth of coverage of the seminar show once again Don’s mastery of a vast literature and intellectual heritage. He also paints a picture of Dixon the teacher and the way he engages and challenges his students, forcing them to develop their own ideas and learn by their mistakes rather than to digest a prepackaged set of ideas. We see here, the Don that would have railed against the changes to the Marketing Theory seminar at Wharton when he was a doctoral student and which led to the opening article of this special issue.

Taken together, these articles and comments highlight several themes evident in Dixon’s work. His interest in the intellectual heritage of marketing thought allowed him to avoid much of the confusion of re-inventing concepts and view ideas that others missed. His use of the general systems framework to organize ideas and phenomena offered him an unsurpassed ability to analyze the marketing system broadly as a unified whole. As his writings show, Dixon followed in the footsteps of the great thinkers, throughout the history of Western civilization, who discussed aspects of markets, marketing and marketers through time, including: Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, St Augustine of Hippo, Maimonides, St Thomas of Aquinas, Michel de Montaigne, William Petty, Daniel Defoe, David Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Etienne de Condillac, John S. Mill, John B. Clark, Thorstein Veblen, Alfred Marshall, Edward Chamberlin, Joan Robinson, Ralph Breyer, Kenneth Boulding and Wroe Alderson, among others. By following in their path and then building on the work of these giants, Dixon brought his insightfulness and scholarship to our understanding of the role, value, nature and scope of the marketing system[1].

Don Dixon’s list of publications as well as the readings in his Seminar on the Development of Marketing Thought may be found at the CHARM Association web site: http://charmassociation.org/don_dixon.htm./

Eric H. Shaw, Ian F. WilkinsonGuest Editors