The Practical Domain of Marketing: The Notion of a‘Free’Enterprise Market Economy as a Guise for Institutionalized Marketing Power

A bstract . The development of certain key concepts in marketing is explained from an anthropological frame of reference. Marketing thought, it is argued, emerged as a conceptual domain to fill the gap left by the economists ' abandonment of the real world. But it had to do so in such a way that a practical description of the emerging real world was presented as consistent with the economists’account of the atomistic market economy. Certain key concepts in marketing evolved or were invented to suggest that consistency and functioned as bridges over which a sense of profound meaning and purpose would transfer from economic theory to marketing thought. These same marketing concepts function as covers for the power that marketing institutions have come to exercise and thereby serve not the understanding or improvement of the economic system but the goals of those who have power in the system.