Vironmäki, Emma: Academic Marketing in Finland: Living up to Conflicting Expectations by |ˈpʌblɪʃɪŋ

— Emma Vironmäki — Publisher: Suomen Ekonomiliitto – Finlands Ekonomförbund

Academic Marketing in Finland: Living up to Conﬂicting Expectations

The Finnish Association of Graduates in Economics and Business Administration SEFE ry, Ratavartijankatu 2, 00520 Helsinki, Finland

Typography: Michael Diedrichs Cover illustration: Matti Piippo Inside cover drawing: “Abstraction” by Emma Vironmäki Printing house: Painosalama, Turku

ISBN 978–951–8968–65–1 ISSN 1459–434X

Åbo Akademi School of Business

— Emma Vironmäki — Publisher: Suomen Ekonomiliitto – Finlands Ekonomförbund

Academic Marketing in Finland: Living up to Conﬂicting Expectations

The Finnish Association of Graduates in Economics and Business Administration SEFE ry, Ratavartijankatu 2, 00520 Helsinki, Finland

Typography: Michael Diedrichs Cover illustration: Matti Piippo Inside cover drawing: “Abstraction” by Emma Vironmäki Printing house: Painosalama, Turku

ISBN 978–951–8968–65–1 ISSN 1459–434X

Åbo Akademi School of Business

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am eternally indebted to my extraordinary supervisor, Professor Barbara Czarniawska, who ﬁrst saved me, and has since spared no effort to row this project into harbour. Nor would I be writing these words without the consistent support of my husband, Docent Magnus Gustafsson, who not only stood by the darkest times, but also provided me with practical advice on writing interview material. There are no words to express my gratitude to you both. This book is dedicated to Dr. Daisaku Ikeda, whose sole purpose in life is to make this world a better place.

This research project would not have been initiated without the original idea and enthusiasm of my ﬁrst supervisor, Professor Päivi Eriksson. Professor Kari Lilja also played a crucial role in its progress during my time in Helsinki, and Professor Saara Hyvönen enabled me to earn a licentiate degree in her department. Professor Alf Rehn provided me with an ofﬁce and a coffee room, without which there would be no dissertation, and Professor Bengt Kristensson Uggla also supported me when it was most needed. I am grateful to you all. I am also grateful to all my interviewees for their insightful and intelligent narratives. Without colleagues there would only be empty coffee rooms. Thank you, Docent Minna Halme and Amanuensis Kyösti Koskela for sharing many experiences. With my colleague and friend, Dr. Niina Koivunen, I have had the pleasure of sharing my professional life and my philosophy of life. Thank you for the many enlightening discussions on both matters.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Åbo Akademi School of Business provided a haven for finishing this thesis. Thank you, dear colleagues, for discussions, friendship, support, and lunch company. In there, I have also had the privilege of taking advantage of the world’s best librarians, May Ahlqvist and Inger Pietiläinen. I never knew how valuable librarians could be until I met you. Google is nothing compared to you, May! I have also benefited greatly from discussions with Dr. Tiina Vainio, Docent Matti Hyvärinen, and Docent Mika Pantzar. Thank you, Professor Nina Colwill, for editing the thesis. Not only do my thoughts sound much better now, but you also forced me to rethink many important parts of my manuscript with your invaluable advice. My official thesis examiners, Professor Jonathan Schroeder and Professor Jussi Välimaa also challenged my brain capacity at the final stages of this research project. Thank you for your insightful comments.

Foundation for Economic Education, Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, Turun kauppaopetussäätiö, Dagmar och Ferdinand Jacobssons fond, Waldemar von Frenckells stiftelse, and the Åbo Akademi Research Institute have provided the necessary funding for writing this thesis. In addition, I have received funding from the Academy of Finland’s Liike 1 research program, more speciﬁcally the sub–project on experts that was led by Professor Marja Eriksson from the University of Tampere. Thank you, Marja, for taking me on. SEFE—the Finnish Association of Graduates in Economics and Business Administration—decided to publish my thesis, for which I am grateful.

Friends and family—providing a world outside academic concerns—you are my lifeline. Thank you all. Specific thanks go to my brother–in–law, graphic designer Michael Diedrichs, for making the contents of this book look good. An additional thanks goes to a wise woman, Maila Seppä, who taught me to breathe. I hope it shows in the text. It will definitely be a new experience to my children Tyra and Arne to have a mother who has no unfinished thesis. Thank you for bearing with me.

Henriksgatan 7, April 2007

Emma Vironmäki

VII

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Henriksgatan 7, April 2007

Emma Vironmäki

VII

CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE 1

CHAPTER 1 : INTRODUCTION 6

Introducing marketing 6 How marketing was “scientiﬁed” 8 Introducing higher education and business education 11 The study and the dissertation 12 A few words on semantics 13

CHAPTER 2 : A TRAVEL GUIDE A.K.A. THE RESEARCH PROCESS 15

Assembling the pieces 16 Collecting the research material 16 Finding (relevant) literature 22 Analysing the interviews 25 Accidental academics 25 The process of analysis 29

VIII

A few words on interviews and interpretation 37 Reflections on the choices made 41

CHAPTER 3 : UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IN GENERAL AND IN BUSINESS AND MARKETING 43

Universities 44 From elites to masses and managerial principles 44 Academic work: teaching and doing research 50 Finnish higher education 52 Background 52 Faculty and funding 56 The binary higher education system: universities and polytechnics 59 University–level business education in Finland 63 Background 63 University–level education in marketing 68 Marketing curricula 68 Degrees in marketing 71 Marketing at university level in 2006 73 Summary of the development: the calendar of events in marketing 76

CHAPTER 4 : THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARKETING AS A DISCIPLINE 82

Marketing as a discipline: the USA 83 The beginnings 83 Standardized knowledge 86 The development of a marketing discipline in Finland 91 Charts as tools for seeing networks 91 First generation 101 Second generation 107 Summary 114

CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE 1

CHAPTER 1 : INTRODUCTION 6

Introducing marketing 6 How marketing was “scientiﬁed” 8 Introducing higher education and business education 11 The study and the dissertation 12 A few words on semantics 13

CHAPTER 2 : A TRAVEL GUIDE A.K.A. THE RESEARCH PROCESS 15

Assembling the pieces 16 Collecting the research material 16 Finding (relevant) literature 22 Analysing the interviews 25 Accidental academics 25 The process of analysis 29

VIII

A few words on interviews and interpretation 37 Reflections on the choices made 41

CHAPTER 3 : UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IN GENERAL AND IN BUSINESS AND MARKETING 43

CHAPTER 4 : THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARKETING AS A DISCIPLINE 82

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 5 : UNFOLDING THE CONTROVERSIES IN MARKETING 115 Becoming a (marketing) academic: accidental or not? 116 Superhumans or merely professors? 119 Specialists or general workers? 123 Individuals of parts of community? 126 Teachers: at the centre of the faculty or its margin? 129 Students: products or clients? 130 More administration—less control 133 Collaboration or lonely work? 137 Open or closed university? 141 Marketing practice and theory 145 The pedagogy: general education or practical skills? 149 Marketing: an activity or a way of thinking? 151

Summary of the controversies 165

SAMMANFATTNING 199 TIIVISTELMÄ 203

REFERENCES 208 Bibliography 208 WebPages 223

CHAPTER 6 : LIVING UP TO CONFLICTING EXPECTATIONS 167

The emerging discipline and separation in it 167 Practical and scientific orientations 170 Academic research in marketing: different views 173 The ideal marketing scholars? 176 Managerial university: Clients, employers and products 178 Producers of knowledge 183

EPILOGUE 196

Theory and practice revisited 186 The appearance of a theory, the contents of a good story… 190 Final reflections and future research 191

Dissertations in chapter 4 223 APPENDICES

229

The letter of request for an interview 231 Brief translation of the letter 233 The interviewees 234 An example of node transcripts 236 XI

CONTENTS

Summary of the controversies 165

SAMMANFATTNING 199 TIIVISTELMÄ 203

REFERENCES 208 Bibliography 208 WebPages 223

CHAPTER 6 : LIVING UP TO CONFLICTING EXPECTATIONS 167

EPILOGUE 196

Theory and practice revisited 186 The appearance of a theory, the contents of a good story… 190 Final reflections and future research 191

Dissertations in chapter 4 223 APPENDICES

229

The letter of request for an interview 231 Brief translation of the letter 233 The interviewees 234 An example of node transcripts 236 XI

CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES, TABLES, AND CHARTS…

Table 1: The names and contents of the nodes 34 Table 2: Students applying and accepted to university–level business education 1990–2004 71 Table 3: Marketing degrees in Finland, 1971–1997 73 Table 4: Marketing education provided at Finnish universities 74 Table 5: Marketing education at Finnish business schools 75 Table 6: Six decades of the Journal of Marketing: Predominant metaphors 84 Figure 1: The process of analysis 37 Figure 2: The education system in Finland 61 Figure 3: The system of academic research in marketing. Opinions of the interviewees with scientiﬁc orientations 173 Figure 4: The system of academic research in marketing. Opinions of the interviewees with practical orientation, or orientation to both 174 Figure 5: The system of academic research in marketing. A summary of the interviewees’ opinions 175 XII

Chart 1: Thesis acknowledgements in chronological order 94 Chart 2: Thesis acknowledgements by different schools 98

Academic Marketing in Finland: Living up to Conﬂicting Expectations Emma Vironmäki Åbo Akademi School of Business

CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES, TABLES, AND CHARTS…

Chart 1: Thesis acknowledgements in chronological order 94 Chart 2: Thesis acknowledgements by different schools 98

Academic Marketing in Finland: Living up to Conﬂicting Expectations Emma Vironmäki Åbo Akademi School of Business

PROLOGUE

X.X.1997

A conversation among ﬁve distinguished marketing professors and one doctoral student.1 Picture a coffee table at a marketing tutorial in some academic institution in Finland in the late 1990s. Five marketing professors, all men, are sitting together, discussing the position of marketing—somewhere between science and practice. This situation is imaginary, as these professors would not likely seek each other’s company voluntarily. However, the content of their discussion could have been as follows: Prof. B: (who likes to provoke) To tell the truth, my viewpoint has always been that you poor creatures are far too scientiﬁc and that the education you offer is far too theoretical. I think it should be obligatory for marketing professors to do some work in practice. For many university people, it might be their only connection with practical life. Prof. A: But it’s just such thinking that has led to the idea that 1

All lines are direct quotations from the interviews, with the addition of a few discoursive devices, such as “well” or “yes”. The characters are loosely based on the classiﬁcation of the interviewees, explained in Chapter 2. See Mulkay (1984) for a similar representation of interviews. Also Ferrell et al. (1979, as quoted by Hunt 1983) presented a discussion on the same topic among marketing scholars and practitioners of marketing. Their lines were taken from a panel discussion, titled “What is the appropriate orientation for the marketing academician?”

PROLOGUE

X.X.1997

PROLOGUE

everything happening in practice is somehow better than anything else. And the basic task for academic education should be to develop an apparatus to evaluate what is good or bad! Prof. B: Yes, I’m aware that the basic task of universities is research. But I see no contradiction if the basic research is focused on areas that are truly useful. It is extremely pleasant for me as a researcher to see something function in practice. Personally, I’d never want a professor to my department, who had never been on the other side of the fence. I must say that it is a great loss that there are so few professors with practical experience left. Prof. H: Well, I’ve always claimed that the main purpose of academic work is to produce new knowledge—knowledge that helps other research or knowledge that can be applied to practice and the results put to use. Not just collecting dust in the library. Prof. B: Also the students like it when you can relate your own experiences, successes, and failures… Prof. A: Yes, and the students keep up this discussion, by implying that you are “dusty” —that you don’t know anything about practical issues. But they don’t have any work experience themselves, so they can’t really appreciate the level of the teaching, or judge how research relates to practical life. But after they’ve graduated and come later back for further training, they say that they get the point now, and that they start to understand the meaning of what they have learned during their education.

Prof. C: I remember that in the 1970s it was almost forbidden to be in contact with the outside world, because it was believed that the objectivity of research would suffer. It was as if we were in our research chambers looking at things as they really are… But nowadays we’re allowed to be in contact with the world

—I would say we are obliged to be—and of course that’s very rewarding. Prof. D: I must say that I always try to teach the students business manners and ways of behaving in the business world, as a kind of indoctrination. Prof. A: But isn’t the purpose of academic education to teach students some basic abilities for dealing with the unknown, teaching them to communicate—also social skills and languages? These are skills that one learns through hard work, not by increasing practical cases in the education. Prof. B: (upset): Well, when you look at what gets published under the name of marketing, it’s too high–ﬂying. The appreciation in companies declines, you now, when you start studying esoteric issues. And the more complicated you make your research, the bigger guru you become in academic circles. But from my point of view, you need to teach people to do something! Prof. H: (trying to calm B down) When I started, I thought that marketing was the liveliest of all business subjects. It was fun talking to students, because they were interested, and I could get live, exciting examples from practice. Marketing was deﬁnitely a subject in which theory could not be taught without examples from practice. Prof. D: The marketing function aims at binding the company to the market. It follows that marketing teachers need to be bound to practice, to be in close contact with the phenomenon they study and teach.

PROLOGUE

Prof. D: I don’t actually want to say what needs to be said.

The student and other professors are slightly puzzled by this sudden monologue. The student seems ready to escape and the other professors start collecting their papers, glance at their program sheets, and mumble about the next session that will begin any minute in the big auditorium nearby. Professor D sits still, deep in thought. Professor B is anxious and a bit upset. He feels that he did not make himself heard. Professor A does not look happy either. The student is perplexed that there seems to be so much to say about this issue. But, if they put it like this, is the purpose of marketing education to teach future marketing practitioners the skills required for different marketing tasks? Or is it, as Professor A believes, to learn how to deal with the unknown, to foster capable people with academic wisdom?

Student: (backs away) You don’t need to, I’m sorry…

She decides to take a closer look at this problem.

In the background hovers a doctoral student, who now clears her throat and enters the discussion. She directs her question to Professor D. Student: You apparently move around a lot between the academic world and the world of practice. So what do you think is the most obvious difference between these two? Prof. D: (clearly disturbed) You are moving into sensitive areas… (Student lets out a nervous giggle).

Prof. D: Maybe the biggest difference is… Put it this way: the academic community is very rarefied. Its contact surfaces with the outside world, society and the international side of business life are very narrow. Well, there are some, but they are between individual researchers or universities, which is only a fraction of the contact surface that universities should have, being a part of the society and global economy. If you think of the business world, it’s very difficult to imagine that a company could act in a vacuum like universities do. I would bring the same principles into universities: listen more to society; learn more from society; find the strategic, important, and central problems; and try to help solve these problems by directing our research to those questions… At the moment, there are too many people who do research for research’s sake. That’s understandable, of course. In universities there has to be a right to do theoretical research that has got nothing to do with the society around us. I do accept that.

PROLOGUE

Prof. D: I don’t actually want to say what needs to be said.

Student: (backs away) You don’t need to, I’m sorry…

She decides to take a closer look at this problem.

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1 : INTRODUCTION Introducing marketing Before beginning our journey into the academic discipline called marketing in the country called Finland, I want to briefly present what it is that marketing means and does. This description is based primarily on marketing textbook definitions, chiefly from the USA. The reason for this choice is the strong US influence on Finnish marketing, which will be explained more thoroughly in the next chapter. Definitions of marketing usually include the word exchange or transaction. Marketing deals with everything that happens when consumers and producers meet in the markets and exchange goods or services for money. As defined by Philip Kotler (1976), the leading author of marketing textbooks for three decades, in his book Marketing Management. Analysis, Planning and Control: Marketing is human activity directed at satisfying needs and wants through exchange processes (p. 5–6).

In that sense, marketing began when the ﬁrst caveman decided to exchange his squirrel skin for a chunk of meat instead of taking it by force. Those who see marketing as persuasion might say that marketing is a social action that has existed as long as original sin: since Satan persuaded Eve to bite the apple (Holbrook & Hulbert 2002, 706)2. Even nature around us is an example of marketing; the scent of a ﬂower persuades bees to choose its nectar (Kotler 1982).

INTRODUCING MARKETING

The marketing literature reveals almost as many definitions as there are marketing textbooks—definitions that have varied across time. From the 1960s through to the 1980s, the essence of marketing was exchange and customer satisfaction, attained by having the right products at the right price in right place at the right time. By the 1990s, the definitions were becoming more abstract and began to reflect the global nature of marketing. As Czinkota et al. (1997) suggested, “Marketing is a state of mind”. Nevertheless, every introductory chapter in most marketing textbooks seems to be unanimous: the centre of business activities is the customer rather than the company. Marketing is an activity seen from the point of view of the end result: the customer. Thus, marketing activities are the responsibility of general management, not only of the marketing department. However, if you ask people on the street what marketing is, they will probably say selling (Panula 2000), or advertising. In everyday life, marketing happens when our favourite TV program is interrupted by commercials or when we pick up the phone, and on the other end of the line is a salesperson with new, breathtaking offers. Yet marketing scholars prefer a much broader definition of marketing: “Selling is only the tip of marketing iceberg”, says Philip Kotler (2000, 8). Morris Holbrook and James Hulbert (2002) provide us with a good definition of marketing when they say that throughout its existence as a modern field of science the focus of marketing has been the gap between consumers and producers. Consumers need information about products (promotion); there must be techniques that physically move the product from producer to consumer and locations (place) where these consumers can purchase the product. The producer must also know what the consumer wants (product), and how much the consumer is willing to 2

These definitions seem to suggest that marketing is a natural force that has always existed —a force that, during its scientification process, marketing scholars have managed to explain in their theories and teachings. These examples are illustrations of different viewpoints, and hopefully fulfil their role as such, even though there are no cavemen in the saga of Adam and Eve.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCING MARKETING

CHAPTER 1

pay for it (price). Here we have the classical marketing mix, articulated by Jerome McCarthy in 1960, and later adopted by Philip Kotler as the 4P Model: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. The 4P Model—the marketing mix—includes practical issues to be dealt with while going about one’s business. Consequently, the task of the marketing manager is to manipulate these parameters in order to close the gap between consumers and producers (Holbrook & Hulbert 2002, 710, emphasis added), while preferably creating proﬁt for the producer and satisfaction for the consumer.

How marketing was “scientiﬁed” Let us suppose for a moment that the millennium does arrive, and marketing does, indeed, become a full–ﬂedged science. What then? Robert D. Buzzell, 1963

It is impossible to identify an unambiguous starting point for the academic discipline of marketing. If the starting point is when it was conceptualized and baptized (Panula 2000, 17), then the point of beginning is in the USA around 1910–1920 (Bartels 1976). However, as Franck Cochoy (1998, 195) stated, the discipline of marketing understood as controlling the markets, started well before the discipline of marketing was understood as the ﬁeld of scholarly research and education of markets. Thus, the academic discipline of marketing has not really contributed to the construction of markets—rather, markets existed, and the ﬁrst marketing scholars went in where the action was, and described what happened when goods were produced, transported, and sold to customers. Such descriptions date back as far as Weld (1915).

INTRODUCING MARKETING

The dawn of the “scientification” of marketing, on the other hand, can be pinpointed with greater ease. It has its roots in the work of definition committees (e.g. one established by American Marketing Association in 1933) and other pursuits to standardize its contents and concepts. Scientification was embarked upon more fully after the Second World War3, when more and more areas of human activity were brought into the lap of modern science. This was partly due to the proven success of science during the war and partly because the ideals of modernism that were strongly felt in post–war life (see Whitley 1992). Those who followed the tenets of modernism cherished an idealistic picture of social development, in which any intervention by science was considered equal to development, a better world, and happier lives. And there were good reasons for that view: scientific research in medicine had begun to extinguish diseases that had previously been considered lethal; and technological research provided industry with more sophisticated methods, creating more jobs and higher standards of living. By the 1950s, business was flourishing, industry was booming, people began to be called consumers, and homes started to become show rooms of the latest technology (see Pantzar 2000). Every technological and scientific development was seen as enhancing human welfare. The modern scientific ideal, however, was based on laboratory research, where the keywords were precision, validity, and reliability. The development of knowledge was linear in that world view, and research evolved around core theories. Modern behavioural sciences were similar: Psychological tests on human behaviour were conducted in laboratory conditions, in order to explain human action by valid and reliable methods. Such a scientific ideal was adopted by management sciences, a practical field of knowledge involving human behaviour that entered higher education, and it began in earnest to become a full–fledged science.

Although in the USA, the Great Depression turned out to be signiﬁcant for the development of scientiﬁcation (see chapter 4, p. 78).

CHAPTER 1

How marketing was “scientiﬁed” Let us suppose for a moment that the millennium does arrive, and marketing does, indeed, become a full–ﬂedged science. What then? Robert D. Buzzell, 1963

INTRODUCING MARKETING

Although in the USA, the Great Depression turned out to be signiﬁcant for the development of scientiﬁcation (see chapter 4, p. 78).

CHAPTER 1

In the 1960s, the discussions focused on whether or not marketing could be considered a science. Robert D. Buzzell (1963) was one of the first to address this question in his Harvard Business Review article, “Is Marketing a Science?” To be against science is as heretical as to be against motherhood. Yet when executives are asked to consider the social and economic process of marketing as a science or prospective science, most confess to extreme scepticism (p. 32). Thus, the issue of uniting managerial knowledge and scientific research raised some doubts. However, the Ford and Carnegie Foundations had already launched vast financing programs aimed at strengthening the quantitative research orientations, also in marketing. Research became more scholarly, especially with universities beginning to stress the importance of academic publication (Westing, as quoted in Hunt 1983; Cochoy 1998). The era of behavioural and quantitative research followed. It produced a few critical reactions, mainly worries about the insignificance of such research for marketing practitioners and doubts about the ability of research to increase the knowledge of scholars (Westing 1977). The next wave of criticism was for the excessively scholarly emphasis of marketing; it came from European scholars via the so–called critical management school, with Glenn Morgan (1992), Stephen Brown (1993), and Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott (1996) in the lead. Currently, the excessively scholarly emphasis of marketing has been debated in such non–academic journals as Harvard Business Review (Bennis & O’Toole 2005) and The Economist (24.3.2006)4. 10

Referring to an article in Advertising Age (Neff 2005), titled “Don’t study too hard; MBA’s fail at marketing”.

Introducing higher education and business schools Universities are the principal venues of higher education. Their history in Europe extends over almost nine hundred years, and for many centuries —until the latter half of the 20th century, in fact—university education was the privilege of a few. The massiﬁcation (Välimaa 2001) of universities is a recent phenomenon, as is the notion of education as a provider of competitive advantage for societies (Tomlinson 2001). An emphasis on competition and business–like control systems entered Finnish universities during the 1990s, in a rapid development that has confused the entire university sector. Discussions about closing academic departments and re–directing research funds have become everyday news, and the academic career system in Finland has undergone such rapid changes that academic unemployment has become a reality. Universities base their teaching on research; hence academics are usually both researchers and teachers. Nevertheless, the evaluation of academic merits emphasizes research in the form of academic publications, whereas good teaching is rarely rewarded in career systems. Although teaching is the most visible activity of universities, few university teachers are educated in the skill of teaching. The ﬁrst Finnish business schools of higher education appeared in Helsinki in 1909 and 1911, in the aftermath of general changes in higher education policy. Two practical areas, agriculture and forestry, entered university level education in Helsinki in 1907, and engineers followed suit one year later. Hence, only business administration was remaining on the lower educational level. As the need for higher education in business had been discussed already, this development sparked off their actual establishment (Michelsen 2001, 23).

CHAPTER 1

Referring to an article in Advertising Age (Neff 2005), titled “Don’t study too hard; MBA’s fail at marketing”.

CHAPTER 1

The purpose of the new business schools was to provide the business world with skilful people. Toward this end, their curricula were based on such practical subjects such as bookkeeping, accounting, and chemistry (Westerlund 1984; Michelsen 2001). The next business school was established at Åbo Akademi University in Turku in 1927. The Finnish university network expanded rapidly during the latter half of the 20th century, and by 2006 there were nine universities and three business schools offering a marketing curriculum. Since the end of the pre–war German era in marketing teaching, the focus has been primarily on US literature. The history of Finnish business schools is presented in more detail in Chapter 3.

The study and the dissertation This text presents the results of a study examining marketing professors’ views of Finnish academic marketing. I collected 31 narrative interviews with Finnish marketing academics, mostly professors, and the interviews are the primary, but not the only research material in this text. I do not compare the opinions of practitioners with those of scholars, but provide insights into the nature and development of marketing as an academic subject. The dilemma of practical or scientiﬁc orientation is not the only focus here, although it holds the central place in my thesis, as it did in the professors’ discussion in the prologue. The structure of the thesis is as follows: 12

In Chapter 2, I describe the research process, showing how the research material has been collected and analysed.

T H E S T U D Y A N D T H E D I S S E RTAT I O N

Chapter 3 contains a description of the contemporary university system in Finland and of Finnish higher education. I also introduce university– level education in business studies and marketing in this chapter. Chapter 4 explains how the discipline of marketing developed in the USA and Finland. Chapter 5 introduces the contents of Finnish academic marketing from the point of view of the interviewees. In this chapter, I focus on twelve controversies inherent in academic work and marketing. Chapter 6 presents the conclusions, which concern the varied effects of the split in orientations, reﬂections on the managerial university culture, and the theory/practice dichotomy. In the last part of the chapter, I suggest possible lines of further research. Epilogue describes my meeting with an interviewee, and reﬂects on how things have changed since the time of the interviews.

A few words on semantics When referring to marketing as a branch of learning, I use the terms “academic marketing”, “marketing discipline” or “the discipline of marketing”. The people working within this discipline are referred to as “marketing academics” or “marketing scholars”. In general level, I understand “marketing science” to be the body of knowledge that marketing scholars deal with; and “marketing discipline” to be the area of different scholarly activities—research and education—where marketing academics work. Hence, the discipline of marketing is the focus of my research, but I will refer to the discussion of the scientiﬁc role of marketing, as it holds a central position in the US literature on the development of marketing discipline.

CHAPTER 1

In Chapter 2, I describe the research process, showing how the research material has been collected and analysed.

T H E S T U D Y A N D T H E D I S S E RTAT I O N

CHAPTER 1

It also needs to be stressed that there are linguistic differences in the use of the word science. In Finnish, it can also refer to academic disciplines, while in English, it is mostly understood as referring to the so called “hard sciences”, or “natural sciences”. Hence, I try to be consequent in using the expression science as not referring to a certain branch of learning—an academic discipline. Finnish institutions that provide non–university, post–secondary education are called “commercial institutions”. Finnish university– level education providers with curricula in Business Administration are usually called “Finnish business schools”:

CHAPTER 2 : A TRAVEL GUIDE, A.K.A. THE RESEARCH PROCESS If earnest scholars do not ﬁnd it dignifying to compare an introduction of a science to a travel guide, be they kindly reminded that “where to travel” and “what is worth seeing there” is nothing but a way of saying in plain English what is usually said under the pompous Greek name of “method” or, even worse, “methodology”. The advantage of a travel book approach over a “discourse on method” is that it cannot be confused with the territory on which it simply overlays. A guide can be put to use as well as forgotten, placed in a backpack, stained with grease and coffee, scribbled all over, its pages torn apart to light a ﬁre under a barbecue. In brief, it offers suggestions rather than imposing itself on the reader. Bruno Latour (2005, 17)

• The Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration: HSEBA5 • The Turku School of Economics and Business Administration: TSEBA • The Swedish–speaking School of Business Administration in Helsinki: Hanken. • Åbo Akademi School of Economics and Business Administration: HHÅA Three ﬁelds form the basis of management studies in Finland: accounting, management (also leadership, organization and management, or administration, and combinations of these), and marketing (or international business/marketing). The entire ﬁeld is referred to in this dissertation as management studies or business administration6.

It must be noted that since 2006 both Helsinki and Turku schools have been called School of Economics: HSE and TSE respectively. Because part of this thesis was written before and part after this renaming, I have retained their older names for consistency. Although the need to simplify and shorten their names is understandable, it is interesting that the schools stress economics in their name, as economics is only one sub–ﬁeld in the schools. 6

Liiketaloustiede / Företagsekonomi in Finnish and Swedish.

In this chapter, I explain how I have conducted this research. This is, therefore, the method chapter of this thesis; although rather than a description of method, it provides, as Latour has proposed, a map for the reader. David Silverman (2000) has also suggested that rather than quoting large amounts of literature on methodology in the form of traditional method chapters, doctoral students should write a natural history chapter7 in their thesis. The purpose of such a natural history should be to reﬂect on the research process and its turns, problems, and discoveries, rather than writing the chapter in retrospect, as if the research in its entirety had been a clear and well–planned process. Following the advice of Silverman and 7

See Koivunen (2003) for an elegant application of Silverman’s advice.

CHAPTER 1

Liiketaloustiede / Företagsekonomi in Finnish and Swedish.

See Koivunen (2003) for an elegant application of Silverman’s advice.

CHAPTER 2

Latour, therefore, I describe the research process in this chapter, reﬂecting on its various phases, my decisions, and their consequences.

Assembling the pieces Collecting the research material My original plan was to write a history of Finland’s higher education in marketing. This history would have included descriptions of the contents of marketing education as well as interviews with marketing professors. For the latter, I planned to conduct structured interviews, inquiring about certain historical events in marketing and gathering respondents’ ideas about what they considered to be the important issues in the ﬁeld of academic marketing. I started to acquaint myself with marketing through curricula material from three large marketing education providers: the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration (HSEBA), The Turku School of Economics and Business Administration (TSEBA) and the University of Tampere. These books, usually called “study guides” in Finland, are aimed at students, and contain information in the form of course titles, course literature, and the teachers responsible for each course. My purpose was to determine the types of courses that were included in the marketing curricula, the books used as the course literature, and the names of persons who appeared to play a central role in marketing area in these schools.

To make the depiction easier, I made three charts—one for each school. The horizontal timeline ran from left to right, starting from the ﬁrst year these books were available8. In the columns, I marked the names of the courses, and under each course name, the course method (e.g. lectures, cases, group work), and the course literature. In this way, I could easily see the entities comprising each of the courses and how the curricula 8

HSEBA: 1952; TSEBA: 1972; Tampere: 1967.

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changed over time. Because there have been many courses in each school, each of these three charts became almost 1 meter long and 50 to 70 cm high. I also counted the most commonly used textbooks according the years they were used as course literature. A working paper based on the contents of these curricula, and the most commonly used textbooks was published a few years later (Vironmäki 2000a). After several months of examining marketing education through these student guides, I was ready to embark upon the interviews. Although I had planned to conduct structured interviews, narrative interviewing (see e.g. Mishler 1986; Hyvärinen 1994) was beginning to be employed in business studies at that time, and it was suggested that narrative interviews might be a more relevant tool for my purposes. A narrative interview (see Rosenthal 1993, 71 and Hyvärinen 1994, 40) allows respondents to choose what they want to discuss, the order of events, and the starting point of their discussion. My focus was on the emergence of the discipline and how its content has been shaped in certain times and places, and narrative interviews offered many possibilities towards that end. Narrative interviews could help me to understand the world views of the actors, rather than providing them with ready–made ideas based on the pre–conceptions of the researcher, as might have happened if I had chosen structured interviews. I chose narrative interviewing in order to see the bigger picture of the subject—its strengths, weaknesses, and inner conflicts, as well as its development. A letter with a request (Appendix 1) for an interview was sent in April 1997 to 40 university teachers of marketing in Finland. The interviewees were chosen chiefly on the basis of the student guides, through which I had formed a broad view of the field, on the published histories of several business schools, and on the WebPages of the schools that had home pages at the time. My purpose was to identify the non–temporary teachers with a relatively long history in the area of marketing, in which I included international marketing or international business. I also wanted to involve a few younger marketing academics.

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Latour, therefore, I describe the research process in this chapter, reﬂecting on its various phases, my decisions, and their consequences.

HSEBA: 1952; TSEBA: 1972; Tampere: 1967.

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Forty teachers met these criteria. Five people declined the request to be interviewed; three appeared to be interested in participating, but scheduling the interview became difficult; and one of the teachers, it turned out, had left the field many years earlier. Thus, 31 interviews were conducted, covering most of the field of academics in marketing9. The interviewees are listed in Appendix 2. Most of the interviews were conducted at the respondents’ offices; a few in the homes of the respondent or in other university settings such as conference rooms.

from what usually was done within marketing. It also became clear that the interviewees seemed to consider this study to be important enough to be worthy of their participation, although they may also have felt that such a level of interest in their personal life histories was somewhat intrusive.

The interviews were conducted in 1997 and 1998 with 31 interviewees: 19 full professors, 7 associate professors10, 2 senior assistants, 1 assistant, 1 lecturer, and 1 researcher.11 I tape recorded all interviews, and they were transcribed verbatim. I have since cleaned the transcripts that I used for the analysis, but I also have the ﬁrst printouts, which contain every word, sigh, and stutter the interviewees uttered. During the interviews I also made notes, primarily in order to avoid staring at the interviewee. I asked the interviewees to tell about their work histories in academic marketing. Hence, the interviews were actually based on two questions: How did you become what you are today? What happened along the way? Although the respondents were not used to being “research objects”, they did not seem to be uncomfortable talking about themselves. During the ﬁrst interviews, I had relatively vague ideas about what was to be done with the material and was unable to present the interviewees with an explicit research question or a clear research method. Yet no interviewee seemed to have problems with the method of inquiry, although it was far 9

One interviewee was actually a professor of economic geography at the time of the interviews, but with a background (and a future, as it has turned out) in marketing; and one was a professor of management, but with prior research interests in the development of Finnish business administration and marketing as a discipline. 10

Most of the interviewees turned out to be good narrators. Some demanded more information—what the others had talked about, for example—and some interviewees hopped over many years of their working life without mentioning them, which led me to asking a few specific questions. In some interviews I participated a bit too enthusiastically, sometimes because the topic at hand was interesting, sometimes —especially at the beginning—because of the imagined need to reassure them about my knowledge of the themes discussed, or because I was too nervous to tolerate silence. Before starting the interviews, I was confident about my ability to listen, but seeing the first transcripts and listening to the tapes was a shock. For example: E: I: E: I: E: I: E: I: E: I:

How did you end up here? I’ve only been here two years… As an assistant? …senior assistant… So, you are senior… Now I’m an assistant again, and I don’t know about the future […] It’s like this in the academia. That’s right. How long ago—you’ve graduated from here, haven’t you? Yes, I graduated in 19XX and I’m ﬁnishing my doctoral thesis this year… You’re in a hurry, so to speak! Well, I don’t know, if you do research full–time, you should come up with something as well. There’s not much else to do…

An academic title that existed until the end of July 1998, and still exists as a salary grade.

The Finnish system of academic positions is explained in Chapter 3. Nevertheless, a few clarifying remarks may be in order here: Assistant is a position held by a doctoral student, and senior assistant is usually a post–doc position. In English these positions are usually referred to as assistant professor. I stick to the direct translations along the lines with Välimaa (2004), because I want non– Finnish readers to be acquainted with the labels attached to these academic positions in Finnish.

I did not allow this interviewee to begin his own narrative, but kept interrupting him. However, as my conﬁdence grew and my knowledge

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An academic title that existed until the end of July 1998, and still exists as a salary grade.

I did not allow this interviewee to begin his own narrative, but kept interrupting him. However, as my conﬁdence grew and my knowledge

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of the subject increased, I started to relax and let people talk at their own pace. I also learned to be careful about leading questions or words with strong connotations—terms like “career” or “to drift”. Although many respondents told me that they had “drifted” into academia, I should never have asked one interviewee: “How did you drift into this profession?” However, I never repeated that mistake. Every interview situation contains the question of power (e.g. Gubrium & Holstein 2002). The imbalance between interviewee and interviewer in my study varied, as there were both professors with decades of experience, and a few who were just ﬁnishing their own theses, and I was a doctoral student in the early phase of my studies. Hence, in some interviews the tone was more conversational, and in some, more like interviewing elites—the interviewee standing and I sitting down, phones ringing, people at the door, the time pressure tangible. As Ostrander (1995) has pointed out, elites are accustomed to being in charge, and used to being asked what they think. Hence, my choice of the interview method, narrative interview, while allowing the interlocutors to talk at their own pace without adjusting to a question pattern, also diminished their resistance to my approach and simultaneously eased the potential power conﬂicts.

The interview material is varied; it contains rich, emotionally loaded stories, straightforward chronicles, and everything in between12. The interviewees are identiﬁed by numbers rather than pseudonyms. I had originally listed them in the order in which they were interviewed, and later randomized them using Excel. Thus, they are numbered P1…P31, where P stands for “professor”, although, as mentioned earlier, not all of them were professors. I have also referred to all of the interviewees as “he” as an additional safeguard against identiﬁcation—only six of them were women. 12 The interviews lasted between 30 minutes and 2.5 hours, and the transcripts comprised 392 pages of text in 1.5–space, typed with Times New Roman, font size 12. The length of the interviews varied between 6 and 28 pages; 42 percent of them were between 11 and 14 pages.

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In summary, the focus of this research is Finnish marketing discipline, but the primary material consists of accounts of careers within the area. Hence, the interviews are embedded in marketing. As the interviewees told their stories, they also discussed academic marketing. What if I had directly asked them what they thought about academic marketing? It would have been such a broad, abstract, question that it probably would not have generated much free narration, even though the interviewees naturally had a lot to say about marketing. As they reflected on marketing in their life stories, however, they told small stories about marketing in a way that they probably would not have done if asked about it directly. The importance of this type of spontaneous reflection was emphasized by Susan Chase (1995), who described her experience as a sociologist who had been interviewed by a colleague for a study on women in academia: […] Some of the questions she asked were not about my experiences at all […]. I felt impatient with these questions but not because I had nothing to say about them. Indeed, I have plenty to say about the differences gender makes in this and other occupations […]. I was impatient because this was neither a classroom interaction nor a casual conversational context; this was supposed to be an interview about my experiences. I did not want the focus to shift away from me and my stories. […] In short, these questions felt like work. Not surprisingly, I offered sociological responses to her sociological questions. Chase (1995,11) As the respondents in my study were professionals, a structured interview would probably have motivated them to analyse the structure of marketing in their answers. They might also have felt that the questions did not allow them to discuss matters that were important to them. The discipline itself, being relatively young and small, is an interesting research topic. It was clear that the whole field could be seen as a terrain on which to travel slowly, to use Bruno Latour’s (2005) analogy.

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In addition to the interviews and curricula material, I also collected acknowledgements from the interviewees’ doctoral dissertations and from the dissertations of a few others who finished their theses before the time of the interviews (1998), and who were at the time of writing this thesis holding professors’ chairs. The purpose of collecting these was to see how networks between actors have been formed within the field of academic marketing. The networks were depicted on the basis of whom the authors thank in their acknowledgements, as it is common to acknowledge persons who have one way or the other influenced writing of the thesis. The network built by the persons acknowledged by the authors of dissertations also functioned as a background for depicting the development of Finnish marketing. These are shown in Chapter 4.

have used interviews, I believed that the analysis of interviews required me to ﬁnd citations to support my chosen theoretical framework. The process was both rigid and boring, and theory became something like a bad hypothesis, rather than a tool for understanding.

Finding (relevant) literature There is a rich literature in the area of marketing as a science—its development, content, scientiﬁc role, history, and schools of thought. As the focus of my research was neither the contents of marketing science nor its conceptual development, I chose a literature that helped me to gain a general understanding of the nature and content of marketing as a science. Hunt (1983), Holbrook (1995), Cochoy (1998), and Holbrook & Hulbert (2002) in particular, have provided a backbone for the understanding of marketing and its development in the USA.

I needed another type of research literature in order to depict the origin of this discipline and how its essence and various aspects of academic life were seen in the interviews. Hence, I examined research in other areas: Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of the ﬁeld and different forms of capital (e.g. 1985 and 1988), for example. Because Bourdieu’s approach seemed to be an appropriate one, I wrote a conference paper based on his work and on references to cultural capital and different strategies of action in my interviews (Vironmäki 2000a). Like many other researchers who

I also examined contributions by the critical management school (Arndt 1985; Morgan 1992; Brown 1993; Alvesson & Willmott 1996), where marketing was criticized for its need to be “more scientific than science”, as manifested in its use of rigid research settings and methods. Members of this school of thought accused marketing of empiricism, a positivist world view, and a lack of ethical discussion. It was easy to agree with their texts (Vironmäki 2000a). However, their criticism ignored the insider view, and the point of my study was not to criticize the discipline from the outside, but to examine it from the inside, as seen by the practitioners. I then turned to higher education studies (e.g. Clark 1987; Becher 1989; Whitley 1984 and 1992; Ylijoki 1998), which resulted in another conference paper (Vironmäki 2000b) and an article (2001), inspired by some of the themes in these studies. I identified the themes of marketing as a science, the professors’ attitudes towards teaching, their commitment to the discipline or the work place (department), or both. That initial analysis provided a significant first step towards research literature that entered the process a few years later, when I began to analyse the various ways in which different disciplines have been studied. The discussion on disciplines as cultural entities with distinctive features began with C. P. Snow’s famous lecture that was later published in book form (Snow 1959). In them, he presented the dualism of “the two cultures”—humanists and scientists—two cultures that do not communicate with each other. This lecture can be seen as the beginning of research interest scientific disciplines. The sociology of science began with the extensive work of Robert K. Merton (1974), followed by more constructionist approaches (Knorr-Cetina

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1981; Latour & Woolgar 1981; Gilbert & Mulkay 1984; Latour 1987). It was followed by another area of research, which concentrated on science as culture (e.g. Pinch 1990) or the cultures of various disciplines (Becher 1989; Ylijoki 1998). Whereas Robert Merton’s classic covers theoretical issues from the sociology of knowledge to reward systems in science, Latour and Woolgar study what happens in laboratories when research is in action; Knorr–Cetina examines manufacturing knowledge and Gilbert and Mulkay reveal the different ways that scientists talk about a given research event. In other words, these researchers delve into the everyday practices and oral cultures (Pinch 1990, 297) of scientists. The approaches of Becher and of Ylijoki seek to construct and understand the “small worlds” within academia by establishing a taxonomy13 for observing the habits, beliefs, and socialization processes within certain disciplines. However, the foremost empirical study on academic cultures, from the student’s point of view, is the extensive study of student culture in medical school by Becker et al. (1961/2004).

All this literature—from Bourdieu to critical management studies and science studies—is present in this thesis. During the last two years, however, the literature study has been extended further: more science studies (Latour 2005) and disciplinary reﬂections about management studies (Czarniawska 1999, 2001, 2003) and higher education and university research (Nowotny et al. 2001; Välimaa 2001, 2004). Donald Schön (1987) provided me with insights into the issues of business education and the relationship between business studies and practice. This research is not located in a single debate, therefore, but reaches to various discourses relevant to the research question.

One distinguishing feature of the studies on disciplinary or institutional cultures is the unit of analysis employed. As Välimaa (1998) has suggested, “studies of institutional cultures are structured by higher education institutions, whereas the studies of disciplinary cultures skip the institutional level and focus on an individual academic to reconstruct the international disciplinary cultures” (p. 120). Thus the unit of analysis could be cultures of locally determined academic communities or an interest in cultural inﬂuences through studies of international epistemic traditions. In institutions, the attention goes to students, faculty, and the organization of higher education institutions; whereas a disciplinary–based approach focuses on the interplay between people and ideas (ibid. p. 121). My study is a combination of both these approaches, as I deal with two units of analysis: life in various academic departments around Finland and the lives of the individuals who form one discipline—though not internationally. 13

See Huber (1990, 242) for a criticism of taxonomies.

Analysing the interviews Accidental academics Before describing my analysis, I must explain the type of material provided by the interviews. They were life stories, or according to some definitions, life histories. The difference is not significant, and both terms are used, but a life history often focuses on a specific aspect of person’s life, such as work life (Atkinson 2002, 125). Some interviewees told brief and unemotional stories—mere listings of actual events—but for the most part the interview narratives were many–sided, meandering stories. I had no mandate to interrogate my respondents about their lives, and my aim was not to judge the accuracy of events, but to attend to the events as they were described and the ways in which they were described (see Linde 1993, 68). Furthermore, because my interest was not really in the life histories, but in marketing, I needed first to understand the usual strategies and conventions that people use to tell their life histories. A life story is a presentation of the self; it contains a moral aspect of being a good and proper person who makes decisions that can be accounted

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See Huber (1990, 242) for a criticism of taxonomies.

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for in a way that is approved in our culture (Linde 1993, 142–3). Moreover, ways of accounting can include different strategies—humour and irony being among them. Listening to stories with humorous, even ironic, explanations of career moves was certainly interesting and amusing. However, it seems that humour was allowed for certain characters only—either those who are “successful rebels” or those who are simply successful. For instance, one professor told me that he chose academia because he visited his future department on a hot summer day, and the teacher with whom he had an appointment was wearing shorts and a casual shirt, while he himself was dressed in a business suit and a tie. His other career moves seemed equally random—phones happened to ring, the right people were accidentally met, and so on. However, only a successful professor can provide such an account. Just think! He is so good, yet it was only an accident! If someone whose career did not turn out as well were to tell a similar story, one would think that the story was bizarre and that it provided a good explanation for failure. Unlike a detective story, in which only the author knows the ending, when a well–known professor tells his life history in this study, the outcome is clear to everyone. He did turn out to be successful! And yet his life history can be full of mere coincidences—one of the leading themes in the material. Many these interviewees appear to have become academics in two ways: perseverance and luck. Perseverance suggests that they were stubborn enough14 under whatever circumstances came their way, and luck suggests that they happened to be present when the phone rang and the caller needed an assistant. For example, one professor (P25) concluded the description of his choice of profession as follows: Accidentally business studies, accidentally marketing, and then accidentally work within academia. (P25).

Or “stupid enough”, as one interviewee put it. Irony is a strategy that can be used to distance oneself from one’s life stories (Hyvärinen 1998). Few respondents in this study used irony in their narratives, however.

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And another concluding quotation by another professor: So… It was purely an accident that I became a marketer. Like most things in life, careers, life careers are accidental. … The only choice that had some personal initiative in it was that I continued studies after my Masters’ degree (P13). A few words on happenstance may be in order here. First, it would be hasty to conclude that the careers of academics are composed primarily of hazardous moves with no apparent target or ambition—a conclusion that I, in fact, reached in the earlier phases of this study. The common–sense meaning of the word accident implies a happening that cannot be influenced and is not intentionally caused by the actor. A car crash is usually considered to be an accident. Nevertheless, when the people refer to certain happenings as accidents in their narratives, they do not mean accident in this sense. As Linde (1993) suggests: But if we broaden our understanding of accident to include an event whose causality is insufficient or in some way problematic, we can handle this case—as well as other narratives in the data that include an analysis of some sequence of events as accidental. We may say that the insufficiency of the causality lies in the speaker’s relative lack of agency (p. 142). The case to which Linde refers is a narrative provided by a woman professor who ended up specializing in a certain field by accident. The “relative lack of agency” in the quotation above refers to a professor whose opinion triggered her career move. Thus she presented his actions, rather than her own, as determining her actions. According to Linde, when a choice of profession is not seen as having sufficient causality of a culturally standard type, it is labelled

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“accidental”. Yet there are usually some identifiable precursors to a career choice, she argues; the person may have demonstrated an early interest in business life, for instance, or enjoyed studying and making sense of the surrounding world. Thus, the culturally accepted career choice is supposed to be determined by a long–time interest and hard, conscious work oriented towards clear goals. In fact, such careers are probably relatively rare15, and most life careers may be “accidental”. For instance, Robert Pryor and Jim Bright (2003), while developing their “chaos theory of career choices”, stress change and chance events as pertinent influences in career decision making (p. 121). According to another study (Bright et al. 2005) almost seventy percent of Australian high school and university students reported chance events as influencing their career decisions. Hence, happenstance seems to be a relatively common attribute of career choices, regardless of culture. I would probably be justified, therefore, in setting the common use of accident aside, and refer to it as a deviation from some ideal career choice pattern that the respondents have in mind. Might the generally, widely, and globally accepted career history of goal–determined action and hard work be but a modernist ideal? Mary Bateson (quoted in Stablein & Frost 2004) advises us to be sceptical of such heroic adventures: I believe that our aesthetic sense, whether in works of art or in lives, has over focused on the stubborn struggle toward a single goal rather than on the fluid, the protean, the improvisatory. We see achievement as purposeful and monolithic […] rather than something created from odds and ends (p. 180–1).

Stablein and Frost add that we should “avoid the retrospective reconstruction of success as planned, rational and under control” (ibid. p. 180). 15

Yet only one professor in Frost and Taylor’s book on academic careers attributes her academic career to meeting a person on campus “by chance” (Gallos in Frost & Taylor, 1996, 12). Most other career histories in that book differ greatly from those in my material—which may be explained primarily by cultural differences between USA and Finland. Also, Frost and Taylor’s book is a collection of texts by prominent scholars—a different approach from mine.

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Roger A. Kerin, Harold C Simmons Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Southern Methodist University, titled his biography in the Journal of Marketing “An Accidental Academic” (Kerin 2004). In his case, “accidental” stems from receiving a letter of acceptance to a doctoral program he never had applied for. In a study of Finnish women academics (Julkunen 2004), two–thirds of the respondents gave some weight to happenstance in their career choices. However, to these respondents it also meant capturing the moment; her interviewees were often unexpectedly offered posts but they considered their decisions to take them as having been well thought through—not accidental16. In the context of this study, however, one should keep in mind that the ﬁrst professors could not have made conscious decisions to become professors of marketing, as this discipline did not exist at the time in Finland.

The process of analysis The ﬁrst phase of my interview analysis consisted of reading the transcripts several times. Through this process, I began to understand that a central issue was how the respondents in general related to a basic question: Is marketing primarily a discipline with emphasis on contribution to the academic community, or is it primarily a discipline that contributes to business? This factor makes marketing such an interesting discipline to study, and, as can be seen from the Prologue, it was also an area in which many controversial accounts could be found. 16

The strongest reason for pursuing an academic career in Julkunen’s study was an interest in research work, followed by a determined wish for an academic career; manifest job opportunity came third, although the order of the last two motives was reversed in the youngest generation of female academics. The majority of interviewees in my study was men, and they seldom mentioned research interest as a career motivation. It would be interesting to do a study similar to Julkunen’s with academic men to see if happenstance would score higher than research interest. However, my study and that of Julkunen (2004) were conducted differently. Had I directly asked about the interviewees’ motivations for choosing their careers, the results might have been similar.

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Stablein and Frost add that we should “avoid the retrospective reconstruction of success as planned, rational and under control” (ibid. p. 180). 15

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I classified the interviewees in accordance with this question: whether or not they had discussed the relationship between the academic discipline of marketing and the practice of marketing. Then I classified the interviews in line with what I perceived to be their general orientation. From these classifications I learned that 12 respondents did not discuss the relationship between marketing and business, that 16 did, and that 3 discussed it either briefly (as an anecdote that was part of an event), or only when asked directly about the relationship. Furthermore, the classification of the interviews into an orientation towards academia versus practice can be summarized as follows: Academia (20) The interview narrative is situated in the context of marketing as a discipline, its history, and its current existence. The narrative may touch upon the connection between marketing education and practice, but does so only in the context of ways to help the students learn independent and critical thinking and to communicate with other professional areas with which marketing graduates will work in the future (designing, engineering). Some interviewees had more of a teaching orientation; others were more research oriented; and yet others emphasized academic merits. Practice (4)

The narrative is embedded in the context of business. The community one works for is the group of other like– minded scholars as well as the business people one knows. Students need to be taught to do something, and research needs to be oriented towards issues relevant for business. Academic merits are not so important.

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Both (7)

The narratives are situated in the context of university life, but emphasize the necessary link to business. There is no marketing without good contacts with economic life, but the purpose of education is broader than today’s business problems. Most interviewees in this group seek academic merits in form of journal articles and other forms of publishing.

The original purpose behind the classification was to use it as basis for writing general narratives of marketing professors—one for each orientation. My inspiration came from several narrative studies in which the author had managed to write interesting and informative analyses using life stories as research material. Writing about single mothers, May (2001) categorized her material into various types of narratives; Hyvärinen (1994) studied the Finnish labour movement through the meticulous reading of four narrative interviews; and Czarniawska (1997) depicted the public sector through her own observations and interviews. These examples all provided possible solutions for my own research, and my aim was to write a similar narrative analysis. Because I had promised the interviewees that they would remain completely anonymous, however, the small size of the field made it difficult to write interesting narrative analysis while preserving their anonymity. I literally tried writing an entire life story without referring to any actual events, but it turned out to be a peculiar narrative. Even though my caution may have been exaggerated, there were good reasons for it; at one point during the interviews, I felt as if I were talking to the inhabitants of a small village. Many of these people had studied together, been each other’s opponents, friends, colleagues, professors, and students. How could I present their narratives without damaging these relationships? As sociologist Laurel Richardson (1997) pointed out:

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Both (7)

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We can never fully know what consequences our work will have on others. We cannot control context and readings. But we can have some control over what we choose to write and how we write it. […] I wouldn’t want to “give voice” to real, live people who know each other and could identify each other in my text. For me, it might be “text”; for them, it is life (p. 117). I then left the categorization aside (although I refer to it again in Chapter 6, as the orientation helped me to understand how certain points of view are represented and divided among the interviewees). It is also the basis for forming the characters in the professors’ discussion in the Prologue of this book. Next, I tried to ﬁnd a way of dealing with the interview material that would do justice to its richness while protecting the identity of the interlocutors. I chose not to write the interviews as stories of life and work within Finnish marketing, but to classify the contents of the interviews according to the themes discussed. In my licentiate thesis (Vironmäki 2003), I brieﬂy presented four themes that I had noticed were central in the material: teaching, commitment, social relations, marketing as science, and relationships with practice. I also did a poetic analysis (see Richardson 2001) of one interview and summarized one interview in one page17.

After my licentiate was completed, my understanding of the material was stuck with the impressions I had already formed—so much so, that I felt unable to see beyond them. Therefore, in accordance with the idea suggested by Potter and Wetherell (1987, 66), I decided to select from the transcripts references to the areas of interest. In practice this meant identifying new (or more) themes—after all, referential meaning expressed through “themes” and their relations to each other is fundamental to analysis and interpretation (Mishler 1986, 87). I used a software, QSR N’Vivo18, for coding the 400 pages of material. 17

The poem received the most positive feedback from the interviewees after I sent them the thesis.

See Halme (1997) for an application of similar software in a study of environmental management.

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Coding can refer to the generation of new ideas and the gathering of material by topic (e.g. Richards 2005, 85); in practice it required me to read the interview transcripts and mark text sections as belonging to certain topic of interest. These categories are called nodes in the software, and include citations from the interview material that I have coded according to the topics that the interlocutors discuss. The main issues of interest, which represented the largest nodes during the coding procedure, were the contents of marketing, the nature of the academic world, and marketing as both practice and discipline. Hence, I had no code labels ready when I started, but given the subject at hand and the licentiate thesis in the background, these three topics gathered substance quickly. The other six were formed during the process of coding the interviews, which included interesting issues that did not seem to ﬁt into the existing categories. The nine nodes and the questions they relate to, the number of interviewees who had accounts that were coded into the respective node, and the total number of quotations in each node are presented in Table 1.

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The poem received the most positive feedback from the interviewees after I sent them the thesis.

See Halme (1997) for an application of similar software in a study of environmental management.

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Name of the node

Contents, schools of thought, and the focus of marketing

Number of Total interviewees number of (out of 31) quotations

This node includes references that relate to questions about the nature of marketing: its focus and its past and present schools of thought.

146

What is an academic career like? How does one become an academic? The What does a university professor do? What world of are the requirements of the work? academia What is it like to work in the university? What kind of workplace is a university department?

116

Theory – practice

Borders

Wrong and right Efﬁciency and heroism

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This node includes quotations linked to the question of whether marketing, as an academic discipline, should contribute primarily to the academic community or be a provider of knowledge for economic practitioners. This category includes accounts that are also presented in other nodes, such as: What is marketing; what is it not? What does one do in marketing? What should one do? It also includes some accounts about marketing in relation to other management sciences and the relationship between polytechnics and universities. Critical remarks on how things are done. Evaluations on how things are done correctly and how they should be done, i.e. what would be right. Accounts of how one has worked exceptionally effectively, or the current demand for effectiveness. And how effective one’s department has been or how one has worked alone and/or against the will of inﬂuential actors. This is the true “garbage node”, which includes everything left over that I considered to be interesting. Many of the quotations refer to the narrator’s career: receiving a phone call, accidentally drifting into academia, the formation of research interests. Here, also, are many historical details and stories discussed in Chapter 4.

Table 1. The names and contents of the nodes.

149

26+25

83+80

14+19

56+80

180

As can be seen from Table 1, one node includes references to many questions, requiring interviews to be coded in several overlapping nodes. For instance, the node entitled Borders includes every mention of the relationship between marketing and the surrounding environment in virtually every context: when the interlocutor explains, for instance, that there was no need for marketing during post–World–War–II rationing because there was nothing to market. This was in the coding procedure understood as a historical border between a time when marketing thought did not exist and a time when it began to exist. This node also includes many accounts about the nature of marketing that were also coded to the ﬁrst node. There were also nodes that were not substantive, and those I left aside. One such node was called “networks”, and included quotations in which the interviewees discussed people with whom they had worked. This node remained small: only 7 of the 31 interviewees had accounts coded in that node. After having read the interviews, I had formed the impression that the interviewees talked a great deal about networks, but coding revealed a completely different picture—a good example of the advantage of using a software like QSR N’Vivo for organizing texts. I also believed that few respondents had told heroic stories, but after using a search tool within the software, I noticed that two–thirds of the respondents had been coded in that node. In a sense, then, software is a reliable replacement for post–it notes or highlight pens. It makes it easier to work with the material and reveals relationships that could otherwise be overlooked. The software itself does not analyse anything. The coding procedure produced a transcript for each node, listing each interviewee’s quotations that had been coded in that particular node (an example in Finnish is shown in Appendix 3). I then wrote descriptions of each node on the basis of the node transcripts. I tried to stick to their contents, rather than inserting any of the literature or my own observations. This was not always easy to do, especially in the node that

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Name of the node

Contents, schools of thought, and the focus of marketing

Number of Total interviewees number of (out of 31) quotations

This node includes references that relate to questions about the nature of marketing: its focus and its past and present schools of thought.

146

116

Theory – practice

Borders

Wrong and right Efﬁciency and heroism

Details 34

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A N A LY S I N G T H E I N T E RV I E W S

Table 1. The names and contents of the nodes.

149

26+25

83+80

14+19

56+80

180

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describes the academic world; it is difficult to keep one’s own experiences and opinions to oneself when the topic is so close to the heart. Next, I went through the whole node printout once again, rechecking to ensure that the descriptions were correct. Finally, I checked any points that I felt insecure about with the whole interview transcript. After I had written the node descriptions, I started to ferret out the controversies inherent in them. As Latour (2005, 25) states: “Controversies are not simply a nuisance to be kept at bay, but what allows the social to be established […].” From this follows that it is the problems, the contradictions, and the imbalances in lives that allow for the functioning and continuing activities of different areas of social life such as academic work within a certain discipline. The task of the researcher is not to impose some order beforehand, but to first “let the actors deploy the full range of controversies in which they are immersed”. Hence, the researcher should not try to discipline or fit the actors into categories, and should abstain from interrupting the flood of controversies (ibid. p. 23–4). As described in Chapter 5, I identified twelve areas that contained such controversies. The process of analysis is depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The process of analysis.

A few words on interviews and interpretation

Interviews are often used in our society when we need to know something about something, leading Paul Atkinson and David Silverman (1997) to call us ”the interview society”. Journalists, market researchers, and academic researchers alike seek the truth through interviews. Interview talk is meant to function as a neutral way to transforming information

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Figure 1. The process of analysis.

A few words on interviews and interpretation

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from one person to another—information that is assumed to consist of facts, themes, and concepts that exist without context. Hence, an interview or a story that we have taped and transcribed, edited, and further rewritten in small pieces turns into truth: a “scientiﬁc” story (Richardson 1997, 140).

“self” but something that adapts and changes. Also Strawson (2004, 430) has argued against claims that each of us should have a coherent inner narrative as part of our identity or that we need to grasp our lives in a narrative in order to develop fully (see e.g. Atkinson 2002). Hence, our “selves” stem from culturally accepted ways of communicating experiences, further implying that interviews contain samples of public discourse. From this follows that the interviewees discussed issues that they considered proper to discuss when engaging in a research about marketing as an academic discipline. Even though the interviews involved free narration, the interviewees had their preliminary understanding on the research, and prepared themselves accordingly19.

Atkinson and Silverman (1997) have noted that the understanding of interviews has moved away from modernist and positivist ideals where the goodness of the interview was deﬁned by the methodological and theoretical skilfulness of the interviewer. However, the belief in objective truth has been replaced by a neo–romantic belief in subjective truth, by a praising of individuality and egos, all of which is supported by the structure of media. Magazines are rife with stories about people’s personal lives—so intimate that one wonders if they ought not to be kept from the public eye. The rise of narrative research is one aspect of this phenomenon. Lindsay Prior (1997, 63) has argued that any research on social activity includes an informant: a knowing subject who is asked questions, then observed, in order for the researcher to gain knowledge about some area of the informant’s life. The question of subject naturally lurks behind the choice to use interviews in research. Interviews are built on personal experiences, and can apply a multiplicity of perspectives. But whose perspectives?

In Foucault’s terms (e.g. 1972), subjects are constructed by historical and social institutional practices. For instance, Gubrium and Holstein (2002, 21–22) describe a dissertation based on pharmacists’ interviews on illegal uses of drugs and their recovery from this abuse. Gubrium noted that as many of the interviewees had participated in self–help groups, they had also incorporated the groups’ ways of narrating abuse experiences, which could be seen in their ways of accounting. To what extent, Gubrium asked, are these then the pharmacists’ “own” stories, or the stories of these recovery programs? Hence, the sense of who we are is not an inner, stable core called

Although I used narrative interviews in this study, the purpose was not to ﬁnd material that would be more authentic, more honest, or more emotionally rich than, for instance, survey data20, but because I wanted the interlocutors to use their own words, notions and interpretation structures. The importance of such approach has been stressed by for instance Chase (1995). The interview material was collected for this study, and was produced at my request. Hence, it is not what Silverman (1993) calls naturally occurring data, as the respondents were asked, for research purposes, to tell me about their work. I understand the interview to be a mutual accomplishment between the interviewer and interviewee, not a form of stimulus and response, as Mishler (1986, 35) also has pointed out. After my initial clumsiness in interview methodology, described earlier in this chapter, I learned to be as neutral as possible in my use of wording, or when explaining my research setting for the interlocutors. I never, for instance, said that I was interested in the relationship between business and academia, practice and theory, but only commented or asked about it in more detail if the interviewee took it up and discussed it at length. 19

However, one interviewee (P18) began the interview with a surprised exclamation: “I just picked up your letter and noticed that you are interested in me!” 20

An excellent use of survey data in showing how sets of beliefs about a discipline are maintained among students is seen in Colander & Klamer (1987).

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However, one interviewee (P18) began the interview with a surprised exclamation: “I just picked up your letter and noticed that you are interested in me!” 20

An excellent use of survey data in showing how sets of beliefs about a discipline are maintained among students is seen in Colander & Klamer (1987).

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Following the advice of Paul Ricoeur (1976/2000), I tried not to read hidden messages behind the text when interpreting the interviews. A text is always a discourse—something someone has told someone else—although experience by one individual is always radically uncommunicative. My experiences cannot become your experiences (ibid. p. 43), and, along the lines of Wittgenstein, my thoughts cannot be transferred to become somebody else’s thoughts (see Heaton & Groves 1994, 111). And what people mean when they tell their stories and what is interpreted by the listener may differ. As Ricoeur (1976/2000, 61) pointed out: “What a text means now is more than what the writer meant when writing it.” Ricoeur also suggested that an interview is a living dialogue, but that the transcribed interview is “dead”, in the sense that the dialogue has become interpersonal, and the interviewee can no longer resist my interpretations. However, as I did all the interviews myself, I still hear the interlocutors’ voice in my head while I read the interview transcripts, which also helps in interpreting pieces of individual interviews.

In writing the report, I have followed Bruno Latour’s (2005) advice to describe, to write well, and to try not to force into a frame or to explain. Just as biologists do not try to explain ants or worms to the ants and worms, so should social scientists refrain from trying to explain the work of informants to their informants. Much research, suggests Latour, seeks to provide reflective understanding to people whose action they study—as if they would have been totally unreflective before the arrival of the social scientist. The aim is to describe the practice of the interviewees to others—in this case, to those who do not know the nature of academic marketing in Finland. Latour also writes: “The text in social sciences is the functional equivalent of a laboratory. It’s a place for trials, experiments and simulations” (p. 149). Before embarking on these trials, I briefly reflect on the choices I have made, their advantages, and their setbacks.

People have their own reasons for telling what they tell, and it is often impossible to guess their motives, which may not even be conscious. There are many interpretations of what a word, let alone a whole sentence, can mean, but within the same social context, the meanings of different people are close enough when using the same words. Hence, when reporting qualitative research, it is important to be clear about the process of analysis and why certain choices in interpretations have been made. In this thesis, I have sought to explain my choices openly.

A narrative resulting from an interview is understood here as a sense– making process (see Weick 1995). As the respondents tell their stories, they also make sense of what has happened and is happening. They reﬂect upon the past through the glasses of today, and make sense of everyday events both to the interviewer and to themselves. In this sense–making process, there are cognitive elements of which the respondents may be totally unaware.

Reflections on the choices made The interviews, which were conducted in 1997 and 1998, reflect the contents of Finnish marketing at that time. Much has changed since then, especially in the university culture, but much has remained the same. Of the 31 interviewees, only three have since retired and one has left academia and moved into business. In that sense, the material is still representative of Finnish academic marketing. I have sought to analyse the interview material through the lenses of the time they were conducted. This means that I have not reflected them with other research on disciplines from later time periods. There are advantages and disadvantages of this time gap. On the negative side, the material does not demonstrate any changes that may have occurred since 1998. However, as I was into my first years as doctoral student at the time of the interviews, I have since experienced academia from the point of view of a university researcher in three universities, in

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three departments, and with two different subjects, and hence can also reflect on what I have experienced and what I read from the interviews, and keep the later developments out of the interpretations. The advantage of the time gap is that the material is less sensitive now that time has passed. The choice of interviewees was difficult, and, in retrospect, they may not represent the schools in equal numbers as accurately as I had originally intended. On the other hand, by the time the interviews were completed, I also felt that the information saturation point had been achieved (e.g. Hyvärinen 1994). I believe that the interviewees provide a good representation of the field of marketing; in retrospect, I would say that only one of them did not turn out to be as long–time active in the field of Finnish academic marketing, as I had thought before asking him for an interview. And as it has turned out, three of the four interviewees who were assistants or senior assistants at the time of the interviews have now obtained professors’ chairs, and have become even more influential actors in the contemporary field of marketing.

CHAPTER 3 : UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IN GENERAL AND UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IN BUSINESS AND MARKETING This underestimation of research work and its results also covers institutions that do such work. It occasionally results in the tendency to deny the University its quite exceptional status in society, and see in it an ordinary school, an institution intended to teach young people which is on the same footing as various general education and vocational schools. And yet the University, called to serve scientiﬁc truth and objective knowledge and to improve methods of research, should above all teach people scientiﬁc thinking as it is exactly that mode of thinking which leads us to that knowledge and truth. Kazimierz Twardowski, 1933/1997, 11

This chapter deals with universities and university–level business education in Finland. I begin with a short description of the origin of European universities and move to the problems and challenges faced by contemporary university education—the problems and challenges that essentially deﬁne its activity. I then explain the development and structure of Finnish higher education and its academic career system. Finally, I describe the beginning of higher business education in Finland, and move to the speciﬁc development and contents of Finnish marketing education. 42

This chapter serves as an introduction to Chapter 4, in that it provides an insight into marketing education; Chapter 4 concentrates on the activities of individual marketing professors during the emergence and development of Finnish academic marketing as a discipline.

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Universities From elites to masses and managerial principles University is the venue of highest possible education and its roots as organization can be traced to medieval time. Early scholars were dedicated to the exploration of their particular fields of interest. Because they tended to lecture in various places before they began renting permanent facilities, it is difficult to define the exact founding dates of the first universities. According to the WebPages of University of Bologna21, it is generally acknowledged that it came into being “as a body independent of the ecclesiastical schools” in 1088. The knowledge produced in these centres of learning was applied to practical ends. As organizations, universities had two starting points: In Bologna, the university was a community of students who hired teachers, and in Paris (founded in the latter half of the 12th century), a corporation of teachers who accepted students. Early universities included faculties of law, medicine, and theology. Scholars were dedicated to a life of simplicity, expected to lecture for free—or for the pleasure of it. A scholarly career was dependent upon patrons who financed the life of the scholar (see Ziembinski 1997). During the Age of Enlightenment, from the late 17th to the 18th century, scholars began to take note of the world around them, expanding their fields of interest beyond philosophical debates and embracing a curiosity about the various phenomena of life22. William H. Starbuck (2006) comments on the time before this shift as follows:

During the thirteenth century, professors at the University of Paris decided to ﬁnd out whether oil would congeal if left outdoors on a cold night. […] To them, research meant searching through the works of Aristotle. After much effort, they found that nothing Aristotle had written answered their question, so they declared the question unanswerable (p. 1).

UNIVERSITIES

Starbuck’s point in this introductory story of his book is that research findings often tell more about the researcher’s activities than they tell about the studied phenomenon, and that such thinking as those Parisian researchers used in tackling the problem of congealing oil, can be found in present–day social research. However, it also illustrates the shift in scholarly thinking that happened between the first centuries of the existence of universities and the more empirical orientation of natural philosophy—the predecessors of current natural sciences. It needs to be stressed, however, that the enlightenment scholars did not conduct their research in universities, which were still professional schools, but in academies or societies23. The roots of current research universities lie in uniting research and teaching, and can be attributed to Wilhelm von Humboldt, a linguist and the founder of Humboldt University in Berlin in 1810. He objected to the division of research to societies or academies, and teaching to universities, because according to him, many university teachers develop science as much as researchers in academies—if not even more. That is because an oral presentation in front of listeners (among which there are independent thinkers) always refreshes the presenter, and because there are more youthful and vigorous minds present in universities than in academies. von Humboldt also stressed the difference between research universities (or higher scientific institutions) and other schools—the former engage in science partly as an unsolved problem, and continuously practice research, whereas the latter busy themselves with ready knowledge and solved problems, and teach them (von Humboldt 1810/1990, 58 and 62). The most famous slogan of his educational philosophy was Einheit der Forschenden und Lehrenden (the unity of teachers and students), in which the university should be seen as a sanctuary in the quest for the truth in 21

www.eng.unibo.it/PortaleEn/University/Our+History/default.htm

See Quicksilver (2003), The Confusion (2004) and The System of the World (2004) by Neal Stephenson for informative and entertaining ﬁction about these times. 23

For instance Académie Française that was established in 1635, and the Royal Society, established in 1662 (Sironen 1990).

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www.eng.unibo.it/PortaleEn/University/Our+History/default.htm

See Quicksilver (2003), The Confusion (2004) and The System of the World (2004) by Neal Stephenson for informative and entertaining ﬁction about these times. 23

For instance Académie Française that was established in 1635, and the Royal Society, established in 1662 (Sironen 1990).

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a free, never–ending interaction (Schlieben–Lange 2004). The search for truth should also be combined with an ambition to live a correct life. Humboldt’s idea of a university contained four imperatives (Bertilsson 1992): 1. The unity of research and teaching, 2. The unity of the various empirical sciences achieved through philosophy, 3. The unity of science and general upbringing (Bildung in German), and 4. The unity of science and universal enlightenment. It is argued that each of these unities creates some tension in the modern world, and that modern universities have lost their once–extravagant position (ibid.). The quotation by Twardowski at the beginning of this chapter is a reﬂection of the ideal research university.

In principle, universities have been engaged in making societies better places in which to work and study, as the purpose of knowledge was to “increase the happiness of mankind” (Ziembinski 1997). Kazmierz Twardowski reflected that purpose in his acceptance speech from 1933, when he received honorary doctorate from Poznan University. He presented the university as the community of scholars searching for the highest of values: objective truth. The University provides society with knowledge: “discovers scientific truths and probabilities, and spreads the skill of arriving at them”. Also, “these two paths—the teaching of students and the publication of research—make the University radiate upon the whole of society, and spread opinions and convictions which are never imposed upon anyone as dogmas, and which are not inculcated in anyone as programmes. Their strength is inherent in their scientific substantiation” (Twardowski 1933/1997, 10–12). In Twardowski’s University,

the education of young people consists in arousing and increasing in them comprehension of the immense significance which objective truth and the striving for it has for mankind. […] In a word, young people, permeated by the atmosphere of science and research typical of the University, will learn everywhere to look for objective truth instead of following fine–looking slogans and being trapped by various soul hunters […] and common considerations dominate over private ones and the joint interest rises above that of individuals (p. 13). For a university employee at the turn of the millennium, Twardowski’s ode to the University and Humboldt’s quest for an “exemplary life form”, seem hopelessly outdated or an impossible dream. First, the notion of objective truth has been subjected to critical discussion, and many scholars are willing to accept that we are in the business of constructing truths rather than finding them (see e.g. Latour 1987, and Topolski 1997), and acknowledging that there may not be only one truth known only to science (Nowotny et al. 2001, 84). Second, the atmosphere in present–day universities is seldom that of common considerations above private ones, primarily due to changes in financing principles and the criteria of effectiveness, which is discussed in the next section. Thus, Twardowski’s speech serves well to illustrate the changes that universities have undergone during the last century. Much of that change can be characterized by the fact that university education has shifted from being the privilege of a few to being a possibility for many—a phenomenon known among researchers in the area of higher education as the massification of university education, which has changed the role of universities in society (see e.g. Välimaa 2001). It is nevertheless worth noting that Twardowski’s speech was a defence for free universities against two totalitarian ideologies: communism and fascism24. 24

In a sense, the current managerialism that has entered universities could be seen as analogous threat to free research and their roles as providers of general education, Bildung.

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In a sense, the current managerialism that has entered universities could be seen as analogous threat to free research and their roles as providers of general education, Bildung.

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Next, I quote two ﬁctional scenarios of the university, taken from the doctoral thesis of Leena Koski (1993), who studied the hidden symbolic orders of universities. The image of University that Twardowski gave in his speech is close to the description of “the university of shine” in Koski’s thesis, in which the faculty is driven by higher ideals: beauty, goodness, and truth. Teachers are enthusiastically providing top–line education by sharing their bright intelligence with motivated students. Universities lead society in the best possible way, providing it with the latest results of high–quality research and searching mercilessly for the ultimate truth (Koski 1993, pp. 13–15). In “the university of decline”, which Koski contrasts with “the university of shine”, students sit in mass lectures, and answer simple and trivial questions in their examinations. They want to complete their education by doing as little as possible; they have few interests and no independent thinking skills—neither is it expected of them. Professors steal students’ ideas, asserts Koski, and present them under their own names at conferences, where they spend most of the time drinking or suffering from hangovers. The teaching faculty consists of mediocre academics, who year after year teach the same orthodoxy using the same transparencies. Nobody cares, she maintains; nobody is interested in anything: high–salary professors neglect their research, teaching and administrative tasks, while the state supports a bunch of thieves, forgers, and drunks (ibid. 17–18).

Present–day universities fit neither of these two scenarios, but they do contain features of both. The massification of universities means that the relative and absolute number of university students has grown significantly, and the elite university has come to an end (Välimaa 2001). Massification also implies everything that is considered negative within universities: mass lectures, cramped facilities, increasing amounts of teaching, and lower student quality (Pirttilä & Eriksson–Piela 2004, 11). The end of elites might thus suggest that our present university staff consists not of dedicated seekers of truth but of “common mortals”, among

UNIVERSITIES

whom there are exceptional talents, mediocrities, and thieves—probably in the same proportions as in society in general. However, the introduction of “education for many” has had its inﬂuence: The most conspicuous socio–psychological effect of the explosive expansion of higher education in the ‘50s and ‘60s was widespread disappointment; the hopes were frustrated as intensely as they had been beefed up before, and the universities were prime targets for resulting anger (Bauman 1997, 50). Sally Tomlinson (2001) suggests that education has become a competitive market in which young people “learn to compete”. Thus, education has changed from being a cornerstone of welfare society to the driving force of global economy, where every output is quantitatively measured and where amount equals quality. Market forces, centralized control of education and the subservience of educational ends to economic priorities combined, by the end of the century, to diminish schools as independent, creative and democratizing institutions (ibid. p. 170). Her focus was British education in a post–welfare society. However, her observation that education is becoming—to use the words of Britain’s Prime Minister— a “competitive advantage in the modern economy” (Blair 1998, in Tomlinson 2001) could as well be applied to higher education. As Julkunen (2004) stated in her book on Finnish women academics: …in accordance with Tomlinson one can say that the purpose of education is not to produce knowledge and skills but habitus’ and subjectivities of performance–, contract–, and competition society (p. 21).

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Competition has probably existed as long as universities have existed. But emphases on economic growth as a measure of education and research and the introduction of managerial steering systems have changed the climate of academic work. As Daisaku Ikeda (2001, 71), a recognised spokesman for humanist values, stated: “The educational system has … been reduced to mere mechanism that serves national objectives. […] Treating education as a means rather than an end reinforces a utilitarian view of human life itself.” Hence, whether one discusses education in general or higher education in particular, education is thought to become, more and more, a means rather than an end.

Academic work: teaching and doing research It is usually assumed that academic work consists of conducting research and teaching based on research, although there are also teaching posts that do not embody research activity. Teaching is usually considered to be the most salient function of universities. Nevertheless, according to Pirttilä & Eriksson–Piela (2004, 12–13), teaching and research in Finnish universities are diverging. This divergence can be seen in the everyday life of academic institutions with the growing number of short–term project researchers who do not participate in teaching and the establishment of research units with no direct link to the university’s teaching activities. Short–term employment has also had an impact on the administrative tasks that are an essential part of university work, as they pile up on the desks of those academics whose jobs are more of a permanent character.

The purpose of academic education, claimed Bauman (1997, 47–8), is to “shape up individual members of society into social beings ﬁt to perform the socially assigned roles” (emphasis original), and further, to acquire skills and knowledge that will “enable the individuals to act”. However, as regards enabling to act, there are now seductive competitors to universities. Why should one choose a full–ﬂedged university career when

UNIVERSITIES

it leads neither to life–long career nor better economic circumstances? Once–evident functions of universities are far from obvious today (ibid. p. 47–49). If, as stated above, the university’s purpose is to provide individuals with skills and knowledge, what is the knowledge they provide? Gibbons et al. (1994) discussed two modes of scientific knowledge, which they identified as Mode 1 and Mode 2. Mode 1, the old or traditional mode, is characterized by scientific context and curiosity, scientific subjects, homogenous and hierarchical structure with stable organizational structures, collegiality, internal quality, and communication limited to scientific community. Characteristic of the new mode, or Mode 2 (also Nowotny et al. 2001), are the context of application and practical goals, multi–disciplinarity, heterogeneous, and non–hierarchical structure with transient organizations, answerability to society and financers, impressiveness as a measure of quality, and communication of knowledge to a whole society. This thesis has been fiercely debated, and some say that the Mode 2 has been prevalent in scientific knowledge throughout modern times. On the whole, however, it can be said that both modes can be found in present–day universities—often even within same academic subjects or departments (Pirttilä & Eriksson–Piela 2004, 11) There is another question: What do students “really” learn at universities? Cook and Brown (1999) discussed organizational knowledge, and argued that the traditional understanding of the nature of knowledge is that it can be possessed by individuals and transferred from one person to another. For them, knowledge is a tool for knowing, and knowledge and knowing are not competing, but mutually enabling, which means that knowledge is used in action and knowing is part of the action. Universities deal primarily with individual and explicit knowledge—at least that is what is emphasized and measured by those who evaluate the effectiveness of universities and individual researchers. However, if one agrees with Cook and Brown, extending the traditional view of knowledge by first acknowledging the presence of tacit and group knowledge and then adding

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knowing, can generate new knowledge and new ways of knowing. As my study deals with a practice–based discipline, it is clear that there is a great deal of knowing in the ﬁeld of practitioners. Yet, in university settings only knowledge is discussed and recognized. This issue is discussed further in Chapter 6.

Finnish higher education Background During the Middle Ages, some Finnish students studied in European universities; and during the 14th century, talented students were regularly sent from Turku, Finland’s commercial and religious capital, to the University of Paris. The University of Wittenberg and the University of Rostock were also important venues for Finns to study during the 15th and 16th centuries (Tommila 2001). The ﬁrst Finnish university was established in 1640 by the command of Christina, Queen of Sweden—Finland being part of the Kingdom of Sweden. The practical aim of the Royal Academy of Åbo (the Academy of Turku25) was to prepare civil servants for the Kingdom, and to produce clergymen to serve the Lutheran Church. From a political point of view, it can be said that the purpose was also to unify the newly acquired territories (Finland) under Swedish rule and to defend the Lutheran version of Christianity against Roman Catholics and Protestants. The cultural point of departure of the Academy was to socialize people into virtuous Christians and members of a civil society (Välimaa 2001, 13–14).

In 1809, Sweden lost Finland to Russia, and Finland was granted the status of a Grand Duchy. The university became the Imperial Academy of Åbo (Academiae Imperialis Aboensis). Turku was Finland’s capital until 1812, when Alexander I, the Russian Emperor, concerned with Turku’s 25

Turku is Åbo in Swedish.

F I N N I S H H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N

proximity to Sweden, ordered that Helsinki become the new capital. When half of Turku burned down in the great fire of 1827, the Emperor had legitimate ground to move the university to Helsinki as well. It then became Imperial Alexander University, renamed University of Helsinki after Finland declared independence in 1917. After the Academy had moved to Helsinki by order of the Russian Emperor, there were reforms to the school system requiring students to take final examinations before they could apply for university. The need to raise the level of teaching and research in the Imperial University as well as a need to stabilize student movements, led to university reform in 1852—a step towards research universities (see Välimaa 2001, 19; Tommila 2001, 420). In order to understand the future development of Finnish universities, it is important to acknowledge the fact that the Finnish system was not based on the French tradition, with specialised and vocationally oriented institutions of higher education (Välimaa 2001, 17). The latter half of the 19th century was meaningful for the development of Finnish higher education. First, there were obvious signs of industrialization and its consequences becoming visible: demographic changes (people started to move to cities) and diffusion of factory–produced goods. Lack of technological know–how and capital, however, slowed down the adoption of the latest technology. The specialized, technical workforce was usually imported, probably because of poor or nonexistent technical education in Finland (Heikkinen & Hoffman 1982). Second, the latter half of the 19th century was a time of awakening for the Finnish identity and Finnish language. Until then, the language of the upper class and commerce had been primarily Swedish, although it was common for practical reasons for businesspeople to practice their trade in both languages. For instance, it was habitual to sign documents with one of two names, which were spelled differently, depending on the language the business deal. Nevertheless, the initiation of schooling and higher education in Finnish was also part of the general need for better technical and commercial education (see Näsi & Näsi 1996, 201). The first

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Turku is Åbo in Swedish.

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commercial institute had already been established in Turku in 1839, and the ﬁrst bilingual school in Oulu in 1864. In accordance with the general trend in Finland at that time, the commercial institutes in Helsinki and Raahe that were established two decades later required a higher level of prior schooling from their pupils (Saarsalmi 1961, 21). Technical education was initiated in the 1870s at the Helsinki Polytechnic School. Its establishment was preceded by a statement by the Industrial Directory of Finland, expressing a need for advancing economic life by establishing a polytechnic institute that would provide higher education in science for future pharmacists; merchants; machinery and building engineers; mechanical and chemical manufacturers; and professionals in mining and forestry. The latter half of the 19th century heralded a period when authorities were attending to the economic state of affairs in Finland and methods for advancing it. Finland began producing its own currency in 1860; full freedom of trade was introduced in 1879, and with the help of industrialization and the development of transportation, industry and commerce expanded rapidly (Saarsalmi 1961, 19; Heikkinen & Hoffman 1982). When Finland declared its independence on the 6 of December 1917, this event affected the existing educational institutions. All schools were closed during the civil war in the spring of 1918, and the political insecurity continued when the doors re–opened in the autumn of 1918 (Michelsen 2001, 61–3). Finnish foreign trade also changed dramatically, as Finnish export had been directed primarily at Russia during World War I. However, as Russia fell deeper into a disorder induced by the revolution, the markets in that country closed almost completely (Ahvenainen & Vartiainen 1982). th

There were a few points that further formed the Finnish notion of a university during the early years of the Republic of Finland. The most inﬂuential of these for the future development of Finnish universities was probably the fact that politicians were to have a hand in deciding access to higher education (see Välimaa 2001, 25).

In the period between the two world wars, the majority of Finnish people still earned their living from agriculture, although industry was growing quickly after the critical years of 1930–31 (Ahvenainen & Kuusterä 1982). Higher education was still an elitist system, with few students (Välimaa 2001, 28). Commerce in different parts of Finland was remarkably divergent. There were department stores in the southern cities, whereas the dominant method of trade in the periphery was similar to that of the 19th century (Pihkala 1982, 274–275). During the late 1950s the Finnish university system began to follow “the logic of expansion”, induced by a welfare–state agenda supported by major political parties. The network of universities expanded rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s, when some former teachers’ colleges raised their status by becoming universities, a few summer university associations initiated regional universities, and the College of Social Sciences became the University of Tampere. Hence, also the number of university students increased tenfold between the 1950s and the end of the 20th century (Välimaa 2001, 25–30). In 2005, there were 20 universities in Finland: 10 multidisciplinary universities, 3 universities of technology, 3 schools of economics and business administration, and 4 art academies. Finland’s level of post– secondary education is relatively high: The current network of universities covers most of the country and provides a student place for almost one–third of the relevant age group (Opetushallitus, National Board of Education26). Finnish development during the 20th century was characterized by rapid expansion of its network of universities, and of its welfare society agenda, which was to make education possible for everyone, regardless of social status or wealth. Expansion towards a mass higher education peaked in the 1970s, when 15 percent of the age cohort entered it. The growth in number of students in higher education has continued in that direction 26

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since the introduction of the polytechnic network in 1995: In 2001, 83 percent of the relevant age cohort was offered a starting place in higher education (Välimaa 2004, 116). The current system of Finnish higher education is presented next.

Faculty and funding All universities in Finland have been owned and run by the State since 1977, and their faculty and non–faculty members are regarded as civil servants. Universities are autonomous institutions, but subordinated to the Ministry of Education, and have the right to nominate professors and recruit other faculty and non–faculty members. The State Civil Servants’ Act regulates the rights and duties of employer and employee, as well as the conditions of recruitment and dismissal (Välimaa 2004, 117). The decision–making system is independent and the Universities Act and Decree prescribe universities’ operation (National Board of Education). The decision–making system is a combination of academic guild traditions, collegial practices and democratic structures. Because of guild traditions, university deans and rectors are selected from among the professors; collegial practices decree that the ideal aim of decision–making is consensus and that seniors have more inﬂuence than novices. Democratic structures are manifested in representatives that are elected for three to ﬁve years, and in the representation of all professional groups of the university, as well as students (Välimaa 2001, 38–9).

University faculty members in Finland may be categorized into university teachers, researchers, and assisting staff, who are, for instance, librarians, laboratory engineers, or amanuenses in departments. There are three main categories of university teachers in Finland: professors, lecturers, and assistants. Until the end of July 1998, the category of professor included both professors and associate professors. This division still exists as a salary grade, although the title of an associate professor has

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been discontinued. Earlier, professors were appointed permanently, but in the 1990s universities began appointing people for limited–time chairs. But even as late as 2001, however, almost 90 percent of Finnish professors held permanent appointments. Professor is still the most prestigious group of academics (Välimaa 2004, 121), although some interviewees claimed that the increasing number of administrative tasks has increased time pressures and diminished research opportunities, rendering the position less lucrative. Traditionally, lecturers are university teachers who are not expected to conduct research, although this principle is now in transition due to free allocation of teaching resources. The post of assistant was originally a doctoral training position for junior academics, but the shortage of academic staff has saddled them with increased teaching and administrative tasks. When the rapid expansion of Finnish universities in 1970 slowed down, people with doctoral degrees occupied the assistant’s posts. Thus, the post of a senior assistant was created in 1980s, allowing people with doctoral degrees to move into a higher rank and leave more assistants’ posts vacant for doctoral students. Assistants must now have a Master’s degree, and senior assistants must have a post–graduate degree (licentiate or doctorate)27. Both are usually appointed for a limited time—usually five years (Välimaa 2004, 121–2). University expenditures are financed from the State budget. In practice, however, universities also acquire income from external funding and from the sale their commercial services, to make up the 30 % of its expenditures not covered by direct state funding (National Board of Education). University education is free for students, who also receive some financial aid from the State. The aid is not enough to cover living costs, but Finnish students can finance their living expenses with a study loan, part of the interest of which is subsidized by the State. The fact that most students are unwilling to take advantage of this scheme and borrow money to finance 27

However, exceptions do happen.

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However, exceptions do happen.

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their living expenses has been a recent topic of discussion, as their working necessarily prolongs their studies (see, for instance Honkimäki 2001). There have been various suggestions as how to approach this problem, but it seems to boil down to the fact that young people are not willing to invest in their own education. This attitude throws some light on young people’s expectations towards education in Finland: Education should not incur a cost to the student—its purpose is for young people to acquire skills for the job markets and be able to earn their living. The insecure job market makes students reluctant to invest their own money on education and they obviously feel that they should be able to study whatever is their own interest, without caring much for the future market price of their educational investment. Such risks should be taken by the State, apparently.

Finnish higher education has undergone a major reform during the last decade with the introduction of market, or quasi–market type mechanisms, which has led to competition both among and within institutions of higher education. The shift in funding structures has also increased market–like behaviour in the academic world, and has changed the social dynamics inside universities. Hence, if one asks any contemporary Finnish academic to name the most negative university situation, the answer would probably be the new management principles, called “management by results”, which stands for a control procedure that is to be used for steering Finnish universities. Brieﬂy, this term means that all universities must set production objectives (measured by number of degrees) and sign a performance agreement based on these objectives with the Ministry of Education28. Hence, market–like behaviour—academic capitalism—is said to be the social context of today’s Finnish university life, as faculty members are required to work in accordance with performance targets and output objectives (Välimaa 2001 and 2004, 118). In sum, the Finnish academic career structure still largely follows the original idea that novices begin as assistants, qualify themselves as senior assistants, and obtain professors’ chairs at the peak of their careers.

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However, because of the rapid growth of doctoral degrees, it is also clear that large majority of PhDs will never become professors. Although there are new possibilities as project researchers, the future of newly graduated doctorates has become a problem. Namely, the current ﬁnancing system that emphasizes the number of degrees has created a vacuum for newly graduated doctors. At the post–doctoral level, they are left almost entirely on their own, as university funding principles support institutions only as far as doctoral degrees. Thus, when doctoral candidates ﬁnally obtain their government–funded degrees and could start practicing their skills as researchers, there is no system to support them29.

The binary system of higher education: Universities and polytechnics Universities and polytechnics30 form the Finnish higher–education sector. According to the WebPages of the Finnish National Board of Education31, universities are characterized by “scientific research and the highest education based thereon”, whereas polytechnics are oriented towards working life, and base their operations on vocational skill requirements. This non–university sector of higher education, currently consisting of 30 polytechnics, was created in parallel with the university sector when the Polytechnics Act was passed by Parliament at the beginning of 1995. 28 The Ministry of Education and the universities conduct performance negotiations to agree on the objectives of the university operations and to set, among other things, the field–specific target numbers of Master’s degrees and doctorates for each university. These objectives are based on national analyses of educational needs and on the development plans for education. The universities decide on their field–specific intake on the basis of these objectives (Välimaa 2004). 29 Another debate is whether or not there should be different routes for doctors depending on their interests. If one is clearly dedicated towards working in the business world, this funding system is not a problem. But for young research–oriented academics, the situation can be unbearable. 30

A polytechnic can also be understood as technical university. In Collins English Dictionary, however, it is defined (in Britain, and the same definition applies in Finland) as “a college offering advanced […], especially vocational courses in many fields at and below degree standard”. See also Tomlinson (2001, 59). 31

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Consequently, the Government authorized nine polytechnics to begin operating on a permanent basis in August 1996 (Ministry of Education32). The network of polytechnics was based on existing vocational institutions from a variety of educational areas, such as business studies, engineering, and social work. Universities grant Bachelor’s degrees, Master’s degrees, Licentiate’s degrees and Doctoral degrees, and the polytechnics grant Bachelor–level degrees that differ from the academic degrees in that they are targeted at a particular area of working life. However, since 2002, certain accredited polytechnics were been given the opportunity to offer education above the Bachelor level, in order to provide competence for more demanding occupations. This move raised criticism, as many people believe that polytechnics should emphasize the vocational aspect of higher education, thereby eliminating the need for a post–graduate degree (see Herranen 2003, 10–11). The relationship between polytechnics and universities is discussed later in this chapter. Both universities and polytechnics select their own students independently, and the competition for study places can be fierce in popular fields of study (Välimaa 2004, 117). The structure of Finnish higher education is depicted in Figure 2. As can be seen from this figure, the Finnish system is a flexible one, which means, for instance, that even people who choose vocational education at the age of 16 can enter university, and go all the way to a doctoral degree33.

The legislation constructs the difference deﬁning polytechnics for providers of higher vocational education and universities as providers of highest education based on scientiﬁc research. The Universities Act (645/1997) says: 33

Two of my interviewees actually followed this route. They are professors who never matriculated from upper secondary school, but came to university via vocational education. 32

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Figure 2. The education system in Finland (Source: National Board of Education).

The purpose of universities is to promote independent research and scientiﬁc and artistic education, to provide instruction of the highest level based on research, and to raise the young to serve the fatherland and humankind (§4). Paragraph 4 of the University was changed by a decree (30.2.2004/715) that extended the responsibilities of universities to cover interacting with society at large and applying research results. The Polytechnics Act (9.5.2003/351), on the other hand, says that polytechnics should,

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Two of my interviewees actually followed this route. They are professors who never matriculated from upper secondary school, but came to university via vocational education. 32

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Figure 2. The education system in Finland (Source: National Board of Education).

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in executing their tasks, co–operate with business life and working life, especially in their own area, and collaborate with Finnish and foreign institutes of higher education and other educational institutes. Thus, both polytechnics and universities are urged to collaborate with the outside world; but in the case of former, it is explicitly stated that this outside world shall be of the business world. The difference in the legislation is clear; universities base their instruction on research and polytechnics concentrate on practical skills. However, these lines are difﬁcult to draw when both universities and polytechnics provide business studies, which is both a practice–based and a vocational education. Business education suffers from this confusion most, because law and medicine, the two other practice–based university disciplines with which academic business education is often compared, are not provided in polytechnics. To further add to the confusion, in January 2006, the polytechnics changed their English name to “University of Applied Sciences”34. Although it may be explicit in the legislation and operational principles, this binary educational system is causing confusion for linguistic reasons as well. In Finnish language, as well as in Swedish, the other ofﬁcial language of Finland, there are two parallel names for higher university education. Multidisciplinary universities are called universities, but universities of technology, as well as schools of economics and business administration, have been and are called, literally translated, “high schools”, deriving from the German Hochschule. Hence, translated into English, which is the language of business education, they would be called technological high schools and commercial high schools35.

Prior to the 1990s, most polytechnics were based on previously existing vocational institutions and went by names like commercial institute. The confusion began when the network of polytechnics was created in the mid–1990s under the Finnish name of “vocational high schools”. This linguistic confusion is common in all Scandinavian countries, as the German Handelshochschule and Nordic Handelshögskola translated their names into English in a variety of ways (Engwall & Gunnarsson 1994, 19).

University–level business education in Finland Background In 2006, there were 10 universities with business curricula, as well as 3 business schools, the largest being the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration (HSEBA). Until it was nationalized in 1974, and the prefix “Helsinki” was attached to its name, it was “the” school of economics in Finland. Its centrality is also due to geographical factors. Helsinki has been the administrative capital of Finland since 1812, and has a dense population, especially when the nearby cities of Espoo and Vantaa are included in its backyard. Thus, HSEBA has more students, more professors, and, presumably, greater influence than any other school. Furthermore, the development and history of HSEBA does have influence on other parts of Finland as well, because they have had professors educated in Helsinki36. As mentioned before, the first Finnish commercial institute was founded in Turku in 1839, but higher education in commerce began first at the beginning of 20th century. Two separate business schools were established in Helsinki: In 1909, the Helsinki Swedish business community founded what is now known as the Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration (Hanken), and two years later, HSEBA37 initiated its first term.

Also, a few polytechnics were threatened with closing in 2006 because they did not fulﬁl their criteria for “international standard research”. Hence, the confusion over the role of polytechnics seems to predominate at the political level as well. 35

In the aftermath of the creation of polytechnics, at least two institutions, in Lappeenranta and in Tampere, have changed their names from “technological high school” to “university of technology”. 36 37

The inﬂuence of HSEBA is also depicted in Chart 2, Chapter 4.

Although I call it HSEBA throughout its history, it was called the School of Economics (without the preﬁx Helsinki) until 1974 when it was nationalized, and “and business administration” was dropped from its English name in 2006.

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The inﬂuence of HSEBA is also depicted in Chart 2, Chapter 4.

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It seems that the order of emergence of higher business education varies with the writer. Although the Swedish school emphasized its role as provider of higher education in business from the beginning, the educational level of its pupils varied, and by 1911 it had initiated a lower, institutional level of teaching. These two levels of study became mixed and often confused with each other, which also accentuated the role of the institution as being more practically oriented. HSEBA also offered lower and higher degrees, but the higher degree at HSEBA was seen as a university equivalent sooner than the Hanken degree was. HSEBA had professors from the beginning, but Hanken upgraded the senior lecturers to professors first in 1934. HSEBA could grant doctorates as early as 1931, whereas Hanken was first granted that opportunity in 1944. Hence, HSEBA established itself in the map of higher education earlier than Hanken did, which is why it is often seen as the first business school in Finland. Furthermore, the existing Finnish–speaking commercial institute in Helsinki had initiated a parallel class for pupils with higher basic education as early as 1907, which can also be seen as a starting point for HSEBA (Michelsen 2001, Westerholm 1984). The curriculum at Hanken was based along two lines of studies: industry or industry and commerce. A variety of practical skills was taught, from calculation and bookkeeping to machinery, chemistry, and foreign languages (Westerlund 1984, 13). The curriculum at HSEBA was similar, with maybe less emphasis on the industrial side (see Michelsen 2001, 31). Both schools had a strong emphasis on practice; their aim was to provide Finnish commerce and industry with skilled personnel.

Hanken was ﬁrst called “The Higher Swedish Institute of Commerce” and the body within it that provided lower degrees, “Commercial Institute”. In order to clarify the difference between an institute and higher education, the name of the school was changed to Swedish School of Business Administration (Svenska Handelshögskolan) in 1917, but due to economic arrangements, the new name was not ofﬁcially initiated until 1927. However, even though professors’ chairs were introduced, Hanken

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remained a practically oriented school, and its level of education was considered academically lower than HSEBA’s (see Westerholm 1984). In 1927, another private business school for Swedish–speaking students was established—this time in Turku. It was part of the city’s Swedish–speaking university38, and thus called the Åbo Akademi School of Economics and Business Administration39, until 1981 when it was merged with the university’s Faculty of Social Sciences. It had professors from the university at the beginning, but the university’s chancellor urged the business school to find its own teachers. Due to economic reasons, this goal was not achieved until the law of financial State support for business schools came into operation in May 1950. Hence, during the first decades the faculty had varied status, and some chairs were managed by university professors as secondary positions. The Business School started to grant doctorates in 1959, and the academic level of teaching began to rise, when post–graduate studies and research were provided with financial resources (Sandström 1977, 57). ÅA Business School used HSEBA for its role model in setting its curriulum, in order to gain acceptance from authorities and to ensure the competitiveness of its students in the labour market. At the beginning, the curriculum was based on two topics: economics and techniques in commerce. Commercial law and economic geography40 were introduced in 1940s. Being a part of Åbo Akademi University guaranteed the business school students a place in related courses such as chemistry and law. The school had a similar two–scale system of lower and higher degrees as did the other contemporary schools, and, during the first four years, it also offered a degree for teaching at commercial institutes41, but it 38

This is also an example of the development of bilingual education in Finland. Two separate universities were established in a single city: the University of Turku (1920) for Finnish speakers, and Åbo Akademi (1918) for Swedish speakers (Välimaa 2001, 28). 39

From now on referred to as Åbo Akademi Business School or ÅA Business School.

Economic geography is a sub–discipline that seems to have played a bigger role in Swedish– than Finnish–speaking curricula in Business Administration. 41

Teacher shortage in commercial institutes was remarkable, as was also reﬂected in the history of HSEBA (Michelsen 2001).

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From now on referred to as Åbo Akademi Business School or ÅA Business School.

Economic geography is a sub–discipline that seems to have played a bigger role in Swedish– than Finnish–speaking curricula in Business Administration. 41

Teacher shortage in commercial institutes was remarkable, as was also reﬂected in the history of HSEBA (Michelsen 2001).

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was discontinued before a single student graduated. According to the schools’ annual reports from the 1950s and 1960s, the school was offering marketing–related lecture courses as early as the mid–1950s and 1960s through their visiting or acting professors and teachers. The curriculum varied in accordance with who was responsible for teaching. In 1930s, the word kauppatiede (commercial science) was openly used at HSEBA. The contents of education started to separate into business administration and economics, but the academic side of the education was still not really valued, as the school’s board of directors consisted solely of practitioners with no experience in evaluating academic achievements. The growing student body in both Hanken and HSEBA created space problems, and the new buildings of HSEBA and Hanken were inaugurated in 1950 and 1954 respectively. They were located on both sides of one street42 (Westerholm 1984; Michelsen 2001). The growing interest in higher business education led to the establishment of TSEBA in 1950. It had the right to grant doctoral degrees as early as 1954, but the progress was slow, as the first licentiate was obtained in 1965, and first PhDs in 1970 and 1975. The growing number of students and lack of financial resources during the 1960s made research difficult. The school had some “suitcase professors”, who did research in their home universities and taught at TSEBA. With their onerous teaching and administrative tasks, local professors had no time for research (Kanerva 2000). The baby–boom generation, born after World War II, entered higher education in the 1960s, and the lack of qualified teachers became serious

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in all the schools. This was partly because post–graduate studies had not been lucrative earlier, as employment for business school graduates was good. Hence, even though the proponents for raising the academic level of studies were outspoken at HSEBA, the lack of teachers made it necessary to lower the requirements for the teaching posts, which continued unﬁlled for long periods (Michelsen 2001). The subjects in business administration at Åbo Akademi Business School also suffered from a shortage of competent faculty during the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps partly because other Nordic countries were offering lucrative positions for Swedish speakers, and partly because the business schools’ graduates had other good employment opportunities. Thus the school began co–operating with Hanken, in teaching market economics, for instance (Sandström 1977). The Finnish educational politics emphasized decentralization in 1960s, which made the shortage of qualiﬁed faculty even worse, as new university units, some with business curricula, were established elsewhere in Finland. The Vaasa School of Economics and Business Administration was established in 196643, and Tampere initiated studies in economics and administrative sciences in 1965, when a new faculty was established in the College of Social Sciences—the predecessor of the University of Tampere. Other important steps were the nationalization of universities and business schools in 1974, and the degree reform44 in 1977. As stated previously in this chapter, the network of universities expanded rapidly during the 1970s. The dates of establishing of different universities with marketing curricula are listed in the calendar of events at the end of this chapter.

The street is called Arkadiankatu, and a joke has been coined about it being the “widest street in Helsinki”, as these two schools had so little contacts with each other (P13).

In 1980, it became a university and developed more faculties around business studies (e.g. humanities in 1980 and social sciences in 1983). In 1993 the faculties are established: The Humanities, Business Administration, Accounting and Industrial Management, and Social Sciences. It is worth noting that University of Vaasa thus has two faculties with subjects related to Business Studies. It is also worth noting that the business school in Vaasa had marketing as an independent subject already in 1968 – earlier than other schools in Finland. 44

The different degree systems will be described later in this chapter.

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The street is called Arkadiankatu, and a joke has been coined about it being the “widest street in Helsinki”, as these two schools had so little contacts with each other (P13).

The different degree systems will be described later in this chapter.

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University–level education in marketing Marketing curricula The beginning and development of university–level marketing education is shown in the general contents of marketing curricula. Consequently, I examined curricula material between 1952 and 1997 from three different institutions providing higher marketing education: HSEBA, TSEBA, and University of Tampere. These institutions were chosen because they are the largest Finnish–speaking marketing education providers, representing about half of marketing graduates45. I also include some points from Hanken’s and ÅA Business Schools’ study guides, as they had marketing– related study programs relatively early. These books that are here called curricula material, or study guides, include relevant information for students. This includes names of courses taught; classrooms, course methods and course literature, usually also names of teachers responsible for courses. Often the information is imprecise, as certain facts are not known at the time when the material needs to be printed. Thus, in study guides there might be a name for the course, “NN” as responsible teacher and literature might be “announced later”. Hence, students have also been informed via notice boards. However, my purpose here is to explore what academic marketing education in general consists of, and for this end these study guides give sufﬁcient information, although the curricula material is not complete, especially concerning the earlier decades.

According to curricula data, HSEBA had two study programs in 1952, ﬁrst of which was called “study of selling and advertising”, and included lectures as well as literature for instance in the principles of advertising and market analysis. The other program was on more advanced level, and was labelled “study of trade and (shop) management”. It included large amounts of literature on marketing, organization, practical business

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psychology and international trade. The literature was in Finnish, English, Swedish, German and Danish. In 1955, these two programs were divided into four sub–fields, out the fourth of which was called “study of selling and advertising and market research”, with literature of selling, advertising and one that is called “principles of marketing”. When curricula at HSEBA, TSEBA and University of Tampere started to be apportioned to departments, two entities were formed: Business Administration 1 and Business Administration 246. In 1960s, BA 1 in HSEBA included studies related to accounting, and BA 2 concentrated primarily on different aspects of commerce. The study of selling and advertising still formed one sub–field, along with at least English language, commercial law, and statistics. In the latter part of 1960s, marketing courses were becoming part of Business Administration 2, along with distribution, business organization, and various aspects of management. When marketing and management separated, curricula in business studies usually began to include three subjects: Accounting, Management (or Organization and Leadership, or Administration) and Marketing. As an independent discipline, marketing appears to have started in 1969 at Tampere University and HSEBA, and in 1973 at TSEBA. In the first years, marketing studies consisted of marketing basics (lecture courses) and large examinations (many books, called “book packets” were covered in one exam) where students were to prepare themselves independently with a given amount of literature47. By the beginning of the 1980s, university teachers had begun using exercises rather than independent examinations. Case studies were beginning to flourish in all these schools during 1980s, 45

In 2000, there were a total of 1488 graduates, Bachelors and Masters combined, of business administration. Of these, 719 graduated from these three schools (Kota Database). 46

I use the USA–based title of Business Administration rather than Business Economics, which stems from Germany, although at least the Helsinki school used the latter at the beginning. However, over the years, Business Administration has become the standing title for business studies in Finland, as can be seen in Table 5. 47

Such examinations had been the primary study method through 1950s and 1960s as well.

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In 2000, there were a total of 1488 graduates, Bachelors and Masters combined, of business administration. Of these, 719 graduated from these three schools (Kota Database). 46

Such examinations had been the primary study method through 1950s and 1960s as well.

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although they had already entered marketing education during the previous decade.

statistics were the primary bases of marketing research. In 1990s, students could include a course on qualitative methods in their studies.

Perhaps due to linguistic differences, Swedish–speaking Hanken initiated a study program called Special Business Administration in 1966, which included a course called Market Economics. In the other Swedish–speaking Business School, at Åbo Akademi University in Turku, an independent course by the same name was offered from 1966 onwards. The other Special Business Administration –subject at Hanken was accounting, and the rest was under General Business Administration, which changed in 1967 to be one Special Business Administration subject as well. However, Hanken differed from the other schools in that it used the title Department of Market Economics until 1987, when economic geography was included to the department’s name; and one year later, they were two separate subjects in that department. In 1991, the department changed its name to Department of Marketing48. At ÅA Business School, study program in Market Economics became Marketing and Foreign Trade in 1978, and further just Marketing in 1989. International Marketing was placed under Economic Geography until 1999, when it merged with marketing and the whole subject became International Marketing.

In every institution, the number of courses taught in English increased during the 1990s. The studies of international marketing formed an independent study program in HSEBA starting in 1984, and by the beginning of the 1990s, they were taught entirely in English. However, TSEBA had a separate marketing–based study program on foreign trade as early as 1979.

In general, during this time span (1952–1997), marketing education seemed to consist of: • • • • • 70

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Marketing communication Marketing research and decision making Marketing planning International marketing Consumer behaviour

During the time span that these guide books cover, mathematics and 48

Although the name of department was back to Market Economics in the study guide of the following year (1992–1993), it translated into English as Department of Marketing and Economic Geography. 49

Professor of International Marketing at HSEBA.

The marketing classic, Marketing Management by Philip Kotler (1967) is found in top–three list of most–used textbooks in the course literature of all these schools. The other two books on that list are Research for Marketing Decisions by Paul Green and Donald Tull (1966); and Consumer Behaviour by James Engel et al. (1968). Thus, the US inﬂuence is clear, although Internationalization of the Firm, a doctoral thesis by Reijo Luostarinen (1980)49, can be found in the top ten of both HSEBA and TSEBA. There were a few other Finnish or Swedish books in the top ten; however their use had almost stopped by the 1980s and given way to US texts.

Degrees in marketing The interest in university–level business education has been growing steadily since 1990. The number of candidates who applied in relation to those who were accepted is shown in Table 2: Year

Applications

Accepted

1990 1995 2000 2004

6 333 7 471 9 427 11 979

1 562 1 759 2 527 3 272

Table 2. Students applying and accepted to university–level business education 1990–2004 (Source: Kota Database).

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although they had already entered marketing education during the previous decade.

statistics were the primary bases of marketing research. In 1990s, students could include a course on qualitative methods in their studies.

In general, during this time span (1952–1997), marketing education seemed to consist of: • • • • • 70

U N I V E R S I T Y – L E V E L E D U C AT I O N I N M A R K E T I N G

Marketing communication Marketing research and decision making Marketing planning International marketing Consumer behaviour

During the time span that these guide books cover, mathematics and 48

Although the name of department was back to Market Economics in the study guide of the following year (1992–1993), it translated into English as Department of Marketing and Economic Geography. 49

Professor of International Marketing at HSEBA.

Applications

Accepted

1990 1995 2000 2004

6 333 7 471 9 427 11 979

1 562 1 759 2 527 3 272

Table 2. Students applying and accepted to university–level business education 1990–2004 (Source: Kota Database).

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The degrees obtained from higher education in business administration have varied over time. At HSEBA, from 1921 onwards, the higher BA degree (kauppatieteen kandidaatti; Master of Economic Sciences) was comparable to that provided in universities; whereas the lower degree was a two–year degree program, only slightly above the level of commercial institutes. Its aim was to ensure that graduates mastered the basic concepts and operational activities of business in practice. The higher degree, which required more independent academic work, did not appeal to most students, as work was guaranteed also with the lower degree. In order to strengthen the status of the lower degree, graduates were entitled to use the title, ekonomi, from 1928 onwards (Michelsen 2001, 88). The reformation of the degree system was much discussed in HSEBA in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The higher degree of kandidaatti was vague and the studies had the reputation of being light and easy. Hence, there was need to develop the degrees in a more scientiﬁc direction. In 1968, the title kandidaatti disappeared, and ekonomi was the only degree one could obtain at business schools. It was equivalent to the Master’s degree of universities (Michelsen 2001). The much–opposed degree reform came into effect in 1977 after much discussion. It organized the degree requirements into three levels: basic, subject, and advanced (special) studies. It was seen as a threat to the Humboldtian notion of a university, and there were concerns that it would turn universities into school–like institutions (Välimaa 2001). The degrees were changed once again in 2002, when the lower degree was re–introduced. The degree system currently follows the system of Bachelor and Master’s. 72

Changes in degree titles and levels make the statistics difﬁcult to follow. From the raw data provided by the Central Statistical Ofﬁce of Finland, I have counted each years’ degrees from 1971 to 1997 by combining lower and higher degrees, despite their titles.

U N I V E R S I T Y – L E V E L E D U C AT I O N I N M A R K E T I N G

1971–72

Lower Higher Sum Licentiate Doctorate

317 87 404

1973–77

1 071 248 1 319 9 4

1978–82

1983–87

708 436 1 144 7 10

91 1 142 1 233 10 5

1988–92

5 1 363 1 368 21 14

1993–97

104 1 331 1 435 42 35

Table 3. Marketing degrees in Finland: 1971–1997 (Source: Central Statistical Ofﬁce of Finland50). As can be seen from Table 3, the number of marketing degrees has been growing steadily since the hiccough in late 1970s and early 1980s. The shifts between lower and higher degrees, described above, can be seen clearly, as well as the starting growth in number of doctorates.

Marketing at university level in 2006 In 2006, there were 10 universities and 3 business schools in Finland offering a marketing curriculum. The name of subject can vary from place to place: “international business”, “international marketing”, or just “marketing”. Table 4 displays the names of subjects and the departments and faculties where marketing is taught in Finnish universities. Table 4 also shows how many chairs of marketing there are in different schools. The total of marketing chairs in Finland adds up to 41. 50

The time span here is based on the fact that the Central Statistical Office of Finland has not published statistics on degrees by major subject since 1997. Similarly, Kota database (see previous page), which is maintained by the Ministry of Education, and offers statistical data on universities and education since 1981, does not separate business studies by major subject either. There are some inconsistencies between the data provided by Central Statistical Office and the data from Kota database, because their bases of data collection are slightly different. For instance, according to Kota there are there are no lower BA degrees granted between 1989 and 1994, whereas according to Central Statistical Office there were eight lower degrees granted with marketing as major subject during this time period.

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1971–72

Lower Higher Sum Licentiate Doctorate

317 87 404

1973–77

1 071 248 1 319 9 4

1978–82

1983–87

708 436 1 144 7 10

91 1 142 1 233 10 5

1988–92

5 1 363 1 368 21 14

1993–97

104 1 331 1 435 42 35

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University Name of Subject

U N I V E R S I T Y – L E V E L E D U C AT I O N I N M A R K E T I N G

Name of Department

Name of Faculty

University of Tampere Marketing

Department of Economics and Management Department of Management Studies

Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry Faculty of Economics and Administration

and University Marketing of Vaasa International Marketing

Department of Marketing

Faculty of Business Studies 2 + 2 Faculty of Economics

Lappeenranta International Technical University Marketing

School of Business and Economics Department of Business Administration

–

University Marketing of Joensuu

Economics and Business Administration

Åbo Akademi International University Marketing

Department of Business Studies

Faculty of Law, Economics 1 and Business Administration Faculty of Economics 2 and Social Sciences

University of Helsinki Marketing

University of Jyväskylä Marketing

Marketing and Department University International Business and of Kuopio Business (Small of Management Enterprises) University Marketing of Oulu University Marketing of Lapland

Department of Marketing

No. of chairs51

In addition, there are three business schools:

1 Name of School Name of Department Marketing–related Chairs

Faculty of Business and Information 1 Technology Faculty of Economics 3 and Business Administration Faculty of Business 1 and Tourism

Table 4. Marketing education provided at Finnish universities.

Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration52 Hanken, the Swedish–speaking School of Economics and Business Administration in Helsinki The Turku School of Economics and Business Administration54

Department of Leadership and Marketing

Marketing (6) International business (4)

Department of Marketing

Marketing 4 53 (+ 2 in Vaasa )

Department of Marketing

Marketing (2) International business (2)

Table 5. Marketing education at Finnish business schools.

The network of universities that provides curricula in marketing covers the whole of Finland, and becomes even more extensive when polytechnics with a business curriculum are added to the network of university–level education. There is currently a debate over the need for such a vast network of university–level education. As can be seen from the tables 4 and 5, the name of marketing subjects varies across schools (although, as noted by a few interviewees, not as much as its neighbour subject, Management, which can be called Leadership, Administration, Organization and Leadership, or Management). However, also the re–naming of marketing into international marketing or international business raised criticism among the interviewees.

The number of chairs might differ from time to time due to allocation of posts between different subjects or ﬁxed–time chairs. The numbers in table 4 include permanent marketing chairs, and have been checked with each school.

Since 2006, Helsinki School of Economics (HSE).

Hanken has a campus in Vaasa, with two marketing chairs.

Since 2006, Turku School of Economics (TSE).

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University Name of Subject

U N I V E R S I T Y – L E V E L E D U C AT I O N I N M A R K E T I N G

Name of Department

Name of Faculty

University of Tampere Marketing

Department of Economics and Management Department of Management Studies

Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry Faculty of Economics and Administration

and University Marketing of Vaasa International Marketing

Department of Marketing

Faculty of Business Studies 2 + 2 Faculty of Economics

Lappeenranta International Technical University Marketing

School of Business and Economics Department of Business Administration

–

University Marketing of Joensuu

Economics and Business Administration

Åbo Akademi International University Marketing

Department of Business Studies

Faculty of Law, Economics 1 and Business Administration Faculty of Economics 2 and Social Sciences

University of Helsinki Marketing

University of Jyväskylä Marketing

Marketing and Department University International Business and of Kuopio Business (Small of Management Enterprises) University Marketing of Oulu University Marketing of Lapland

Department of Marketing

No. of chairs51

In addition, there are three business schools:

1 Name of School Name of Department Marketing–related Chairs

Faculty of Business and Information 1 Technology Faculty of Economics 3 and Business Administration Faculty of Business 1 and Tourism

Table 4. Marketing education provided at Finnish universities.

Department of Leadership and Marketing

Marketing (6) International business (4)

Department of Marketing

Marketing 4 53 (+ 2 in Vaasa )

Department of Marketing

Marketing (2) International business (2)

Table 5. Marketing education at Finnish business schools.

Since 2006, Helsinki School of Economics (HSE).

Hanken has a campus in Vaasa, with two marketing chairs.

Since 2006, Turku School of Economics (TSE).

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Summary of the development: the calendar of events in marketing The purpose of this calendar is to show the general progression of the subject of marketing in Finnish universities and business schools. It shows events that have formed Finnish academic marketing and is based upon the interview material, published histories of various schools (TSEBA: Kanerva 2000, HSEBA: Michelsen 2001, Hanken: Westerlund 1984, HHÅA: Sandström 1977), student guides, and the schools’ WebPages. More general history that affected the development of academic marketing is inserted in italics. When it is stated in the calendar that marketing studies begin, it usually means that Marketing becomes separated from Management. In fact, the contents of the curriculum do not change much at the time of introducing marketing as a separate study program; the contentual separation of Marketing from Management develops in time. It is not possible to identify the beginning of marketing for every school by ﬁnding the word marketing in its curricula. For instance, Hanken started its market economics program in 1966, but it was not called marketing until 1991. The Business School at Åbo Akademi had a study program called Market Economics, starting around the same time as Hanken’s. Both are included in the calendar, therefore, as it would be misleading to claim that marketing began in these schools in the late 1970s (ÅA) or early 1990s (Hanken). Also, the terms “Marketing” and “Market Economics” could be used simultaneously in their curricula.

1909: Hanken or the Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration is founded by the Helsinki Swedish business community as an advanced educational institution in Finland with instruction in the Swedish language According to its WebPages, it is one of the oldest university–level business schools in the Nordic countries.

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1911: Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration (with Finnish as its teaching language) is founded. The curriculum concentrates primarily on practical skills of selling: how a shop should be organized, and the qualities required in a salesperson or a manager. World War I (1914–1918) and the Finnish Civil War (1918). Finland declares independence (1917). Hanken loses its director, one teacher and ﬁve students. 11 Hanken graduates and 9 HSEBA students and graduates are killed in action. 1927: A private School of Business for Swedish–speaking students is established in Turku. It was part of the city’s Swedish–speaking university, and thus called the Åbo Akademi School of Economics and Business Administration (HHÅA). 1939–1945 World War II. It is possible to continue studies at HSEBA on the front. 1950: The Turku School of Economics and Business Administration (TSEBA) is founded on the initiative of local business circles. It starts as a private institution, maintained by the Foundation of the Turku School of Economics. Industrial boom, the rationing of food and goods stops. 1952: The Finnish Journal of Business Economics is established under the editorship of Huugo Raninen. Mika Kaskimies works as assistant editor. 1955: The ﬁrst doctoral thesis in marketing (or the area that is later to be called marketing) is defended by Mika Kaskimies. The topic is the factors affecting the length of distribution channels. Marketing is mentioned in the text but not in the title.

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1956: Meeri Saarsalmi, future Marketing Professor of HSEBA, obtains DBA at the Indiana University School of Business. Her degree does not qualify in Finland and she needs to complement her education with the degree of kandidaatti (equivalent to Master’s) in 1960; a Licentiate 1967; and, ﬁnally, a new dissertation in 1972. 1959: Mika Kaskimies is appointed to a Chair of Business Administration II at HSEBA. 1966: Martti Särkisilta defends the second dissertation in the area that is later to be called marketing at HSEBA. At ÅA Business School, Business Administration I and II become General Business Economics and Market Economics. Hanken offers a study program in Market Economics. 1968: A study program in marketing starts at the Vaasa School of Economics and Business Administration (established two years earlier). Veikko Leivo, a Doctor of Technology from the University of Helsinki, and future marketing professor at HSEBA, holds a chair in both Business Administration 1 and Business Administration 2. Kalevi Piha, a PhD in sociology and future marketing professor at HSEBA, holds a chair of associate professor in Sociology of Economics. Reino Kanerva, future marketing professor and rector at TSEBA, teaches at the school.

Veikko Leivo is appointed to a chair in business studies at HSEBA, which has been vacant since the demise of then–Rector Henrik Virkkunen (Accounting), who held the position from 1948 to 1963. The chair was vacant for many years, due to lack of qualiﬁed applicants.

U N I V E R S I T Y – L E V E L E D U C AT I O N I N M A R K E T I N G

1969: A program of study called marketing starts at HSEBA and University of Tampere. Kalevi Piha becomes Docent (Adjunct Professor) of Advertising and Marketing at Turku School of Economics and Business Administration. 1970: Kalevi Piha becomes Docent (Adjunct professor) of Advertising at the Vaasa School of Economics and Business Administration. 1971: Kalevi Piha is appointed Chair of Business Administration II at the Vaasa School of Economics and Business Administration. The chair is re–named Business Administration: Management and Marketing six years later, in 1977. 1972: Kalevi Piha is appointed a Chair of Business Administration II at TSEBA. 1973: Meeri Saarsalmi, the ﬁrst woman marketing professor, appointed Associate Professor of Business Administration: Marketing at HSEBA. A degree program in marketing is offered at the TSEBA (although courses in marketing were offered earlier). 1974: HSEBA and Hanken are nationalized. Professors’ chair in Market Economics (Agriculture) is established at the University of Helsinki’s Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry. The chair is re–named in 1989 Chair in Marketing, with speciality in marketing of products and services in agriculture and food economics. Business boom is cut down by oil crisis.

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1977: Kalevi Piha’s chair at TSEBA is re–named Business Administration (Management and Marketing). All universities and institutes of higher education in Finland become State institutions. 1978: Philip Kotler visits HSEBA. 1981: The Åbo Akademi School of Economics and Business Administration becomes part of the Åbo Akademi University’s Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences. 1982: Two chairs, now called marketing, become vacant at HSEBA. Many qualiﬁed candidates apply. A ﬁve–year appointment process ensues. 1984: A degree program in International Business begins at HSEBA. First Chair in Marketing is established at the University of Jyväskylä. 1990: Curriculum in Business Administration starts at the University of Joensuu. Courses in Business Administration as minor topic had been offered since the late 1980s in the Department of Economics, in the Faculty of Social Studies. The department was re–named Department of Business Administration in 1992.

U N I V E R S I T Y – L E V E L E D U C AT I O N I N M A R K E T I N G

1998: The first Chair in Marketing of Small Enterprises and International Marketing is established at the University of Kuopio. After re–arrangements in 2001, Business and Information Technology become a separate faculty; whereas business studies were, until then, part of the Faculty of Social Sciences. Kuopio had had its first marketing course as part of the entrepreneurial education program beginning in 1981; and since 1984 had had a Department of Business and Management. At that time, however, it still provided basic business skills to students from other fields. 2000: Liisa Uusitalo, Marketing Professor at HSEBA, is nominated Professor of the Year by the Finnish Union of University Professors. 2001: Marketing starts as major subject at the University of Joensuu. The Eastern Finland Business Network Faculty is established, combining recourses with Lappeenranta Technical University, University of Joensuu, and University of Kuopio. This initiative is a part of the government’s and Ministry of Education’s strategies for strengthening Finland’s business–related capacities and for developing Eastern Finland. Business studies start at the University of Lapland in collaboration with the University of Oulu, with graduates receiving a degree from Oulu. Nevertheless, Lapland, which has been a university since 1991, has had a marketing major in its curriculum since 1997.

1991: University of Oulu initiates its program in marketing.

Department of Business Administration starts its study program in International Marketing at Lappeenranta Technical University.

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1991: University of Oulu initiates its program in marketing.

Department of Business Administration starts its study program in International Marketing at Lappeenranta Technical University.

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 4 : THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARKETING AS A DISCIPLINE The history of marketing is also that of a progressive separation of marketing knowledge from marketing practice. Franck Cochoy 1998, 196 How did it emerge, this discipline called marketing? How did it develop into its present form? In this chapter, I describe two histories that began separately, then overlapped: the history of marketing in the USA and the history of marketing in Finland. But these histories are asymmetric, because Finland copied the USA, not vice versa. After World War II, the USA provided a model of economic growth— not only to Finland, but to other Western European countries as well— especially after 1947, when the Soviet sphere of influence was contained behind the Iron Curtain (Djelic 1998, 66). Many of my interviewees reflected upon the US influence on marketing as a discipline in Finland. Hence, the beginning of this chapter, which depicts the development of academic marketing in the USA, is an introduction to the main part of this chapter, which deals with Finland.

The purpose of this chapter is to review various events and phases of development in both countries—to document the emergence of what Cochoy calls this “separation of marketing knowledge from marketing practice”. This review does not claim to be an exhaustive history of the discipline of marketing, but merely one more piece of background to what follows: the contents of marketing from the points of view of the interviewees. The basis for describing the emergence of academic

MARKETING AS A DISCIPLINE: THE USA

marketing in the two countries is different; for the US part, I rely on existing literature, whereas for Finland, I use the interviews I conducted as my main source of information. It is also important to bear in mind that this chapter deals with the history of marketing as a discipline—not of marketing thought (Hollander et al. 2005). It is a history of events rather than a history of ideas. The next section shows how the development of US marketing is depicted in the literature.

Marketing as a discipline: the USA The beginnings Ronald Savitt (1980, 52) wrote: “history enables scholars within the discipline, as well as the society at large, to gain understanding of its origins and its patterns of change”. Despite this encouragement, research in the history of marketing has resulted in several articles (e.g. Mason 1998; Brown et al. 2001; Hollander et al. 2005), but few monographs since Bartels’ (1976) work55. The focus of historical research in marketing is usually on the identiﬁcation of various research paradigms and schools of thought, which usually leads to divergent interpretations. Hollander et al. (2005), for example, discussed 28 periodizations from marketing history and concluded that there is little agreement among marketing historians on even this topic. They suggested that such heterogeneity may be a sign of the ﬁeld’s immaturity—or its vitality (ibid. p. 35). Despite disagreements, and despite the fact that it falls more into the sphere of ideas than events, Roger A. Kerin’s (1996) periodization of the editorial history of the Journal of Marketing in its 60th year may be 55

In Finland, research on the development of marketing science has focused primarily on paradigms (Näsi & Saarikorpi 1983; Uusitalo & Uusitalo 1983), and little on the history of marketing ideas (Näsi 1982), the problems of deﬁning it (Särkisilta 1969), and its role as both discipline and practice (Panula 2000).

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CHAPTER 4

of interest in examining the development of the discipline of marketing through its scientiﬁc publications. Furthermore, Kerin’s list of the dominant metaphors is supported by other research literature, as shown later in this chapter. He identiﬁed prominent themes and metaphors on the basis of the journal’s published articles during those six decades:

Decade

Predominant Metaphor

1936—1945

Marketing as Applied Economics

1946—1955

Marketing as a Managerial Activity

1956—1965

Marketing as a Quantitative Science

1966—1975

Marketing as a Behavioural Science

1976—1985

Marketing as a Decision Science

1986—1995

Marketing as an Integrative Science

Table 6. Six decades of the Journal of Marketing: Predominant metaphors (Kerin 1996, 4).

According to Kerin, marketing in the USA began as a sub–ﬁeld of economics, and developed through functional and managerial approaches, supported by quantitative research techniques, evolving into a behavioural science (see also Cochoy 1998). Yet, as Hollander et al. (2005, 35) say: “It seems unfortunate that we cannot agree as to when marketing began”. Robert Bartels (1962, 5) who depicted the early days of marketing, placed its birth somewhere between 1906 and 1911—the time when the word “marketing” started to be used as a noun. He concluded that marketing as a practice has existed for a long time, but that the idea it represents has not. Hence, “marketing must be regarded not simply as a practice but as a conception—a concept of a practice”.

MARKETING AS A DISCIPLINE: THE USA

The discipline of marketing did not construct markets. They already existed. The first marketing scholars went where the action was, and described what happened when goods were produced, transported, and sold to customers. Hence the first US marketing scholars were hybrid persons who moved between business practice and scholarly interests. The only field of science that dealt with market phenomena was economics, and many of the founders were disciples of the German historical school of economics (Cochoy 1998). As the first marketing scholars were forced to start from scratch, they had to borrow their knowledge from other domains, visiting various areas of business activities and describing what they saw. They followed procedures of trade and documented what happened, which resulted in early marketing textbooks like Weld’s (1915) Studies in the Marketing of Farm Products. Hence this early stage of development is often referred to as the descriptive phase of marketing. These hybrid persons could easily function in both worlds, combining the identities of managers and academics. Arch Shaw was such a hybrid who successfully integrated business experiences and contributed to the development of the business curriculum at Northwestern University and Harvard University. He founded a weekly that was the direct ancestor of Business Week, and on the academic side, established the first business laboratory and developed the case method (Cochoy 1998, 199). This was an era conducive to the development of marketing. In the “roaring twenties”, productivity was rising, transportation developing, electricity was cheap, and the assembly line represented an organizational revolution. However, the buyers were not up to consuming everything that the new productivity rates could achieve. Thus, the cry from manufacturers to US workers to “save less and buy more” became known as the “gospel of consumption” 56. Most working people were content to earn just enough to 56

The word consumption was still associated with tuberculosis in the 1920s; however, and consuming had a strong negative connotation: to destroy, to pillage, or to exhaust (Rifkin 1995).

CHAPTER 4

Decade

Predominant Metaphor

1936—1945

Marketing as Applied Economics

1946—1955

Marketing as a Managerial Activity

1956—1965

Marketing as a Quantitative Science

1966—1975

Marketing as a Behavioural Science

1976—1985

Marketing as a Decision Science

1986—1995

Marketing as an Integrative Science

Table 6. Six decades of the Journal of Marketing: Predominant metaphors (Kerin 1996, 4).

MARKETING AS A DISCIPLINE: THE USA

The word consumption was still associated with tuberculosis in the 1920s; however, and consuming had a strong negative connotation: to destroy, to pillage, or to exhaust (Rifkin 1995).

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MARKETING AS A DISCIPLINE: THE USA

provide for their basic needs and a fe w luxuries, after which leisure time was of greater value than money. The Protestant work ethic was deeply ingrained in the USA and businesspeople realized that in order to make people want things they had never previously desired, they had to create “the dissatisfied consumer” (Rifkin 1995, 17–20). Thus, the new mission of business was to create the wants it sought to satisfy, as the basic human needs of the majority of US people were fulfilled (see also Galbraith 1984, 138). A new subfield of economics, “consumption economics”, emerged in the 1920s, and marketing gained a significant new position in business (Rifkin 1995, 20).

natively synonymous with selling, distribution, advertising and so forth” (Cochoy 1998, 202). It was for this reason that the AMA Committee on Definitions was established in 1931, and was authorized to construct the official vocabulary of marketing in order to work toward “some degree of uniformity in the usage of the various terms employed in the discussion of marketing subjects” (Committee Reports 1948, p. 202)57. The second aim of the marketers was to ensure that the agreed–upon concepts and definitions were adopted and adapted to business practices, in the hopes that the emerging marketing discourse would not become a dead language. It needed to be organized into a coherent whole (Cochoy 1998, 202).

Marketing scholars needed to strengthen their positions in this emerging field of knowledge, and the Great Depression turned out to be the perfect opportunity. While the US economy plummeted into depression, they were able to tell managers that their problems were marketing problems, too complicated to be solved without expert help. The State’s new regulative actions emphasized the need for codes, rules, techniques, specialized agencies, and accounting devices (Cochoy 1998, 207). According to Hunt and Goolsby (1988), “marketing had now become officially institutionalized and the functional approach was thought highly useful in analysing problems of efficiency, competition, and government regulation”. The Great Depression and its financial consequences also led to the merger of the National Association of Marketing Teachers and the American Marketing Society, to form the American Marketing Association (AMA) in 1937. One year earlier, these associations had founded the Journal of Marketing.

The committee published its ﬁrst report in 1935, and started its revision ten years later, which resulted in a new report, published in the Journal of Marketing in 1948. The second report was based on the earlier one, and on criticism and suggestions from more than thirty AMA members. In the report, marketing was deﬁned as:

Standardized knowledge The next phase in the development of a marketing discipline was standardization. It was a slow and uncertain process, during which the extreme ambiguity of the word “marketing” was often emphasized: “[I]t was alter-

[Marketing is] the performance of business activities that direct the flow of goods and services from producer to consumer or user (p. 209). This definition was followed by comments about what the authors sought to include and exclude. However, it seems clear that the emphasis was on the “flow of goods and services” rather than on consumers, as it later was. As interest in market surveys rose and the techniques were mastered by people other than AMA members, it became necessary to piece together the knowledge acquired in various places. So, in 1937 AMA launched a Committee on Marketing Techniques, which published a reference book (Wheeler 1937). Thus, AMA could reinforce its role as a reference– institution for both the discipline and its clients (Cochoy 1998, 202–3).

Committee Reports: Report of the Deﬁnitions Committee. Journal of Marketing, vol. 13, issue 2, Oct, 1948, pp. 202–217.

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Committee Reports: Report of the Deﬁnitions Committee. Journal of Marketing, vol. 13, issue 2, Oct, 1948, pp. 202–217.

CHAPTER 4

In his The Development of Marketing Thought, Bartels (1962) created a good summary of five decades of slowly formalized marketing ideas leading to the circumstances in the middle of 20th century: This growing self–consciousness of scientists working in the field of marketing is impelling philosophic review of what has been thought and written about the subject (p. vii). Thus, the debate on the scientific role of marketing began, which can be seen in Wroe Alderson and Reavis Cox’s 1948 article, “Towards the Theory of Marketing”, and “Is Marketing a Science?” by Robert D. Bagozzi written in 1963. The interests of marketing scholars shifted in the 1960s, however, away from products and towards consumers, as shown in Robert J. Keith’s (1960) article, which begins with the blunt statement: “The consumer, not the company, is in the middle”. This consumer–centred thinking, also called “the marketing concept”, had appeared in marketing by the 1950s, however. It proposed a link between profit realization and consumer satisfaction, placing the consumer at the centre of marketing and providing scholars with the marketing concept to fulfil their dream of turning marketing into a science in its own right and put practice under its guidance. Nevertheless, the first marketing scholars had no skills to explain the mysteries of consumer behaviour, and thus this marketing concept, popular among managers, was resisted for a good ten years before it penetrated academia (Cochoy 1998, 210).

An important step in the launching of consumer behaviour was a funding programme and reports by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation, both of which aimed at reforming the management sciences. The idea was to fund the business schools that abandoned the descriptive and inductive approach in favour of the implementation of quantitative techniques and behavioural sciences. The goal was to make business school education more analytical, and for the schools to abandon their vocational–

MARKETING AS A DISCIPLINE: THE USA

school approach in favour of a more professional–school approach: “It should view the practice of business professionally in the sense of relating it to what we have in a way of relevant systematic bodies of knowledge” (Gordon & Howell, 1959, as cited in Hunt & Goolsby, 1988, 41). Consequently: On the one hand, the implementation of operations research and econometrics led to the birth of so–called ‘marketing science’: a research stream that could model and optimize market activities. On the other hand, the importation of statistics, psychology and behavioural analysis gave birth to the so–called ‘consumer research’: an approach that introduced a systematic study of consumer behaviour (Cochoy 1998, 212). Consumer behaviour was not the only line of research that applied quantitative research methods. The functional approach of the 1960s was based on quantitative techniques and mathematical modelling. The next phase in the development of the discipline of marketing was, according to Hunt and Goolsby (1988), the managerial approach, the birth of which can be traced to the time of McCarthy’s (1960/1971) introduction of the marketing mix: product, price, place, and promotion—later known as the 4P model58. The managerial approach emphasized the problems of the marketing manager rather than looking at the characteristics of marketing systems and their functions. A general marketing–is–everything approach emerged in the academic writing of the late 1960s, and was emphasized by such authors as Philip Kotler and Sidney Levy (1969)59. They claimed that marketing is a pervasive societal activity that is applicable beyond the traditional business arena. They further argued that every organization is involved in 58

Eric H. Shaw (1994) describes the evolution of the four utilities concept, the predecessor of the 4P model, and places its birth around the late 18th century. The four types of utility were form, time, place and possession. 59

Such a view is discussed in the interviews as well, and, for instance, in Grönroos (1996).

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Such a view is discussed in the interviews as well, and, for instance, in Grönroos (1996).

CHAPTER 4

marketing, whether or not these activities are recognized as such. Cochoy concluded (1998): Thanks to the quantitative techniques and behavioural sciences, one could develop the concepts and the procedures necessary for a true ‘marketing management’—for a technical and integrated administration of markets (p. 212). This summary of the development of the marketing discipline in the USA ends with a reference to a significant question: Can marketing be considered a science? Shelby Hunt (1983), who approached the question in his extensive work on marketing theory, believed that it could be, if it incorporates research problems outside the profit/normative/micro dimensions of marketing phenomena, as emphasized by practitioners. In the nonprofit sector and from the positive60 point of view, there are research questions that fall into the category of scientific enquiry. Whether or not the discipline is organized around one or more central theories—one condition of being a science formulated by Buzzell (1963)—is not relevant, as there are many other scientific fields in which such unity has not been achieved. For Hunt, the difference lies in distinguishing between market research (seeking customers) and marketing research (expanding the knowledge base of marketing). Hunt (p. 26) has no doubt that marketing is science, because it incorporates: 1. A distinctive, if broad, subject matter 2. Description and classification of the subject matter 3. Discoveries (however tentative) of uniformities and regularities in marketing phenomena

90 60

“Positive marketing adopts the perspective of attempting to describe, explain, predict and understand the marketing activities and phenomena that actually exist. This perspective examines what is. In contrast, normative marketing adopts the perspective of attempting to prescribe what marketing […] ought to be (Hunt 1983, 10–11).”

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MARKETING DISCIPLINE IN FINLAND

4. (Although sometimes doubted) commitment to the method of science, as researchers in other disciplines have Hunt identified transaction as the focal point of marketing, treating marketing as the science of transactions—their structure, properties, and reactions with other phenomena—exactly as chemistry is a science of substances (Hunt 1983, 17). In summary, the first marketing professors were hybrid persons, moving between practice and academia and explaining the landscape of both—to both. The second generation comprised more technical consumer researchers who favoured quantitative modelling and explained the mysteries of consumers, pricing, and product choice. However, because these doctrines were not palatable for a wider audience, perhaps, the transforming of marketing back into the general and the descriptive began in the 1990s, as can be seen in such textbook definitions of marketing as the phrase from Czinkota et al. (1997): “Marketing is a state of mind”. Progress was slow, but visible in such publications as Philip Kotler’s Marketing Management. In the 1994 edition, there were still many formulas, but few in his Millennium Edition.

The development of a marketing discipline in Finland Charts as tools for seeing networks It is sometimes difficult to trace how and why different events begin and develop. Individual actors can influence an entire field: research orientations, methods, and subject areas. Furthermore, they attract like– minded students to their schools and influence students in other schools, so the influence of an individual can grow with time. Charts that show

CHAPTER 4

90 60

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MARKETING DISCIPLINE IN FINLAND

CHAPTER 4

clusters and dependencies are one way of depicting such relationships and, through them, the creation and development of networks. Whereas published histories usually take dates of dissertations or establishing of professors’ chairs as their starting point, I start with a map drawn by the Finnish marketing academics themselves, as I use the acknowledgements of their dissertations as a point of departure. I have used dissertation acknowledgements as a criterion because dissertation acknowledgements lay out the network of people who have influenced the author one way or other. As shown in Hellström (2005), charts can be used in a variety of ways. Hellström used them to approach certain business solutions in order to show which phases of production in project industry have an impact on other phases. By shifting various parameters, he clustered production phases, demonstrating which phases were dependent on each other. My purpose for using a chart is to show how generations influence each other (Chart 1), and how different schools both form clusters and affect each other (Chart 2). These charts show both influence and dependency, as columns depict those that each person has acknowledged as having influenced his or her dissertation61. Rows show how much others have depended on the person in question. It must be stressed here that I am slightly uncomfortable in using the word “dependent”, as—unlike Hellström—I am discussing people rather than phases of projects. However, it is a useful way of showing how the network is created when newcomers are linked with an existing network through their work.

I constructed the charts by examining the acknowledgements in each dissertation. First, I wrote the name of the author in both row and column, thus creating a cross–tabulation. I marked with an “x” the cell where the row and column met, in order to create the centre line, and to avoid inadvertently marking acknowledgements to the author himself or herself. Next, I checked the people the author had thanked. Doctoral candidates usually thank their mentors and other senior faculty for having supported their work with comments and suggestions. Such thanks are marked in

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MARKETING DISCIPLINE IN FINLAND

the chart with a 1. Those who thank their colleagues—friends in a similar career phase—are marked with a 2. Opponents or thesis examiners are marked with a 3; whereas 4 represents support in some other sense, and are primarily acknowledgements to Jaakko Honko, Professor, Rector, and leader of the Institute of Basic Research at HSEBA, for his support in organizing the financial side of research62. The authors whose acknowledgements are considered here are all interviewees or academics that I know, from having studied the histories of various Finnish Business Schools, to have influenced future marketing generations at the time when marketing did not yet exist as a separate discipline. They are primarily professors from other fields, mostly economics: Gösta Mickwitz from Hanken; Huugo Raninen, Fedi Vaivio, Aarni Nyberg and Rector Jaakko Honko from HSEBA. Kalevi Piha from the University of Turku is the obvious initiator of marketing at TSEBA. Professors who held a permanent chair in marketing or international marketing/business63 around 2006 and who submitted their dissertations in marketing in 1998 or earlier have been added to the chart. I chose that time limit, because I wanted the charts to be consistent with the interviews, the majority of which were conducted in 1997 and some of which were conducted in 1998.

It needs to be pointed out, however, that not everybody acknowledges others—in two theses by these interviewees, no one is acknowledged. 62

HSEBA’s investment in post–graduate research occurred earlier at HSEBA than at other schools, as seen in this material. 63

This excludes professors of, for instance, economic geography and tourism, even though they are related to marketing.

CHAPTER 4

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MARKETING DISCIPLINE IN FINLAND

It needs to be pointed out, however, that not everybody acknowledges others—in two theses by these interviewees, no one is acknowledged. 62

HSEBA’s investment in post–graduate research occurred earlier at HSEBA than at other schools, as seen in this material. 63

This excludes professors of, for instance, economic geography and tourism, even though they are related to marketing.

USA/HSEBA

1973

Alf–Erik Lerviks

Hanken

1975

Reino Kanerva

TSEBA

1975

Uolevi Lehtinen

HSEBA

1975

Matti Urrila

HSEBA

1976

Tapio Pento

USA/HSEBA

1977

Markku Lahdenpää

HSEBA

1978

Guje Sevón

Hanken

1979

Christian Grönroos

Hanken

1979

Reijo Luostarinen

HSEBA

1979

Kristian Möller

HSEBA

1979

Juha Näsi

TaU

1979

Liisa Uusitalo

HSEBA

1981

Karin Holstius

Hanken

1982

Helena Mäkinen

TSEBA

1983

Jarmo R. Lehtinen

TaU

1983

Lars–Johan Lindqvist

Hanken

1987

Martti Laaksonen

VaU

1989

Niilo Home

HSEBA

1990

Mai Anttila

HSEBA

1990

Saara Hyvönen

HSEBA

1991

Pekka Tuominen

TSEBA

1991

Jan–Åke Törnroos

ÅA

1992

Hannu Kuusela

TaU

1992

Pirjo Rajaniemi

VaU

1992

Esa Stenberg

HSEBA

1992

Pirjo Vuokko

TSEBA

1993

Peter Björk

Hanken

1993

Jorma Larimo

VaU

1993

Juha Panula

TSEBA

1994

Aino Halinen

TSEBA

1994

Maj– Britt Hedvall

Hanken

1994

Tore Strandvik

Hanken

1995

Veronica Liljander

Hanken

1995

Asta Salmi

HSEBA

1995

Hannu Seristö

HSEBA

1996

Kimmo Alajoutsijärvi JyU

1996

Heikki Eerola

JyU

1996

Malin Brännback

ÅA

1996

Rebecca Marschan

HSEBA

1997

Henrikki Tikkanen

TSEBA

1998

Outi Uusitalo

JyU

❹ ❶❶

❶ ❶ ❶

❶

❶ ❶

❶

❷ ❷

❶

❶ ❶❶

❶ ✕

❶

❶ ❶❷❶ ❶

❶

❸ ✕

TSEBA

HSEBA

ÅA

JyU Outi Uusitalo 1998

Henrikki Tikkanen 1997

Rebecca Marschan 1996

Malin Brännback 1996

JyU Heikki Eerola 1996

HSEBA

JyU Kimmo Alajoutsijärvi

Hannu Seristö 1995

1996

Asta Salmi 1995

HSEBA

Hanken

Veronica Liljander 1995

Hanken

Tore Strandvik 1994

TSEBA

Maj–Britt Hedvall 1994

Aino Halinen 1994

VaU

TSEBA Juha Panula 1993

Hanken

Jorma Larimo 1993

TSEBA

Peter Björk 1993

HSEBA

Pirjo Vuokko 1992

VaU

Esa Stenberg 1992

TaU

Pirjo Rajaniemi 1992

ÅA

Hannu Kuusela 1992

TSEBA

Jan-Åke Törnroos 1991

HSEBA

❶

❸

❶

❶ ❶ ❶

❶ ✕

❶

❶ ❶❶

Pekka Tuominen

❶

❶❶ ❶

❶

1991

Saara HUvönen 1990

HSEBA

VaU

HSEBA Mai Anttila

Niilo Home 1989

TaU

Hanken

Martti Laaksonen 1987

1990

❹

❶

❷

❶

❶ ✕

❶

❶❶ ✕

Lars–Johan Lindqvist

❶ ❶

❶

1983

TSEBA

Hanken

HSEBA

TaU

HSEBA

Hanken

❶

❹ ❶ ❶

❶

❸ ❶❶ ❶❶ ❶ ❶ ❶ ✕

HSEBA

Hanken

USA

TSEBA Reino Kanerva 1975

Alf–Erik Lerviks 1973

HSEBA

Olli Ahtola 1973

HSEBA

Meeri Saarsalmi 1972

Univ. Techn.

Aarni Nyberg 1967

Martti Särkisilta

Veikko Leivo 1965

HSEBA

Kalevi Piha 1962

USA

Fedi Vaivio 1959

Meeri Saarsalmi 1955

HSEBA

HSEBA Mika Kaskimies 1955

Hanken

Jaakko Honko 1955

1967

Jarmo R. Lehtinen

Olli Ahtola

1983

1973

Helena Mäkinen

HSEBA

1982

Meeri Saarsalmi

Karin Holstius

1972

❷

1981

HSEBA

Liisa Uusitalo

HU/HSEBA

Martti Särkisilta

1979

Aarni Nyberg

1967

❸❶ ✕ ❶ ✕ ✕

Juha Näsi

1967

Kristian Möller

Univ.Techn./HSEBA

1979

Veikko Leivo

1979

1965

Reijo Luostarinen

TU/TSEBA

1979

Kalevi Piha

Christian Grönroos

1962

❶❶

1979

HSEBA

Guje Sevón

USA/HSEBA

Fedi Vaivio

❶

1978

Meeri Saarsalmi

1959

❹ ❶❶

USA

1955

❶ ❶

Markku Lahdenpää

HSEBA

✕❶ ✕

❶

1977

Mika Kaskimies

❶

HSEBA

1955

❶

Tapio Pento

HSEBA

❶

1976

Jaakko Honko

Matti Urrila

1955

1975

HU/Hanken

Uolevi Lehtinen

HU/HSEBA

Gösta Mickwitz

1975

Huugo Raninen

1952

Gösta Mickwitz

Huugo Raninen

1934

1952

1934

Chart 1.

❶

❶❶ ❶ ❶

❶ ❸

❶ ❶

❶❶

❶ ❶

❶ ❶ ❷❷ ❷

❶

❹ ✕

❶❶

❸

❶

❸

❶

❷

❸

❶ ✕

❷❷ ✕

❷

❷ ✕❶ ❶✕

95 ✕

❷ ✕

❷

USA/HSEBA

1973

Alf–Erik Lerviks

Hanken

1975

Reino Kanerva

TSEBA

1975

Uolevi Lehtinen

HSEBA

1975

Matti Urrila

HSEBA

1976

Tapio Pento

USA/HSEBA

1977

Markku Lahdenpää

HSEBA

1978

Guje Sevón

Hanken

1979

Christian Grönroos

Hanken

1979

Reijo Luostarinen

HSEBA

1979

Kristian Möller

HSEBA

1979

Juha Näsi

TaU

1979

Liisa Uusitalo

HSEBA

1981

Karin Holstius

Hanken

1982

Helena Mäkinen

TSEBA

1983

Jarmo R. Lehtinen

TaU

1983

Lars–Johan Lindqvist

Hanken

1987

Martti Laaksonen

VaU

1989

Niilo Home

HSEBA

1990

Mai Anttila

HSEBA

1990

Saara Hyvönen

HSEBA

1991

Pekka Tuominen

TSEBA

1991

Jan–Åke Törnroos

ÅA

1992

Hannu Kuusela

TaU

1992

Pirjo Rajaniemi

VaU

1992

Esa Stenberg

HSEBA

1992

Pirjo Vuokko

TSEBA

1993

Peter Björk

Hanken

1993

Jorma Larimo

VaU

1993

Juha Panula

TSEBA

1994

Aino Halinen

TSEBA

1994

Maj– Britt Hedvall

Hanken

1994

Tore Strandvik

Hanken

1995

Veronica Liljander

Hanken

1995

Asta Salmi

HSEBA

1995

Hannu Seristö

HSEBA

1996

Kimmo Alajoutsijärvi JyU

1996

Heikki Eerola

JyU

1996

Malin Brännback

ÅA

1996

Rebecca Marschan

HSEBA

1997

Henrikki Tikkanen

TSEBA

1998

Outi Uusitalo

JyU

❹ ❶❶

❶ ❶ ❶

❶

❶ ❶

❶

❷ ❷

❶

❶ ❶❶

❶ ✕

❶

❶ ❶❷❶ ❶

❶

❸ ✕

TSEBA

HSEBA

ÅA

JyU Outi Uusitalo 1998

Henrikki Tikkanen 1997

Rebecca Marschan 1996

Malin Brännback 1996

JyU Heikki Eerola 1996

HSEBA

JyU Kimmo Alajoutsijärvi

Hannu Seristö 1995

1996

Asta Salmi 1995

HSEBA

Hanken

Veronica Liljander 1995

Hanken

Tore Strandvik 1994

TSEBA

Maj–Britt Hedvall 1994

Aino Halinen 1994

VaU

TSEBA Juha Panula 1993

Hanken

Jorma Larimo 1993

TSEBA

Peter Björk 1993

HSEBA

Pirjo Vuokko 1992

VaU

Esa Stenberg 1992

TaU

Pirjo Rajaniemi 1992

ÅA

Hannu Kuusela 1992

TSEBA

Jan-Åke Törnroos 1991

HSEBA

❶

❸

❶

❶ ❶ ❶

❶ ✕

❶

❶ ❶❶

Pekka Tuominen

❶

❶❶ ❶

❶

1991

Saara HUvönen 1990

HSEBA

VaU

HSEBA Mai Anttila

Niilo Home 1989

TaU

Hanken

Martti Laaksonen 1987

1990

❹

❶

❷

❶

❶ ✕

❶

❶❶ ✕

Lars–Johan Lindqvist

❶ ❶

❶

1983

TSEBA

Hanken

HSEBA

TaU

HSEBA

Hanken

❶

❹ ❶ ❶

❶

❸ ❶❶ ❶❶ ❶ ❶ ❶ ✕

HSEBA

Hanken

USA

TSEBA Reino Kanerva 1975

Alf–Erik Lerviks 1973

HSEBA

Olli Ahtola 1973

HSEBA

Meeri Saarsalmi 1972

Univ. Techn.

Aarni Nyberg 1967

Martti Särkisilta

Veikko Leivo 1965

HSEBA

Kalevi Piha 1962

USA

Fedi Vaivio 1959

Meeri Saarsalmi 1955

HSEBA

HSEBA Mika Kaskimies 1955

Hanken

Jaakko Honko 1955

1967

Jarmo R. Lehtinen

Olli Ahtola

1983

1973

Helena Mäkinen

HSEBA

1982

Meeri Saarsalmi

Karin Holstius

1972

❷

1981

HSEBA

Liisa Uusitalo

HU/HSEBA

Martti Särkisilta

1979

Aarni Nyberg

1967

❸❶ ✕ ❶ ✕ ✕

Juha Näsi

1967

Kristian Möller

Univ.Techn./HSEBA

1979

Veikko Leivo

1979

1965

Reijo Luostarinen

TU/TSEBA

1979

Kalevi Piha

Christian Grönroos

1962

❶❶

1979

HSEBA

Guje Sevón

USA/HSEBA

Fedi Vaivio

❶

1978

Meeri Saarsalmi

1959

❹ ❶❶

USA

1955

❶ ❶

Markku Lahdenpää

HSEBA

✕❶ ✕

❶

1977

Mika Kaskimies

❶

HSEBA

1955

❶

Tapio Pento

HSEBA

❶

1976

Jaakko Honko

Matti Urrila

1955

1975

HU/Hanken

Uolevi Lehtinen

HU/HSEBA

Gösta Mickwitz

1975

Huugo Raninen

1952

Gösta Mickwitz

Huugo Raninen

1934

1952

1934

Chart 1.

❶

❶❶ ❶ ❶

❶ ❸

❶ ❶

❶❶

❶ ❶

❶ ❶ ❷❷ ❷

❶

❹ ✕

❶❶

❸

❶

❸

❶

❷

❸

❶ ✕

❷❷ ✕

❷

❷ ✕❶ ❶✕

95 ✕

❷ ✕

❷

CHAPTER 4

Chart 1: Thesis acknowledgements in chronological order showing how generations inﬂuence each other. The chart is constructed by examining the acknowledgements in each dissertation. The name of the author is written in both row and column, creating a cross–tabulation. “X” marks the cell where the row and column meet. The people the author thanked are marked as follows: Senior faculty, mostly supervisors, are marked with a ❶; colleagues—friends in a similar career phase—with a ❷. Opponents or thesis examiners are marked with a ❸; whereas a ❹ represents support in some other sense, mostly ﬁnancial. Abbreviations: HU: University of Helsinki Univ. techn.: Technical University of Helsinki HSEBA: Helsinki School of Econ. and BA TU: University of Turku Hanken: Swedish School of Econ. and BA in Helsinki TaU: University of Tampere TSEBA: Turku School of Econ. and BA VaU: University of Vaasa ÅA: Business School at Åbo Akademi JyU: University of Jyväskylä

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MARKETING DISCIPLINE IN FINLAND

The chart also includes those marketing academics who were asked but declined the request to be interviewed. In addition, everyone who was acknowledged in marketing dissertations more than three times has been added to the chart64. Those who defended their theses in the USA are written in italics. The complete list of dissertations used in the charts is at the end of References. To give an example: Aino Halinen, currently marketing professor at TSEBA, submitted her dissertation in 1994, thanking Professor Helena Mäkinen as her supervisor and Professor Kristian Möller for encouragement and guidance; they are marked “1” in Halinen’s column. In addition, she thanked Professor Christian Grönroos as her official thesis examiner, giving him a “3” in her column. She also thanked her colleagues and friends, PhDs Pirjo Vuokko, Pekka Tuominen and Jan–Åke Törnroos, and Lic. Sc. Asta Salmi, all of whom receive a “2” in her column. In cases in which the role of an acknowledged person is not clear, I have marked them with a “1” unless they have been specifically thanked for collegial discussions. In Chart 1, people have been listed in the order of their year of thesis defence. As can be seen, when the names are placed in chronological order, “1” appears most often above the centre line; people seldom thank as mentors, colleagues who have yet to obtain their own doctorates. A “2” is usually found close to the centre line; it is rare to thank collegially someone who is many years behind one in dissertation work. An exception is Mai Anttila from HSEBA, a contemporary of those who defended their theses late 1970s, and who finished her own in 1990.

97 64

One exception to this rule is Tapani Valkonen, who was Professor of Sociology at HSEBA during the 1970s, and who is thanked by three people. My decision rule was to include persons outside Business Administration who had a signiﬁcant inﬂuence on the area. An example is Aarni Nyberg, an economist who was acknowledged until 1989 by many current marketing professors.

CHAPTER 4

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MARKETING DISCIPLINE IN FINLAND

97 64

1955

Mika Kaskimies

HSEBA

1959

Fedi Vaivio

HSEBA

1965

Veikko Leivo

Univ.Techn./HSEBA

1967

Martti Särkisilta

HSEBA

1967

Aarni Nyberg

HU/HSEBA

1972

Meeri Saarsalmi

HSEBA

1973

Olli Ahtola

USA/HSEBA

1975

Uolevi Lehtinen

HSEBA

1975

Matti Urrila

HSEBA

1977

Markku Lahdenpää

HSEBA

1979

Reijo Luostarinen

HSEBA

1979

Kristian Möller

HSEBA

1979

Liisa Uusitalo

HSEBA

1989

Niilo Home

HSEBA

1990

Mai Anttila

HSEBA

1990

Saara Hyvönen

HSEBA

1992

Esa Stenberg

HSEBA

1995

Asta Salmi

HSEBA

1995

Hannu Seristö

HSEBA

1996

Rebecca Marschan

HSEBA

1962

Kalevi Piha

TU/TSEBA

1975

Reino Kanerva

TSEBA

1982

Helena Mäkinen

TSEBA

1991

Pekka Tuominen

TSEBA

1992

Pirjo Vuokko

TSEBA

1993

Juha Panula

TSEBA

1994

Aino Halinen

TSEBA

1997

Henrikki Tikkanen

TSEBA

1952

Gösta Mickwitz

HU/Hanken

1973

Alf–Erik Lerviks

Hanken

1978

Guje Sevón

Hanken

1979

Christian Grönroos

Hanken

1981

Karin Holstius

Hanken

1983

Lars–Johan Lindqvist

Hanken

1993

Peter Björk

Hanken

1994

Maj–Britt Hedvall

Hanken

1994

Tore Strandvik

Hanken

1995

Veronica Liljander

Hanken

1979

Juha Näsi

TaU

1983

Jarmo R. Lehtinen

TaU

1992

Hannu Kuusela

TaU

1991

Jan–Åke Törnroos

ÅA

1996

Malin Brännback

ÅA

1987

Martti Laaksonen

VaU

1992

Pirjo Rajaniemi

VaU

1993

Jorma Larimo

VaU

1976

Tapio Pento

USA/JyU

1996

Kimmo Alajoutsijärvi JyU

1996

Heikki Eerola

JyU

1998

Outi Uusitalo

JyU

❹ ❶

❹ ❹ ❶ ❶❶❶❶ ❶ ❸ ❶ ❶❶❶ ❶❶❶❶ ✕ ❶ ✕❶ ❶❶❶❶❶❶❶ ✕ ❶ ❶ ❶ ✕ ❶ ✕ ❶ ❶❶ ❶ ✕ ✕ ❶ ✕ ❷ ❶ ✕ ❶❶ ❷ ✕❶ ✕ ❷ ❷ ✕

JyU

JyU Outi Uusitalo 1998

Heikki Eerola 1996

USA

JyU Kimmo Alajoutsijärvi

Tapio Pento 1976

1996

Jorma Larimo 1993

VaU

Pirjo Rajaniemi 1992

VaU

Martti Laaksonen 1987

VaU

ÅA

Malin Brännback 1996

ÅA

TaU

Jan–Åke Törnroos 1991

TaU

Hannu Kuusela

TaU

1992

Jarmo R. Lehtinen 1983

Veronica Liljander 1995

Hanken

Tore Strandvik 1994

Juha Näsi

Hanken

Maj–Britt Hedvall 1994

1979

Hanken

Peter Björk 1993

Hanken

Lars–Johan Lindqvist 1983

Hanken

Karin Holstius 1981

Hanken

Christian Grönroos 1979

Hanken

Guje Sevón 1978

Hanken

Alf–Erik Lerviks 1973

Hanken

TSEBA

Gösta Mickwitz 1952

❶

❹ ❶❶

❸ ❶

❶

❶❶❶ ❶ ❶ ❶ ✕

❸

❶ Ta Ta

❶

❶❶

❶

❸

❶❶

❶

❶ ❶ ❸

❶ ❸

❷

✕❷ ✕

❷ ✕❶❶❶ ✕❶ ✕❶❶ ✕ ✕ ❶

❶ ❶❶❶ ❷❷❷ ❷❷ ✕ ✕❷ ✕

❸ Tu

❶ ❷

❶

Hanken

TSEBA

Henrikki Tikkanen 1997

TSEBA

Aino Halinen 1994

TSEBA

Juha Panula 1993

TSEBA

Pirjo Vuokko 1992

TSEBA

Pekka Tuominen 1991

TSEBA

Helena Mäkinen 1982

Reino Kanerva 1975

Kalevi Piha 1962

HSEBA Rebecca Marschan 1996

HSEBA Hannu Seristö 1995

HSEBA Asta Salmi 1995

HSEBA Esa Stenberg 1992

HSEBA Saara Hyvönen 1990

HSEBA Mai Anttila 1990

HSEBA Niilo Home 1989

HSEBA Liisa Uusitalo 1979

HSEBA Kristian Möller 1979

HSEBA Reijo Luostarinen 1979

HSEBA Markku Lahdenpää 1977

HSEBA Matti Urrila 1975

USA

HSEBA Uolevi Lehtinen 1975

Huugo Raninen

HSEBA

❶

Olli Ahtola

1967

❶ ✕❶❶ ✕ ❶ ❶❶✕ ✕ ❷

1973

HU Aarni Nyberg

1967

HSEBA

Meeri Saarsalmi

HSEBA Martti Särkisilta

1965

HU/HSEBA

Jaakko Honko

1972

HSEBA

Veikko Leivo

1959

Huugo Raninen

1955

Univ. Techn.

HSEBA

Fedi Vaivio

1955

1934

HSEBA

Mika Kaskimies

1955

Jaakko Honko

1934

Chart 2.

❷

✕❶ ✕ ❷✕

❶ ❶❶ ❶ ❶❶ ✕ ❶ ❶❶ ✕ ✕❶ ✕ ✕ ✕ ❶✕

❶

✕❶ ✕

❸ ✕

❶

99 ✕❹ ✕

❶ ❶ ✕❶ ✕

1955

Mika Kaskimies

HSEBA

1959

Fedi Vaivio

HSEBA

1965

Veikko Leivo

Univ.Techn./HSEBA

1967

Martti Särkisilta

HSEBA

1967

Aarni Nyberg

HU/HSEBA

1972

Meeri Saarsalmi

HSEBA

1973

Olli Ahtola

USA/HSEBA

1975

Uolevi Lehtinen

HSEBA

1975

Matti Urrila

HSEBA

1977

Markku Lahdenpää

HSEBA

1979

Reijo Luostarinen

HSEBA

1979

Kristian Möller

HSEBA

1979

Liisa Uusitalo

HSEBA

1989

Niilo Home

HSEBA

1990

Mai Anttila

HSEBA

1990

Saara Hyvönen

HSEBA

1992

Esa Stenberg

HSEBA

1995

Asta Salmi

HSEBA

1995

Hannu Seristö

HSEBA

1996

Rebecca Marschan

HSEBA

1962

Kalevi Piha

TU/TSEBA

1975

Reino Kanerva

TSEBA

1982

Helena Mäkinen

TSEBA

1991

Pekka Tuominen

TSEBA

1992

Pirjo Vuokko

TSEBA

1993

Juha Panula

TSEBA

1994

Aino Halinen

TSEBA

1997

Henrikki Tikkanen

TSEBA

1952

Gösta Mickwitz

HU/Hanken

1973

Alf–Erik Lerviks

Hanken

1978

Guje Sevón

Hanken

1979

Christian Grönroos

Hanken

1981

Karin Holstius

Hanken

1983

Lars–Johan Lindqvist

Hanken

1993

Peter Björk

Hanken

1994

Maj–Britt Hedvall

Hanken

1994

Tore Strandvik

Hanken

1995

Veronica Liljander

Hanken

1979

Juha Näsi

TaU

1983

Jarmo R. Lehtinen

TaU

1992

Hannu Kuusela

TaU

1991

Jan–Åke Törnroos

ÅA

1996

Malin Brännback

ÅA

1987

Martti Laaksonen

VaU

1992

Pirjo Rajaniemi

VaU

1993

Jorma Larimo

VaU

1976

Tapio Pento

USA/JyU

1996

Kimmo Alajoutsijärvi JyU

1996

Heikki Eerola

JyU

1998

Outi Uusitalo

JyU

❹ ❶

JyU

JyU Outi Uusitalo 1998

Heikki Eerola 1996

USA

JyU Kimmo Alajoutsijärvi

Tapio Pento 1976

1996

Jorma Larimo 1993

VaU

Pirjo Rajaniemi 1992

VaU

Martti Laaksonen 1987

VaU

ÅA

Malin Brännback 1996

ÅA

TaU

Jan–Åke Törnroos 1991

TaU

Hannu Kuusela

TaU

1992

Jarmo R. Lehtinen 1983

Veronica Liljander 1995

Hanken

Tore Strandvik 1994

Juha Näsi

Hanken

Maj–Britt Hedvall 1994

1979

Hanken

Peter Björk 1993

Hanken

Lars–Johan Lindqvist 1983

Hanken

Karin Holstius 1981

Hanken

Christian Grönroos 1979

Hanken

Guje Sevón 1978

Hanken

Alf–Erik Lerviks 1973

Hanken

TSEBA

Gösta Mickwitz 1952

❶

❹ ❶❶

❸ ❶

❶

❶❶❶ ❶ ❶ ❶ ✕

❸

❶ Ta Ta

❶

❶❶

❶

❸

❶❶

❶

❶ ❶ ❸

❶ ❸

❷

✕❷ ✕

❷ ✕❶❶❶ ✕❶ ✕❶❶ ✕ ✕ ❶

❶ ❶❶❶ ❷❷❷ ❷❷ ✕ ✕❷ ✕

❸ Tu

❶ ❷

❶

Hanken

TSEBA

Henrikki Tikkanen 1997

TSEBA

Aino Halinen 1994

TSEBA

Juha Panula 1993

TSEBA

Pirjo Vuokko 1992

TSEBA

Pekka Tuominen 1991

TSEBA

Helena Mäkinen 1982

Reino Kanerva 1975

Kalevi Piha 1962

HSEBA Rebecca Marschan 1996

HSEBA Hannu Seristö 1995

HSEBA Asta Salmi 1995

HSEBA Esa Stenberg 1992

HSEBA Saara Hyvönen 1990

HSEBA Mai Anttila 1990

HSEBA Niilo Home 1989

HSEBA Liisa Uusitalo 1979

HSEBA Kristian Möller 1979

HSEBA Reijo Luostarinen 1979

HSEBA Markku Lahdenpää 1977

HSEBA Matti Urrila 1975

USA

HSEBA Uolevi Lehtinen 1975

Huugo Raninen

HSEBA

❶

Olli Ahtola

1967

❶ ✕❶❶ ✕ ❶ ❶❶✕ ✕ ❷

1973

HU Aarni Nyberg

1967

HSEBA

Meeri Saarsalmi

HSEBA Martti Särkisilta

1965

HU/HSEBA

Jaakko Honko

1972

HSEBA

Veikko Leivo

1959

Huugo Raninen

1955

Univ. Techn.

HSEBA

Fedi Vaivio

1955

1934

HSEBA

Mika Kaskimies

1955

Jaakko Honko

1934

Chart 2.

❷

✕❶ ✕ ❷✕

❶ ❶❶ ❶ ❶❶ ✕ ❶ ❶❶ ✕ ✕❶ ✕ ✕ ✕ ❶✕

❶

✕❶ ✕

❸ ✕

❶

99 ✕❹ ✕

❶ ❶ ✕❶ ✕

CHAPTER 4

Chart 2: Thesis acknowledgements by school showing how different schools both form clusters and affect each other. The chart is constructed by examining the acknowledgements in each dissertation. The name of the author is written in both row and column, creating a cross–tabulation. “X” marks the cell where the row and column meet. The people the author thanked are marked as follows: Senior faculty, mostly supervisors, are marked with a ❶; colleagues—friends in a similar career phase—with a ❷. Opponents or thesis examiners are marked with a ❸; whereas a ❹ represents support in some other sense, mostly ﬁnancial. Abbreviations: Univ. techn.: Technical University in Helsinki HU: University of Helsinki HSEBA: Helsinki School of Econ. and BA TU: University of Turku TSEBA: Turku School of Econ. and BA Hanken: Swedish School of Econ. and BA in Helsinki TaU: University of Tampere ÅA: Business School at Åbo Akademi VaU: University of Vaasa JyU: University of Jyväskylä

100

The numbers spread towards the right, as the older generation has influenced others for a long time. Mika Kaskimies from HSEBA and Kalevi Piha from TSEBA representing the first generation and Uolevi Lehtinen and Kristian Möller from HSEBA representing the next generation, have long rows of 1s that stretch over two decades. Uolevi Lehtinen defended his thesis in 1975 at HSEBA and became the most influential marketing person at the University of Tampere, where he

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MARKETING DISCIPLINE IN FINLAND

obtained a chair in 1980. The short period and small amount of data do not allow me to depict how new strong figures would emerge. It would be enlightening to see how the third generation starts to form influential centre figures. Chart 2 shows how people are clustered according to the school where they have defended their theses65. The acknowledgements from Hanken are relatively scattered; the smaller units are in the last rows and columns, rendering the lower part of the chart relatively empty. PhDs from HSEBA and TSEBA, on the other hand, form relatively tight clusters, with acknowledgements reaching over generations and colleagues also being taken into account. It is noteworthy how far the influence of persons from HSEBA reaches, especially for those who defended their theses at TSEBA in 1990s. The cluster in the right upper part of the chart includes Ta (Tampere) three times: the marks are acknowledgements to Uolevi Lehtinen, who defended his thesis at HSEBA, but was at the time of those acknowledgements a professor at the University of Tampere.

First generation66 Chart 1 also supports something that is obvious in the interviews and published histories (e.g. Michelsen 2001): Professor Huugo Raninen can be considered the person who marks the beginning of the marketing story. He is acknowledged in a thesis for the last time in 1975, four decades after his own thesis defence in 1934 and 36years after his appointment as a professor in Kauppa– ja liikkeenhoito–oppi (Professor of Management and Commercial Science) in 1939 at HSEBA. His doctoral thesis from the University of Helsinki was in commercial law, an area that also existed at HSEBA, so he might have been considered for a professorship in 65

I have removed the US dissertation by Meeri Saarsalmi. Instead, she is represented here with the thesis she submitted in 1972 to HSEBA. 66

This section is based on published histories and on the interview material.

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100

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MARKETING DISCIPLINE IN FINLAND

I have removed the US dissertation by Meeri Saarsalmi. Instead, she is represented here with the thesis she submitted in 1972 to HSEBA. 66

This section is based on published histories and on the interview material.

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MARKETING DISCIPLINE IN FINLAND

commercial law as well. He reformed kauppa– ja liikkeenhoito–oppi, which at the time was considered to be purely practical, so that by the time of the Second World War, it began to include some aspects of modern business economics (Michelsen 2001, 109).

business courses in Finland were written in German; some were written in Swedish, Norwegian, or Danish. Now, the notion of Business Administration entered the equation, thanks to Tamminen and to Henrik Virkkunen, who hade defended his thesis in accounting in 1951. Virkkunen and Kaskimies also shared a professors’ chair in industrial economics in Helsinki Technical University in the autumn of 1950; and Kaskimies continued there as an assistant for the next six years. Together with Jaakko Honko, (who defended his thesis on investment calculation in 1955), these men felt that the word kauppa (commerce) was limiting, and they wanted to incorporate more aspects of industry.

In 1949, Professor Raninen asked Mika Kaskimies to become his assistant. Kaskimies accepted the post, although he really did not know what the position entailed. Nor did the HSEBA administrators. When Kaskimies went to claim his first pay cheque, he discovered that Raninen had hired him without the Rector’s permission. Nevertheless, he received his salary, and worked with Professor Raninen for three years, until 1952, when Kaskimies became a lecturer. Finland was still at war in 1943 when Kaskimies enrolled at HSEBA as a student under Raninen. It was possible for him to continue his studies at the front by taking a so–called siirtotutkinto (transfer degree). He completed this (lower) degree after the war as a civilian. He had studied education before the war, which gave him teaching qualifications, and he was recruited as a teacher at a school of commerce in Vaasa. There was a shortage of teachers in commercial institutes, and Kaskimies continued teaching on the side at various schools in Helsinki. The co–operation between Raninen and his assistant was close and effective. Although they spent their days in the same office, Professor Raninen would sometimes call Kaskimies as late as eleven or twelve at night to discuss some urgent matter that had arisen. Kaskimies assisted Raninen in writing several textbooks that played a salient role in business education at HSEBA.

102

During the 1950s, things began to change in HSEBA. When Kaskimies started as a lecturer in 1952, the word “marketing” was not yet used; the courses were called “study of commerce” or “shop management”67. At that time, however, a professor of economics, Mikko Tamminen came home after a year in the USA, and brought with him new, modern ideas and US literature. Until that time, most books used in

In a minibus on their way to dinner after Henrik Virkkunen’s thesis defence, Virkkunen and Mika Kaskimies began to discuss Kaskimies’ idea of establishing a Finnish journal in business economics. Virkkunen thought this was a good idea, as did Professor Huugo Raninen, who obtained the financial support of various companies and societies. The first issue of the Finnish Journal of Business Economics was published in 1952, with Huugo Raninen as Editor–in–Chief and Mika Kaskimies as Associate Editor. They received no financial support from the Academy of Finland, as business economics was considered to be self–supporting, so they had to rely on companies to finance the operation. A well–known German economist, Eric Schneider, also contributed to the journal with an article, which was unfortunately lost in the printing press. Luckily, Schneider had a copy of it, and the incident was cleared up with many apologies. Kaskimies worked with the journal for almost four decades. He also had a hand in further education for managers via an institute called LIFIM—founded by the initiative of Henrik Virkkunen, who died in 1963 before he had the opportunity to work in it. At the time of his passing, he was also Rector of HSEBA—young and energetic and striving to raise 103 67

It may be that Kaskimies actually participated in developing the word markkinointi (marketing), which is a neologism— a translation from English. In Swedish, for example, the word marknadsföring includes both “the markets”, and the verb föra, which has a variety of meanings: to drive, to lead, to guide, to present a case (to name a few). Furthermore, the verb förföra means to seduce. The English “marketing” is a verb derived from “the market”—to do markets.

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MARKETING DISCIPLINE IN FINLAND

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MARKETING DISCIPLINE IN FINLAND

the academic status of education and research at the institution (Michelsen 2001).

The marketing faculty started to expand in 1970s. Meeri Saarsalmi was appointed an associate professor in 1973 and Veikko Leivo, a businessman with a doctorate in technology, assumed the chair left by the late Henrik Virkkunen69, with the opportunity to design the chair’s teaching and research as he desired. When he arrived, marketing in HSEBA was based only on qualitative methods, although professors at HSEBA had been taking training in quantitative methods on Saturdays— forming what they called the “Saturday Society”. Although Leivo believed that students were interested in quantitative and mathematical methods as well, he decided to emphasize his practical experience instead of concentrating solely on mathematics.

Professor Kaskimies defended his thesis on 26 November 1955, at a time when discussions and arguments over the scientific value of doctoral thesis research could stretch over many years. The ivory tower of scientific community was indeed well defended, the professors at HSEBA, most of whom had doctorates in economics from University of Helsinki, showed no mercy even to one doctoral candidate who had been forced to leave his empirical data on the enemy side during the war. Martti Saario’s dissertation in accounting remained at a theoretical level, and its eligibility as dissertation was on trial on several occasions (Michelsen 2001). The lack of criteria for the acceptance of a thesis, and the emerging importance of “scientificness” at HSEBA at the time created particular problems for Meeri Saarsalmi, now Professor Emerita of Marketing at HSEBA. She returned from the USA in 1955 with a DBA from Indiana University School of Business. Her thesis dealt with higher business education, and was not accepted as equivalent to a Finnish doctorate. In fact, it did not even count for higher degree, and although she was already an assistant, it was 1960 before she graduated with the higher degree (kandidaatti)68.

104

Marketing became an important factor in business when post–war rationing stopped. Foreign trade had been liberated and was changing rapidly in its trade associations and agreements (Pihkala 1982). Kaskimies was being asked to lecture all over Finland, which left little time for research. He obtained a chair in “logistics and marketing” in 1959. “Logistics and” was later dropped and he became the ﬁrst marketing professor in Finland in name as well as in fact. Professor Kaskimies wrote his doctoral thesis on logistics, a central theme in business economics, and wrote another book on brands; it was published in 1958. In 1971, he also co–edited an English book on international aspects of marketing. 68

The next doctorate from USA was accepted without argument (Olli Ahtola in 1972).

Although Virkkunen was from accounting.

Leivo’s research came to a halt, however, as he deliberately chose to help new PhD students with their work. He stressed quantitative methods and problem settings in his tutoring and slowly things changed so much that the qualitative approach came to be seen as inferior. His students’ methodological stance and the practical nature of their research topics made them successful at international conferences. Leivo was appointed Rector of HSEBA, and in this position, which enabled him to see the business school as a whole, he realized that the curriculum was following the US curricula much too closely. Although Finland is a country of small enterprises, the business curriculum had been following a US model in which business resolves around large corporations. Professor Leivo then tried to develop a chair in entrepreneurship and small business management, which he said was much opposed. Although some people considered it a good idea, it was said that no government funding should be used for it. He managed to collect over a million Finnish marks from business people, however—enough to pay the salaries of one professor and an assistant for ﬁve years. When it became possible to ﬁll that chair, Professor Leivo himself was called to it, and thus changed his focus of teaching once more, although marketing remained an essential part of his teaching. His courses became very popular. He is said to have been criticized for his poor dress. However it soon

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the academic status of education and research at the institution (Michelsen 2001).

104

The next doctorate from USA was accepted without argument (Olli Ahtola in 1972).

Although Virkkunen was from accounting.

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became known to the students that he was, in fact, a millionaire, and a successful businessman, which increased his popularity among them. Some of his doctoral students, a few of whom are professors today, were apparently devoted to him and his energetic, practical orientation and success in business life. As can be seen from Chart 1, he is acknowledged by the generation that finished their theses at HSEBA in late 1979s70. A similar row of 1s has been allotted to Aarni Nyberg, who was an economist from the University of Helsinki and led the Institute of Basic Research at HSEBA beginning in the mid–1960s. His influence is also demonstrated in the emphasis on econometrics and quantitative methods in HSEBA in 1970s. The 1960s was the decade when raising the academic status of HSEBA was considered important (Michelsen 2001) and the emphasis began shifting from descriptive and inductive research to technical, quantitative research, based on mathematical models—exactly as it had earlier in North America. Although Kaskimies and Leivo were relatively far apart in emphasis, they shared a common devotion to business practice. Professor Kaskimies had a scholarly approach, and as the first professor of marketing was much in demand as a lecturer by various companies. Professor Leivo, on the other hand, was more interested in transforming his own business experiences into teaching materials. Nevertheless, both held the ideal of bringing business into the classroom, which also applies to Kalevi Piha, Professor of Business Administration, at TSEBA.

106

Kalevi Piha, Professor of General Business Economics and a docent of marketing communication or advertising, is undoubtedly the most inﬂuential person in marketing at Turku71. Piha wrote his PhD thesis in sociology at University of Turku in 1962, and had earlier published a collection on television and advertising (Piha 1958). He wanted to study 70

For some reason, professor Leivo is not mentioned in the history of HSEBA by Michelsen (2001), although his inﬂuence in marketing subject (eight 1s and one 3 in Chart 1) is clear. 71

An unsalaried docent is a historical remnant from the German university system. It is not a public ofﬁce, but permission to teach at the university concerned (see Välimaa 2004).

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MARKETING DISCIPLINE IN FINLAND

advertising, but his university advisor told him that such a topic could not be studied scientifically. Professor Piha was devoted to research in advertising, but he was also clearly a man of business. Before entering the business school, he had a long career in marketing and advertising. In his lectures, Piha was able to recall his own experience, successes, and mistakes, and give practical advice to his students. Most of his knowledge was from his years in the business world, where he made the acquaintance of several sales professionals who came from Europe and the USA to enhance product success: “We got all marketing tools directly from America, got the education directly from England and America; there weren’t even any marketing books back then”. However, advertising—his favourite topic—was not popular with the administration of TSEBA. There was only one course in advertising, and that was a non–credit course. In the beginning, TSEBA’s marketing curriculum was part of Business Administration II, and it was not until 1975 that marketing was introduced as a separate subject. In 1972, Piha obtained a chair of Business Economics 2, which was redefined two years later as a chair of management and marketing. He retired in 1986, just as that chair was again redefined—this time as a chair of marketing. Thus, the history of the Turku School of Economics and Business Administration (Kanerva 2000) shows Helena Mäkinen as the school’s first full professor of marketing, appointed in 1990, for Piha never held that title. Piha’s influence on the next generation of researchers at TSEBA can be seen in Chart 1. His first doctoral student was Reino Kanerva, who defended his thesis in 1975, and was one of the first to obtain a doctorate from TSEBA.

Second generation In the Finnish marketing family, I have identiﬁed as the ﬁrst generation the professors who could be considered to be working in the subject area of marketing, although there were men before them like the legal

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106

For some reason, professor Leivo is not mentioned in the history of HSEBA by Michelsen (2001), although his inﬂuence in marketing subject (eight 1s and one 3 in Chart 1) is clear. 71

An unsalaried docent is a historical remnant from the German university system. It is not a public ofﬁce, but permission to teach at the university concerned (see Välimaa 2004).

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MARKETING DISCIPLINE IN FINLAND

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scholar, Huugo Raninen; the economists, Aarni Nyberg and Fedi Vaivio at HSEBA; and the economist, Gösta Mickwitz at Hanken, who have influenced the subject that later became marketing. To add to the complexity, Professors Kalevi Piha and Veikko Leivo, whom I have named as marketing pioneers (or first–generation marketing academics), have their background education from the social sciences and technology respectively. Professor Piha, in fact, was never even officially a marketing professor, but a professor of general business administration. However, they both worked in the subject area for a long time, and contributed to its present state—Professor Piha through his enthusiasm for advertising, and Professor Leivo through his role as a professor of marketing and for starting a study programme in entrepreneurship at HSEBA. The people I have called the second generation are more or less direct heirs of the first generation—although two of them could also be considered pioneers, because they created a research area. However, the development has become more heterogeneous and scattered since the 1980s. People with doctorates in marketing started to emerge from academic institutions other than HSEBA, and the new, more scientific orientation opened up contacts and co–operation with marketing scholars abroad. Furthermore, the centre of research work, which during the pioneering generation had been in the department, started to move towards marketing as a discipline—the community outside departmental and university borders (see also Clark 1987).

108

In the 1970s, quantitative methods and consumer behaviour were central topics in marketing. According to interviewee P13, the 1970s were times of uncritical praise for US thought and for korpihotellit—the luxurious “wilderness hotels” ﬁlled with “foreign shamans and gurus” who came to talk about management and marketing. Every year saw the importing of a miraculous new theory from the USA—a theory that was believed to apply to every culture. Even the word “marketing” was used differently, depending on the user, and varied over time. “Although the word marketing was used”, P13 continued, “it had not necessarily

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MARKETING DISCIPLINE IN FINLAND

anything to do with the present–day marketing, or even the one ten years after”. According to P13, the US influence on Finnish marketing was seen through the AMA definitions that were cited and readily adopted by Finnish marketing academics; through the “Bibles of American professors” the fundamentals–of–marketing type books by authors like Stanton or Kotler, which were used in exams; and through the Fulbright professors, who brought in US influence. This transfer did not occur suddenly: It was not a sudden realization; but rather, it slowly impressed itself in the minds of university men, and via them expanded to the practical side (P13). Yet however slow the process, the standardization procedure initiated in North America by the AMA had direct implications for the practice of academic marketers in Finland. The quantitative orientation of Professor Leivo, as well as the central position of professors of economics at HSEBA, drew like–minded young scholars to Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration. Yet according to P14, it took time before the US influence, with consumer behaviour as its core, penetrated Finnish teaching, and the curriculum was based primarily on Finnish and Swedish literature. This new line of research also awakened resentment in some professors. As P3 said: “the attitudes were very anti–international”72. In 1979, the emphasis on modelling, decision–making, and behaviour resulted in several dissertations by people who later became professors in HSEBA. On the other hand, there was a doctoral thesis that year in Hanken on the topic of services marketing. Later years in the history of that school shows that the emphasis on services marketing remained. 72 The relative closeness of HSEBA around the 1960s is also documented in Michelsen (2001, 217); the professors had no connections with professors from other universities, and the school did not participate in the prevailing socio–political discussions.

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Because they had role models, members of the second generation were in a different situation than members of the first generation were. The supervision of doctoral theses varied greatly because the first generation academics had no supervisory role models to guide them in their supervision of the second generation. Thus, doctoral candidates of the 1970s either collaborated with each other or worked on their own. In HSEBA, there was an institute called the Department of Basic Research, the first such institute in Finland where young scholars could concentrate on their research. Doctoral candidates working as assistants in a subject department seldom managed to finish their theses, as the amount of department–related work was high. Some doctoral candidates had supervisors from the USA, or studied there. At this stage of development, the discipline was forming its own body of knowledge, a development that had started in USA some thirty years earlier. High–quality research from Finland was accumulating, and the new professors were building their special area of research that attracted more new doctoral students with interests in those areas. Until the 1980s, the discipline had comprised scattered bits and pieces with a variety of approaches and research areas. As P10 explained, academics were relieved to be faced with strong and central theories: For me, it was a relief when I found a core theory in this behaviour theory. […] There’s nevertheless a strong macroeconomic tradition and a strong sociological and psychological tradition, where the models come from (P10).

110

Although the theory of consumer behaviour had a long history, and had appeared in the business research in such forms as the theory of buyer behaviour (Howard & Sheth 1969) and the many text books on consumer behaviour that had been steadily emerging since 1955, the ﬁrst important contribution in marketing theory, according to P20, did not appear until the 1970s73. This development can also be seen in the narratives of second–

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MARKETING DISCIPLINE IN FINLAND

generation interviewees, many of whom said that they actually had no idea what marketing was when they began to study it. I return to this topic in Chapter 5. Six interviewees (P2, P10, P16, P18, P20 and P31) discussed the order in which the different schools of thought had emerged, and they were more or less unanimous about both the order and the contents. First, marketing was marketing of goods, then export marketing emerged and started to change the subject towards international marketing: Slowly, international marketing emerged. Nobody really knew what it meant; it wasn’t in that sense global, international thinking, but at the beginning mostly export marketing, where they said that it functions like in the home country, but you need to take conditions into account, which was an advice worth zero in practice (P22). International, or export marketing, was followed by an expansion of the marketing of goods to include the marketing of services in the 1970s or early 1980s. Several interviewees attributed this development to Christian Grönroos in Hanken, and others attributed it to Jarmo R. Lehtinen from the University of Tampere. The inﬂuence of Grönroos’ services marketing on the Finnish discipline of marketing can be seen in marketing curricula. His dissertation on services marketing (Grönroos 1979) has been a textbook classic, well known by marketing students, regardless of their school. Consumer behaviour and quantitative methods emerged in 1970s and peaked in 1980s. Thus, services marketing and consumer behaviour seem to overlap in the order of their emergence—or the order depends on who is talking. Business–to–business or industrial marketing followed, and ﬁnally relationships and networks, although P31 placed network and interaction approaches within industrial marketing. P16 and P20 also mentioned 73

He was referring to Hunt (1976).

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MARKETING DISCIPLINE IN FINLAND

He was referring to Hunt (1976).

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environmental questions and questions of values and ethics as being significant in current marketing, in the light of the relationships between companies and society. P13 estimated that it takes approximately ten years for new jargon to break through from academia to practitioners. He added that the expansion of terminology was not necessarily indicative of progress in a discipline. Marketing has expanded its terminology rapidly especially during the 1990s, and, P13 believed, it suggests that the contents of marketing were developing less effectively than were the words used to describe the existing phenomena. Furthermore, he said, expanding terminology has separated practitioners and academics even further, causing them to literally use different languages. One second–generation interviewee criticized the development of a variety of approaches and schools of thought: This other marketing research today, I think it is very obscure, all this relationship marketing and services marketing and the rest. To me they sound like slogans, or very normative. […] They can be important in company training, but scientifically there’s nothing interesting extracted from them (P10). P10 believed that the marketing that existed at the time he began his career was clearer and of higher scientific quality, whereas the marketing of today is more obscure and accepting of quasi–scientific approaches, such as services marketing. Nevertheless, the topics he criticized are considered central and important by other second–generation academics as well.

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The ﬁrst and second generations differed in their orientation toward the business world. For the pioneers, practice and the needs of companies were paramount. For those who entered an existing ﬁeld, however, things looked different. There were few traces of practice in the stories of the second–generation actors, except for one interviewee, who spoke of nothing else. His story began:

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…I stayed in university, but on one condition, which was that I could rub elbows with business life, or that this umbilical cord of learning in the phenomenon that I studied and that I teach would not be broken (P3). Like Professor Leivo, this professor was drawn into academia from business and was able to set the conditions of his employment. Thus, practical experience apparently is, or has been, considered to be a positive feature for the career of a marketing scholar. When describing the importance of the business world to his academic work, P3 used the expression “umbilical cord” more than once. It seems, therefore, that contact with business is what keeps some of these professors alive, provides them with nutrition and oxygen. Would they suffocate in the academia without it? Is there a third generation? Those finishing their theses in late 1990s could be seen as third–generation marketers, but the line is difficult to draw. As the second generation—those who obtained their chairs primarily during 1980s—approaches retirement age, the whole field will undergo a clear generational shift. Competition for those positions will be fierce, as there are far more people with doctoral degrees in marketing than there were when the second–generation professors were appointed.

Summary The present university–level business education in Finland has its roots in the USA, although the earliest influence came from Germany. But the 1950s saw Fulbright professors returning to Finland from the USA with books and research reports representing what was seen as modern science. In the era of predominantly German influence, research was less quantitative, less “scientific”, and perhaps more practice–oriented. It could be that the supply answered the demand, but there were many other reasons for the US influence to be absorbed so quickly. World War

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II was still remembered and suspicion of Germany was strong. The USA, on the other hand, was seen as a homeland of everything that was new, big, fine, and good. In Finland, the period of the 1970s to the 1990s was marketing’s strong “scientification” phase, which has played a part in the current criticism of its relevance to practicing marketers, a situation described in the next chapter. Criticism of extensive US influence is also seen in the way the interviewees discussed the content of marketing, which has, according to many of them, developed too much along the line of US examples. P5 maintains that marketing communication in Finland is taught too much in accordance with the US dogma, which does not suit our media’s structure. P19, in turn, suggested that marketing concepts are based too strongly on US examples, and that we should develop a more European perspective on marketing. For P14, the difference lies in the fact that the company structure in the USA is based on large corporations, whereas Finland is a country of small– and medium–sized companies. P9, who argued that journal articles are irrelevant in practical life, also stressed the fact that most journal articles in the USA are about large companies, and do not apply to the Finnish situation.

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The US company structure is thus also seen in conceptual development in marketing. As many teachings stem from the USA, where large corporations dominate, their conceptual foundation does not adapt to the Finnish business environment of small– and medium–sized companies. As P18 said, one is forced “to think the American way, doing things in a way that is not familiar to us Finns74. Then, we lose our holistic way of working and the thoroughness for which we are known.” Several interlocutors suggested that services and relationship marketing are areas of scholarship in which US scholars neglect European research, and in the process ignore a phenomenon that could be called “European marketing”.

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Having outlined the birth and development of the Finnish discipline of marketing, I now turn to the various aspects of this process. As explained in Chapter 2, coding the material under various nodes helped me to organize the contents of the interviews according to the topics discussed; but in this text I try to demonstrate how the interviewees describe the controversies inherent in academic life. The nodes, as described in Chapter 2, form the basis for these descriptions as well—I have merely switched the focus from seeing what the interviewees talk about, to how they talk. My focus on controversies is inspired by the sociology of science and technology, which usually focuses on controversies, but specifically from Bruno Latour (2005), who wrote: The task of defining and ordering the social should be left to the actors themselves, not taken up by the analyst. This is why, to regain some sense of order, the best solution is to trace connections between the controversies themselves rather than try to decide how to settle any given controversy (p. 23). The aim of my way of working with the material is to allow the actors to unfold their own differing cosmos rather than imposing my own categories. After all, researchers should abstain from interrupting the flow of controversies (ibid. p. 23–4). Hence, this chapter shows how the interlocutors described different

He was also referring to managing by results that universities have currently adopted.

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He was also referring to managing by results that universities have currently adopted.

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aspects of marketing and their everyday life in academia. The literature on the topic offered me material for reflection, and these reflections are inserted among the interviewees’ comments. Below is the list of controversies, each of which subsequently unfolds in its own section: Becoming a (marketing) academic: accidental or not? Superhumans or merely professors? Specialists or general workers? Individuals of parts of community? Teachers: at the centre of the faculty or its margin? Students: products or clients? More administration—less control Collaboration or lonely work? Open or closed university? Marketing practice and theory The pedagogy: general education or practical skills? Marketing: an activity or a way of thinking? The list begins with people and their careers; moves to the internal organization of universities; then to the relationships among the university in general, marketing in particular, and the environment; concludes with definitions of marketing.

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I now expand upon a topic that is mentioned in Chapter 2—an issue that seemed to puzzle the interviewees, and began to puzzle me: How did they become academic marketers? “Was it really this accidental?” P25 wondered aloud after the interview. He had told me about a career history that I by then I was seeing as typical: One becomes an academic in a way that in retrospect

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is mostly described as “accidental”. Many interviewees had already told me that they had “drifted” into academia, although this word could have different meanings. Some used “drifting” to denote a career development proceeding through several teaching jobs after they had obtained their Master’s degrees; others “drifted” because a school of economics accepted new students without entrance examinations or registration fees; still others “drifted” because they were too lazy to study for the entrance examinations for medicine (or so they said); and still others “drifted” because they noticed that the dress code in the academia was not very strict. Even though many of these “drifts” can be seen as strategies for telling a good life story, it is worth noting that academic work—in marketing at least and in Finland at least—appears not to be a job that people have actively sought. This may have been because the vacant positions for early career phases, although publicly announced, rarely attracted applicants who did not already have a relationship with the department. As mentioned in Chapter 2, portraying an event as an accident is a common strategy for explaining something that the speaker sees as being “beyond one’s control”—or, as Charlotte Linde (1993) puts it, a result of a relative lack of agency. A career choice, however, in contrast to an accident such as a car crash, requires at least three nonaccidental factors: The person needs to be known, needs to be available, and needs to be present (Välimaa, 22 November 2005). Nevertheless, career choices in the material are often described as incidental—driftwood being the metaphor used by P5. The academic work careers represented in this material tend to have taken a similar course. After ﬁnishing a Master’s degree, the interviewee was recruited for a short teaching job, often via an unexpected phone call or an accidental meeting with a professor. At the next career phase, this new academic marketing recruit started teaching a basic course in an unfamiliar topic, to a large audience of ﬁrst– or second–year students:

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Becoming a (marketing) academic: accidental or not?

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— I was interested in communication, but [my professor] made me teach logistics, theory of logistics for an auditorium of a hundred. I had no idea about logistics. E: Quite tough… — Tough, yes, I just read directly from the textbook (laughter) (P16). P4 recalled a similar experience: “After I had managed that, I felt that I could manage anything”. Such rapid career development, starting to work in a new position without any schooling or orientation, seems to be a characteristic of the Finnish academic world—at least in marketing. There were those who had not yet obtained their Master’s degree when they were recruited as lecturers, marketing graduates who were offered positions as senior assistants in management, and assistants who became acting professors overnight. One interviewee who had work experience from US universities said that the course of a career there is not as unclear as it is in Finland: In the USA, the student knows the type of performance that is expected in order to proceed, and does not hop over career phases, as often happens here. After having acquired a position through several short–term employments (researcher, assistant, doctoral student, temporary lecturer), the interviewees reached the point of “no turning back”: When I entered this academic world, and understood that I would do reasonably well there, I rejected all job offers and they also stopped coming. Then I realized that it was obvious that it will be, ok, then it is an academic career (P26).

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In summary, careers within Finnish academic marketing could be seen as reﬂections of an emerging ﬁeld. When the sub–disciplines of management and marketing were still closely related, a person with higher degree in marketing could be offered a post as a senior assistant in management, whereas such interdisciplinary cross–overs happen more rarely nowadays.

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Furthermore, an academic career in the area of business studies still had a relatively ambiguous path at a time when a majority of the interlocutors were making their career choices, and there was no commonly known route for pursuing it. So many interviewees may, in fact, have “drifted” into this work because they did not know that such a possibility even existed—hence the surprising phone calls and sudden job offers. P26 noted that just as one realizes that one has remained in the university, other job offers stop Although there may not have been any other job offers for some of these interviewees, it is also possible that they have created their own conclusion: that they became academics without ever making the conscious decision to do so.

Superhumans or merely professors? Maybe because of these somewhat fuzzy, unplanned career paths, there appears to be some uncertainty about what is required of a professor, and how these requirements can be met. P7, especially, wondered about the current expectations for a professor. The list seemed to be never–ending: good at attracting ﬁnancing, leading research projects, taking care of administrative tasks, developing co–operation with companies, teaching, and publishing. This can also be seen as a reﬂection of new university culture, discussed in Chapter 3, in which departments need to turn their research into “products”, and professors must be team leaders and organizers of research funding. For P7, these requirements were rather worrisome, whereas for P30 they served as positive examples of the many facets of a professor’s work life. Besides breadth and versatility, academic work has other positive features. Freedom to decide on one’s own interests and schedules and continuous self–development and learning were praised by many interviewees as features of academic work. Independence was also mentioned often: academics are able to organize their own time more freely

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than people in the business world are able to do, even though many also said that today’s pressures for effectiveness is so strong, that one is not really been able to enjoy the “academic freedom”. Not many interviewees talked about money as motivator for work, but some did comment on the low level of salaries. However, as P7 pointed out, it is rarely mentioned that some academics simultaneously enjoy a monthly pay cheque, a stipend, and consulting fees. But who would stay in the academia if that were not so, he wondered? Also P5 reminisced about a student whom, he had hoped, would continue her studies after graduation, but who found a job in industry with a salary that was equivalent to a professor’s. In general, business studies differ from the humanities in the sense that the alternative to academic work is working in business, which is often well paid—even though some humanities graduates might also end up working in business. This was stressed particularly by P27, who stated that business studies salaries in the USA can be double those in humanities, partly in order to attract talented students into academia. P7 argued that in order to be a researcher, one’s passions must lie elsewhere than in an impressive career, money, fame, and fortune. Not everyone agreed, however: At the same time [as the content of marketing has developed] the career as a researcher has become an option worthy of consideration. People don’t know how good an option it is. When one takes into account that one can write the thesis with reasonable effort and become a doctor, and then have many opportunities in the consulting markets. Then you get to be a professor, you get twenty75 a month. And, truly, in those jobs you can allocate your teaching to a few weeks in the spring and fall. The rest of the time is your own… Travelling expenses, secretarial services come with the job. An esteemed, legitimate position, no credibility problems. At the same time you can get at least as much [money]

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The interviewee is referring to 20 000 Finnish marks, which was the Finnish currency before the Euro. 1€ = 5,9 FIM.

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consulting, where managers receive fifty a month, really. And managers who get that much have responsibilities. The worst thing that can happen to us is to trip up at some conference (P1). P1 describes the advantages of being a successful marketing professor: fewer responsibilities than managers have, a decent salary, an esteemed position, and freedom to decide one’s own schedule. What a few others saw as problems, he sees as opportunities. In a practice–oriented field such as marketing, a professor’s title is a valuable asset in the consulting market. As P7 pointed out: who would listen to an assistant? Furthermore, academics without PhDs who become an acting professor have the right to use the title, and the business community cannot differentiate between an “office–holder” and a more permanent (although often for a fixed–time period) professor. Even though there are clear advantages to a professor’s position, it is not necessarily a lucrative one, as P7, who at the time of the interviews was a temporary office–holder, remarked: But the job of a professor is really boring; a lot of teaching and administrative tasks. […] I wonder why does one even apply for it (laughter), it is so unlike this senior assistant’s job, at least in our school it is really good, I just got it […] and I would really like to keep this [senior assistant’s] job (P7). At the time of the interview, he was engaging in the application process for the professor’s job he was temporarily holding. But why would he not keep the senior assistant’s job, if the job as professor did not appeal to him?. Had he decided to stay in that position, which he enjoyed, that round of openings for a chair would have gone by, and there might not have been another chance. Professors’ positions do not open often, and when they do, the competition can be fierce. In Helsinki School of

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The interviewee is referring to 20 000 Finnish marks, which was the Finnish currency before the Euro. 1€ = 5,9 FIM.

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Economics and Business Administration, for instance, there were two professor’s positions vacant at the same time in 1980s. As many of my interviewees recalled, the selection procedure took the total of five years, resulted in many hurt feelings, and infected the climate in that field for a long time. So even though he may have preferred the work of a senior assistant, he couldn’t bring himself to give up the opportunity to hold a professor’s chair. P18, P26, P30 and P31 also criticized the position of professor for including too much administrative work and other tasks that take away time from research. Although it has lost some of its old prestige, professor’s chair is still the top of the academic ladder76 and professors, apart from their duties, have more power, influence, and opportunities to form departments in accordance with their preferences than do any other academic staff members, apart from high–ranking administrative managers such as rectors and chancellors.

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In sum, the relative newness of the marketing discipline may play a role in the interlocutor’s descriptions of their work. Perhaps the “practice of academic marketing” was not yet fully formed before the many changes in academia, discussed in Chapter 3, occurred? As the Finnish marketers had no well–established academic community, the actors in this ﬁeld shaped their activities on the basis of what they learned from the previous generation. While the surrounding academic culture was changing rapidly, their work had to adjust to the change without a strong cultural base as its foundation. Hence, some of the interviewees discuss the many demands of a professors’ work from the individual point of view: as one who concentrates on the most proﬁtable parts of academic life, like P1, or as someone concerned about living up to the demands, like P7. P30 is an example of someone who sees a professors’ role as being parallel to that of a general manager—and in addition to that, a fundraiser.

In Julkunen’s (2004) study on women academics, 50% of her respondents answered a categorical “no” to the question of whether they are pursuing professor’s post.

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Specialists or general workers? There are many ways of being a professor, an issue that is further examined later in this chapter in the context of the role of marketing practice in the work of marketing academics. As discussed in Chapter 3, this situation is complicated by the demands of ‘managerialism’ that has entered universities. To describe these demands, I begin with geography, because on reality of life and career development in Finnish academia is the fact that Finland is a geographically large country with a small population and that most of its action occurs in the south. The three largest cities, Helsinki, Turku and Tampere, are located within 170 kilometres of each other in the southeast corner of Finland, and a vacancy in any of the schools in these three cities attracts many qualified applicants. Moving around after academic positions is not easy, as most of the positions currently posted are short–term. As P5 noted: Possible candidates think twice before moving the whole family to a new city for the sake of a job that will last only a few years. Universities further north often need to rely on so–called “suitcase professors”. The size and shape of Finland also affects university departments that need to provide a wide range of teaching and research. From this follows that also professors need to be able to supervise wide range of research topics and teach a variety of courses. This situation has raised some criticism and outspoken demand for specialization, which is where the question of managerial universities and knowledge production enters. Consequently, P30 suggested that it would be important for departments to find their own focus. He compared the Finnish system with that of the USA, where knowledge production is a competitive area, and the university system functions as a market. At the Bachelor level, students piece together degrees based on their interests, and, when they have achieved the necessary level of competence, try to find a department that conducts research in their areas of interest—and in that way a strengthen-

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In Julkunen’s (2004) study on women academics, 50% of her respondents answered a categorical “no” to the question of whether they are pursuing professor’s post.

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ing loop is formed. No such system exists in Finland, however. It would be valuable, P30 suggests, for Finnish university departments to specialize in an area of research, and for each school to have its own research areas. Finland is a small country, and if we want to achieve international–level research, we needed to unite our forces, said P26. Only the Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration (Hanken) in Helsinki was mentioned as having successfully specialized in services marketing, and University of Vaasa in consumer behaviour. P27 also noted that in the USA there can be 13 professors in one department addressing similar research questions, whereas in Finland marketing research is conducted by single individuals plodding along, as P26 said. On the other hand, P30 stated, US academics are expected to be specialists, but Finnish academics are both expected and allowed to be multi–skilled. It is rewarding, he said, to be able to expand one’s research area. Also P31 said that he has not concentrated on one narrow area, but rather saw himself as a “general worker”. However, P26 specifically noted that this specialization should not be in teaching, but in research. Students need to get a whole, general package of marketing, he concluded, not just some specific area. I believe, I’m not sure, but I think that in every place people are not so happy if they have created too tight an educational profile. But in research I’m sure that it is the only way to succeed (P26).

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P24, who worked in inter–disciplinary research projects, wondered why new doctoral students in Finnish business administration are allowed to choose their research area, requiring professors to supervise a wide area of research topics. In the projects funded by the European Union or the Academy of Finland, for instance, it is the funding committee that decides research areas and involves researchers from various approaches to provide their input: “We have the same empirical problem but we look at it from different points of view”. He also emphasized the importance of interdisci-

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plinary collaboration, in the sense that it provides more grass–roots–level research: “research for use”. P24 also stated that the sub–disciplines within business administration are so fragmented that the only way to ensure quality in post–graduate education is to join forces with others. He mentioned the Finnish graduate education program called KATAJA—a collaborative doctoral program in business administration, and said: The day when a) every university receives a lot of money to offer the courses alone or b) the people do not want to collaborate anymore, then it [KATAJA] will fall apart (P24). On the other hand, suggested P7, specialization is already required from professors, and therefore from departments in Finland as well. So, he wondered, how could one unite the contradictory requirements for breadth and specialization? The need for specialization is often linked with collaboration, which is considered important in all areas: cross–disciplinary, between subjects, between marketing professors, between researchers. The annual marketing tutorials that are held in Finnish business schools are important venues for discussing co–operation and meeting other researchers, said P7, P8 and P24. P8 also suggested that a lack of collaboration, especially among business school units, leads to a thin level of “know–how” that affects research, if not teaching. P5 also criticized the scientiﬁc culture, in which knowledge is not allowed to accumulate, as researchers can always produce “at least 57 reasons” why the guy before had it all wrong. Not that everybody should be unanimous about theory—but at least generally united about how things look like and what they include. These comments also relate to the sense of community and the importance of workplace on one hand, and individualist work cultures on the other—the topic of the next section.

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Individuals or parts of community? It has been acknowledged (e.g. Biglan 1973, Becher & Huber 1990, 235) that different social practices dominate in different academic fields or disciplinary communities. It is known in the humanities that the dominant practice is to work alone, whereas in areas such as biology and medicine, group work is the general practice. Some of my respondents expressed frustration because of the modest level of collaboration in business schools—especially within sub–fields, but also between them. This occurs, first and foremost, because the discipline of marketing in Finland is small and the departments are geographically separated. Thus it is considered wise to maintain a wide scope of teaching and research in order to offer students a broader curriculum. Thus, new recruits are relatively free to pick their interest areas, as marketing departments do not usually specialize in any particular research area. Thus professors are often faced with supervising doctoral theses that fall far from their own area of expertise and consequently, they often implicitly instruct their doctoral student to work on their own. P18 has therefore stressed the importance of young researchers learning how an academic department functions—the importance of socializing newcomers into the system, not merely emphasizing the importance of writing their theses. Here, he describes how he entered academia as an assistant: I learned an enormous amount. I learned how one manages issues—you know, being young and enthusiastic, I got to do all sorts of things. And through that I got attached to this university. […] I learned about our teaching periods, their structure and planning. […] And that has been very useful ever since (P18). 126

Yet such socialization rarely occurs. P7 told the story of a doctoral student who was recruited to a graduate school and was perplexed that nobody expected anything from him, never asked him to show any progress, or

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participate in anything. Does the whole system actually support these non–collaborative ways of working? As P18 said, if young researchers and assistants are told not to participate in any department work, but to concentrate solely on their own research, new employees never become attached to the department, or make efforts for the sake of their work community. In fact, research co–operation rarely occurs within the same department, although, as P19 suggests, it would be beneﬁcial to students writing their dissertations: “We were all in our boxes, although we were many doing research on the same area”. Another collaboration difﬁculty has to do with the small size of the Finnish academic marketing community. Everyone knows everyone else, has old grudges from some old competition, ends up evaluating each other, and knows exactly when a particular professor is going to retire and a chair become vacant. It is not necessarily safe to co–operate with the researcher next door, one might argue, because you never know when you will be competing for the same positions. Hence, international collaboration is like a fresh wind that gives strength: “a wonderful door to freedom”, said P7. “The competitive nature of academic life is a function of the emphasis placed on gaining a professional reputation,” said Tony Becher (1989, 91), discussing competition among scientists. His focus, however, was on the natural sciences, in which it is important to publish results before someone else and where plagiarism and idea–stealing may have more dire consequences for the victim than in the more qualitative social sciences, where the results are not always so clear and unequivocal that they plainly could be stolen –although one could argue that ideas, hypotheses and models can, and perhaps are. Whatever the discipline, academic work seems to be competitive by nature, and tends to emphasize individualistic work identities (even though Pirttilä & Eriksson–Piela 2004, 53 argued that it was not so), although among the interviewees there appears to be desire for another kind of work culture. Burton Clark (1983) has argued that academic world has a double structure, that it is organized according to both the discipline and

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the institution. The academics’ ﬁrst commitment is usually their own discipline, which is not limited by state or organization, but creates an international network, an unseen university. A commitment priority to the discipline is demonstrated in the fact that it is easier to move from one university to another than from one discipline to another. Hence, the academic home is found in the invisible network university of like–minded people from around the world, rather than from the department where the everyday work takes place—thus the individualistic work culture. The work community was rarely mentioned in my interviews. When common goals were mentioned in the stories, they seldom related to the community in which the person worked. The sense of community, working together, seemed to vary according to the university. Although there were several interviewees who had been at the same university since their undergraduate days, only interviewees from one university had a work life story that related strongly to the development of their department. In fact, the story of institutional development and the development of marketing in that university run parallel with the story of the individual’s development. In other cases, the focus is primarily on the individual—on one’s own work and research. Yet the further the departments are from the three largest Finnish cities, the more likely the interviewees were to mention co–operation and department life.

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In a study about feelings of wellbeing in academia, Pirttilä & Eriksson–Piela (2004, 53) found out that a common coffee room performs a signiﬁcant role. If the infrastructure of the workplace was built in such a way that there was no space for socializing, it appeared to diminish the sense of community. Ylijoki (1998, 40–44) has also reﬂected on the lack of community as the downside of academic freedom, and noted that a lack of community also manifests itself in missed opportunities to discuss one’s work, especially teaching, with colleagues. Although many teachers would like to know about the topics covered in other courses in the curriculum, or how the entire programme looks from the student’s perspective, these things are rarely discussed and even more rarely expected. University

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teachers teach what they are assigned to teach, never knowing what the other teachers do. It is not surprising that teaching is described a lonely work.

Teachers: at the centre of the faculty or its margin? Teaching is the university’s most salient activity, but Ylijoki (1998), among others, has argued that teaching in the academic world is not highly respected. In her study on “academic tribes”, one of her respondents said that when it comes to merit awards, one article published in an international journal “weighs” more than five years of good teaching. It is paradoxical that the university, which should provide the highest level of education, have teachers who have never been educated in pedagogy. Ylijoki also claimed that the women and men in her study seemed to evaluate the meaning of teaching in a different manner. My data do not support Ylijoki’s findings, however, as women and men were equally likely to emphasize good teaching and to discuss their teaching, and equally likely not to mention it at all. Women were more likely than men to criticize the emphasis on publications as academic merits—specifically, the lack of respect accorded teaching when candidates for academic posts were being evaluated. The merits that required for a professor’s position are primarily publications. As P2 pointed out, there is more and more talk in proclamations and speeches about the importance of teaching, but when a vacant professor’s chair is applied for, research merits continue to carry the heaviest weight with the expert committee. Because of the low value attached to teaching merits, P4 argued, it is not particular motivating to develop one’s teaching, as the time used for improving teaching is the time away from research. Hence, he suggested, the emphasis on teaching should also be noted when candidates are appointed. Many interviewees did not mention teaching at all, or they reflected on it as a necessary, if unpleasant, part of the academic work. University

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teachers teach what they are assigned to teach, never knowing what the other teachers do. It is not surprising that teaching is described a lonely work.

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teaching is a sensitive job because it involves exposing yourself to the possible criticism of tens, even hundreds of students, usually without any explicit education in pedagogy. The initiation rite for university teachers, in fact, often involves teaching a course without any base knowledge of the subject or any training in the teaching of adults.

think of this?’ or ‘How would you comment on this?’ (P4).

The teaching of marketing is increasingly demanding, said P18: group work, practice courses in co–operation with companies, and problem–oriented teamwork all require more preparation and competence. In former times, new recruits might be advised “not to put too much effort on the teaching”, as P4 recalled—to do it “with their left hand”, managing the courses just by talking about their own research. In that sense, at least, the situation has changed. While research was the only signiﬁcant contribution, and teaching was a surplus activity, things are changing, he argued, especially in company training. One can no longer “put on a few slides and tell stories”; people have paid well for their training and want to get one’s money’s worth.

Students: products or clients? Some interlocutors said that today’s students are more active and demanding than they had been as undergraduates. “Reading directly from the textbook”, as described in the beginning of this chapter, leads to empty seats in lecture halls. One–sided preaching no longer exists: students seek the information elsewhere if the lectures are not interesting. P4 reminisced on student’s earlier attitudes like this:

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[W]e went to the largest lecture hall, and the teacher wrote on the slide with drawing ink, and we tried to follow, and, listened and swallowed it, and went away and studied and if we had learned it correctly we passed the exams. To be honest, I don’t remember a single lecture from the ﬁrst two years where the lecturer would have asked: ‘Hey, what do you

The negative side of present–day students is that they expect everything to continuously renew itself. Every term there should be new four–colour slides, said P4. P2 told how he received negative feedback in a course that he gave at the end of spring term, and at the beginning of the following fall term. The content of the course was much the same, and one student who had acquired lecture notes from the course held in May gave the feedback after the fall course: — [The student] said that he thought this course would include a bit more recent stuff. E: (laughter) — Well, I couldn’t laugh, but I tried to seriously explain that these basic issues of international marketing do not change in three–month cycles (laughter) (P2). Indeed, the pace of knowledge change does not function in three–month cycles, particularly because the system on which academic journals function, which ensures that everything that gets published is at least a year old. The publishing procedure is based on peer review, and because these peers are fellow academics with many other tasks to attend to, the review process can take years. As P7 emphasized, it is important to go to conferences in order to keep up with the current debates. He also laughed, slightly ironically, saying that the students are taught that the journals include latest research issues. P6 seemed to think that Finnish universities are getting closer to US culture, where students are seen as “clients” and professors need to care if the students obtain their degrees. It is a good direction, he said, although it implies more work for the teachers. Another side of this more student– oriented culture was expressed by P2, who wondered if students are not also more childish than before:

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think of this?’ or ‘How would you comment on this?’ (P4).

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We had been on an excursion to a candy factory, and we all got a lot of candies, and chocolates, and next time, when I met these students, one of them shouted before the lecture: ‘Hey, teacher, have you eaten all your candies?’ (Laughter) And then I felt like, am I with second–graders in an elementary school? (P2). In general, marketing professors receive the appreciation of their students by telling stories about their experiences in business. However, there are other approaches to teaching, as described by P18: …I am not here to give them marks for their performances, because it would be my duty, but I see my task as to help the students grow and develop, and I try to provide them with meaningful ﬁelds to do it (P18).

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But not all students want to grow and develop, no matter how much the teacher would like them to. According to P5, P6, P7, P9, P26, and P28, students want to learn practical things; their demand for more practical cases and lectures by real–life practitioners is, as evidenced by feedback from their courses: courses with an emphasis on practical issues always receive good marks. Furthermore, according to P7, students imply that academics with no practical experience are dusty, and have no relevant knowledge to impart. P6 added that the present–day students want to discuss and elaborate issues from a practical point of view; they want to know how things are done in practice. P7 pointed out that the students’ constant criticism for “not being practical enough” is good in a sense, in that it keeps their instructors going, although it also peeves him: “year after year the same song”. Probably anyone in any area of university education that equips students for professional life knows these arguments well77. How does theory relate to practice? How should students of practically oriented areas be educated? Can one learn practical skills by reading books? As these

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interviews have indicated, students often expect to learn practical things, and they want to learn it from someone who is doing it, rather than from someone who merely writes about it. So, there are different ideas on the nature of knowledge and how it should be acquired. This controversy, in which education, politics, and personal interests intertwine, is discussed further in Chapter 6. There are other controversies, however, not the least of which is the increasing number of administrative tasks.

More administration—less control? Finnish university policy requires professors to be tied up in many different projects, evaluations and other administrative issues78, said P26, noting that it is like “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face”, wasting the university’s research resources on time–consuming duties that do not support its core activities. Only by releasing these key resources, allowing professors to lead research projects, and supplying them with enough staff and ﬁnancial resources, can Finnish marketing contribute to the international debate. P18 discussed the excessive number of investigations and task forces and forms and evaluations to be completed, and suggested that the number of administrative tasks and the number of administrative personnel are growing at the same speed. He also suggested that although people are the university’s primary resource, it sometimes appears as if people represent the resource that is given the least consideration. As P30 pointed out, democratic management principles have led to professors participating in the administrative duties, which is good, but can also be a certain time pressure. Also P31 criticized the increasing amount of bureaucracy: 77

At least it was not news for education academics when I visited their seminar in October 2005 and presented this dilemma as my main ﬁnding. 78 It should be stressed that since the time of the interviews the administrative duties that some interlocutors refer to have become more intense due to new quality measurement systems and especially to the new salary system, in which salaries are negotiated according to performance and experience.

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Well, this superﬁcial bureaucracy and… too much paper work and such, that troubles me nowadays, like especially in a small unit you need to be a general worker, do everything from the scratch yourself. […] Sometimes you just need to take some time out and go abroad to meet other researchers—that is the freedom in this, this job… you can decide on your own affairs in a way more than in other companies and that is a good thing (P31). Despite the freedom of academic work praised by other interviewees, the new, more bureaucratic management of universities, P18 maintains, has dire consequences for quality control. Control has shifted from the internal rules of the academic community towards control from the outside. Maintaining standards becomes a question of one’s conscience rather than an internal pressure within the academic community. Then, we are in the situation where everybody deﬁnes one’s own criteria for quality, whereas the academic community used to control itself (P18).

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As P18 noted, peer review and control also regulate academic subjects. Control by peers means, for instance, that two independent examiners evaluate doctoral theses79 and that journal articles are submitted for blind review—meaning that two or three anonymous reviewers comment on the manuscript before it is published. As nobody wants the quality of their own area be downgraded, this process should ensure quality publications. When it comes to implicit rules for upholding the reputation and high quality of academic work, however, it seems that ﬁnancing principles sometimes bend them too much. P18 expressed concern for the quality level of current Master’s theses, in particular, and referred to one that was rejected by one institution and accepted as a licentiate thesis in another. 79

Independent in the sense that they should have no interests in the thesis project — not be involved in it as supervisors or in any other way.

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The funding system by performance targets raised other critical remarks. As P8 described: This system is like that of the former Soviet Union, with one difference. Kolkhozes received financing according to how many tractors they produced—nobody cared whether they functioned or had all parts in them. […] Universities are similar nowadays except that we don’t need to produce students; it is enough that we have targets. We are paid according to our targets. If we set as our targets at 50 MAs, we are paid according to that criterion. Let’s see if someone will come and ask if they have ever been produced […] (P8). In other words, internal rules maintain the quality of academic work in universities. However, as some interviewees explained, the rules do not seem to apply to everybody. It may be fruitful to consider this issue in the context of Pierre Bourdieu’s (e.g. 1985, 1988) work. Bourdieu defined a field and its rules as an autonomic area of social activity (e.g. a discipline, sport, profession), in which people strive to strengthen those characteristics (capital) that have most value in that particular field. Of the rules of the field, he said that entering the field is restricted; one can enter only by adopting the current rules and by demonstrating that one has mastered them. In order to strengthen their own position, newcomers often want to change the rules, but not so much that the existence of the whole field is under debate. For this reason, rebellion usually happens within the basic rules of the field. Why, then, do some “players of the field” (Bourdieu’s metaphor) overlook these rules? Of course, not all of the field’s actors accept such operations, and in that sense the field controls itself; but those who work on the margins seldom care about social sanctions. They do not care about disapproval because the rules do not interest them. Thus, some interviewees apparently position themselves outside the field or form smaller sub–fields within it—with their own rules and forms of capital. Or

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Independent in the sense that they should have no interests in the thesis project — not be involved in it as supervisors or in any other way.

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perhaps the concept of the field and its relevant capital is not applicable to every human activity. There were a few other concerns about the growing influence of administration in research activities. P24 was concerned that funding is often allocated to research that is related to a current research trend. He said that he worries that the dynamic growth will end when all new PhDs are clones one research industry and talented young researchers do not have the opportunities if their interests do not fit into the current structures. P29 was concerned about the basic studies, which, according to him, are getting lighter and lighter because universities need to obtain their numerical targets. But where do we find intelligent doctoral students, if no–one invests in basic education? If the standards of studies are lowered, it will ruin the reputation of marketing, he suggested. P26 expressed a concern that the spiritual dimension of universities is being sold cheaply, as everyone runs after financing: If there is something that taxpayers should control in universities, it is that these can concentrate on important research questions and participate in social discussion where the focus is a bit further away than the present day (P26).

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P7 asserted that young researchers are pressed to ﬁnish their theses in shortest possible time, a point that he criticized, saying that it is not speed that makes good research or a good researcher. “Growing takes time”, said P18, who was also concerned about the consequences of time pressures, which manifest themselves in a reluctance to tackle large problem areas or research questions. This is probably a consequence of the constant demand for effectiveness, he believed: One does not write an ambitious thesis on the tight schedule that is expected from today’s doctoral students. The issue of collaboration has lurked between the lines in the previous parts of this chapter. It is also related to the new administrative principles that universities follow; in a university atmosphere in which

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every input should have at least an equal output, collaboration is facing difﬁculties other than those inherent in the academic work itself.

Collaboration or lonely work? Collaboration could be beneficial for researchers in different departments dealing with similar business problems. But if collaboration between individual researchers is difficult, collaboration between departments that are rewarded in Finland’s current academic system is even more difficult. As P19 has noted, there can be several people working in the same area who do not collaborate or even discuss their research. Even more rarely do two researchers use the same research material; P30 was the only professor interviewed who mentioned that he had collected research data for his thesis with another doctoral student. The workplace atmosphere was described by some of the interviewees as negative, and P2 said that he yearns for a work community where people “would say ‘hello’ in the mornings”, and where people would care about the work of the person in the next–door office. The fact that people do not greet each other in the mornings would be cause for alarm in a “normal” workplace, he suggested. P7 admitted that he sometimes wonders why he would want to continue working in such community. Speeches about collaboration between departments are mere lip service, said P2, and suggested academia may attract the type of people who like to work alone. All kinds of power games and such, they peak in places like these. […] People on the outside think that these are highly educated people, and they should be creative personalities, but well… that is a misconception, people just assume so (laughter) (P2). The problem is not only the lack of a work community, but also the many conflicts and arguments that exist within the walls of a single school. They

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every input should have at least an equal output, collaboration is facing difﬁculties other than those inherent in the academic work itself.

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are related primarily to finances and other resources. When somebody retires, for instance, or an assistant’s position becomes vacant, a heated discussion begins about reallocating the position. The ensuing discussions may lead to fighting, and if one unit gets the position, the others will remember it for a long time and “give as good as one gets” (P2) when another position becomes available. Co–operation between departments like marketing and management is also difficult from a resource point of view, as every performance is measured as an output against an input. A planned collaboration can fail because of the disagreement about who will benefit from the outcome—which unit gets the points. Every unit is fighting for the same diminishing resources, said P4, so it is quite understandable. However, as he further explained: Maybe here in the academic world people should be forced to sit around the same table more often, so they would see their common interests. As long as we just squat in our chambers, well, we have only one mirror, in which we only see ourselves (P4).

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In general, the interviewees had little to say about other sub–disciplines within business administration. When they did, they referred primarily to accounting, but hardly ever to the subject of leadership (management). Accounting was usually referred to as the “big and beautiful” (P18) of all subjects, since it was earlier called “business administration I”; whereas leadership (or management) and marketing shared the status of “business administration II”, but the subject of leadership entered discussion very rarely. Earlier, when the two sub–disciplines of marketing and management were viewed as one discipline, there was unity between them. Today they are often separated, even physically, as P18 pointed out. Collaboration among the sub–disciplines of business administration is rare, noted P31:

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— Cross–disciplinary thinking is not easy; many talk in different languages. It can be seen here, we have common seminars. E: Does it work? — It is difficult; it doesn’t really work. People don’t come if the presenter is from another sub–discipline, that’s how it is. E: Really? — Yeah, it doesn’t just work in practice. On paper it might look good (P31). However, P21 thought that the borders between leadership and marketing are lowering, and actually, in HSEBA, marketing and leadership have been reunited into one department since 2005—although they are still situated on different floors. P12 reflected on earlier days when professors in any area of business were appointed as “professors of business administration”, with a specialty in, for instance, marketing. He thought that if professors were called that today they would collaborate more—as he said they did earlier. P13 remembered that when different units were fighting together in order to get an extra appointment for the department, it also united them, as they had a “common enemy”. However, as P14 explained, professors of either “Business Administration I” or “Business Administration II” could no longer bear such titles because the terms were not recognized at international conferences; so, the sub–disciplines were divided in accordance with international culture into accounting, finance, management, and marketing. P20 reminisced about the same period, claiming that because business administration was too wide an area to teach, it was divided into leadership and marketing. 139

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It is not only between marketing and management that research collaboration is difficult or nonexistent, even the relationship between marketing and international business is problematic, said P15, as they are sometimes seen as two separate subjects and sometimes perceived as being closely related: As a department, we have too little… although we are physically close, we have practically no common research projects. We have discussed it many times, but we haven’t really started, and when we look at other units, the situation seems to be the same (P15). He has one possible explanation: “mentally”, the collaboration would work, but as everybody has so much to do, merely co–ordinating schedules to suit everybody seems to be an impossible task. P13 said that when he joined a school of economics, there was no working together with the local university or another business school in the same town, possibly because that school was Swedish–speaking80. P12 perceived the idea of collaboration as being much wider, and remembered how there used to be discussions of uniting engineering and economics under the same roof—after all, their students need to be able to work together after graduating. P3 and P26 were concerned because those who design the financial system and those who implement it are so far apart in the education system. When they finally meet, he said, they are totally incapable of co–operating.

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Open or closed university? If collaboration between researchers and within units is difﬁcult, we might ask how it functions between universities and the business world. P3 suggested that universities should simply become more open towards society, because there are so many relevant research problems that could be addressed. He went on to say that no company would ever survive being as hermetical as universities are—practically living in a vacuum. P3 argued that academic disciplines, especially in business schools, are important to the surrounding society; and inside these educational institutions, marketing is the most important link between society and the university. Research in accounting or management does not need to be so open, he believed, because these subjects do not have contacts with markets, like marketing does. The function of marketing is to bind the company to markets. Likewise, a marketing teacher must follow the same model, in other words, be in close contact the phenomenon that s/he studies and teaches (P3). The doors between practical life and academia, which P3 suggested should be more open, swing both ways. P19 recalled his doctoral thesis and the research that he conducted at that time, and said that people in the ﬁeld of business where he conducted his research did not like the results at all: I haven’t been asked to speak at their seminars, not at all. Because I have always said things as they are. […] It received some publicity […] because these issues had not been researched at all. […] So I can be happy for having been able to do research that nobody has dictated, but it wasn’t easy to write (P19).

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80 Finland is a bilingual country, with Finnish and Swedish as its ofﬁcial languages. However, members of these two language groups usually go to different schools and universities; so a lack of collaboration is not unusual in this case.

P25, on the other hand, talked about the closeness of academia for any new

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P25, on the other hand, talked about the closeness of academia for any new

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ideas within the field. Innovations are often better received by practitioners. A few interviewees (P1, P17, P25 and P28) also stated that when they had initiated their research projects, their professor or the academic community in general did not recognize the phenomenon or could not understand it; so their research on the topic either ceased or they moved elsewhere to continue—or they proceeded steadfastly, as P25 did: [The business people] said that this was the first time that someone had talked about marketing in a way that they could relate to, that they could identify with it better than they could to the old 4P thought. In academia nobody understood, not here (P25). Thus, for some, the practical world is a haven from the academia. P27 also considered the difference between academia in the USA and Finland, saying that togetherness and innovativeness are more common features of academics in the USA; in Finland, on the other hand, people tend to react more negatively to new ideas and suggestions. It is primarily within consulting that academia and business are united, P5 argued, but strong and equal orientation in both skills is seldom found in one person. He believes that universities should not engage in consulting: “When the doors close and you start discussing company strategies, you are present as a private person”. His point was that after a decent time those things that one has heard behind closed doors can be re–formed and served back to companies, “which in most cases also succeeds”. Building up confidential relationships from which both parties benefit was also stressed by P3, because once the relationship is established, he noted, the companies open their doors in a way that they will not do at the outset. 142

P6 believed that marketing is a ”teachable knowledge”81 compared to pure science, and that it would be wise for marketing professors to spend 81

In Finnish: Oppi.

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some time in business and return to the academia, in order to make good use of both. P7 pondered on the need, expressed by fellow academics and students alike, for marketing professors to visit the business world on a regular basis. He agreed that marketing academics should have some practical experience, but also wondered how the two can be united. You cannot leave academic work for a couple of years, because you are quickly left behind at the current academic pace. And for how long would the acquired practical experience be relevant? After a few years one would need to do the same thing again. P1 seems to have found a way of uniting these worlds and was content with his solution. He suggested that university education had readied him to relate managers’ problems and questions into larger frames, while providing him with the status to work with managers, without assuming their level of responsibility, However, P22 added that profit responsibility and other new financial principles that have been introduced to academia have made the distinction between these worlds less clear. Also, the claimed status of academics manifests itself only once you have been able to use the title of a professor, even temporarily. Another slightly different way of managing the two–sidedness of marketing was presented by P23, who stressed the academic merits and skills, but saw students as clients for whom he wanted to teach business orientation in both behaviour and habits. I see them as my clients. I always behave that way, so that when a student comes to see me, I always shake hands when they enter and leave, because that’s what you do in business (P23). How should a university professor work with—or between—these two worlds? The central question could be expressed as: Do academic marketers exist to provide managers with new knowledge in order to make their businesses more profitable, or is knowledge creation an end by itself? Research for research’s sake is acceptable to certain extent, noted P3, as

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P6 believed that marketing is a ”teachable knowledge”81 compared to pure science, and that it would be wise for marketing professors to spend 81

In Finnish: Oppi.

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universities must have the right to do theoretical research that has nothing to do with the surrounding society. “I do accept that”, he said. But there are many other ways of looking at the two–sidedness of marketing. Both P21 and P26 propose that academics share a general, traditional ideal,, according to which research should be value–free and objective. However, collaboration with the society is proclaimed in every ofﬁcial speech and hence there are those who believe that marketing cannot exist without close connections to companies. But this attitude, these professors argue, has also led to condemnation among those who rather uncritically praise everything with a practical side. Speaking of collaboration between universities and business, R18 laughed when he said that it used to be almost forbidden to be in contact with the surrounding world, as it was thought that the objectivity of research would suffer from it. Researchers sat in their chambers and looked at things “somehow more correctly”, which was seen as a proper way to work. Now, P18 said, we are almost obliged to collaborate with business, which is both pleasant and rewarding. Unfortunately, added P21, it has also led to an overemphasis of a practical orientation, almost to the point of foolishness—taking things at face–value instead of setting them in wider societal context. There were a few interlocutors for whom the focus of academic research should be primarily to provide knowledge to marketing practitioners, but also their viewpoints differ slightly from one another. Hence, in what follows, the purpose is to reveal the various outlooks.

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Marketing practice and theory You cannot teach theory without practical experience, said P13, and stated that he chose marketing as a subject because of the lively contact with business practice. Actually, said P5, practical work experience—even in the form of short consulting jobs—should be obligatory for marketing academics, because for many, that would be the only connection with the outside world. And, he added, if the purpose of universities is to enhance the wellbeing of the society, why should such collaboration be frowned upon? Consumers, entrepreneurs, and the rest of society are all connected, but academics refuse to listen to voices from the world outside of the university, or do not see that there may be a problem (in their way of doing things. P5 also suggested that marketing professors are not aware of the assets they actually have in their hands—“grains, no, chunks of gold”—that companies need. Is their reluctance to engage in such collaboration due to their uncertainty about their skills, he wonders? …although it is just one point a year separated from the practice, after thirty years you are quite far from it. And in that situation, you might have butterflies in your stomach, like what if these fine thoughts that have been put for into students’ heads for 20 to 30 years, what if they don’t add up? What then? Or that you will be laughed at (P5). The main purpose of university research should be to acquire new knowledge that either supports other research or can be applied to practice, argued P14; otherwise it merely collects dust in the library. Furthermore, P9 said that he would not want to see a marketing professor with no practical experience hired in his department. This strong emphasis on business connections, he amplified, has allowed graduates from his department to find employment easily, even during the depression in the early 1990s. P6 agreed, saying that if he were an employer, he would be

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concerned about hiring a PhD in marketing who only has strolled along university corridors. He believes that PhD candidates should write their dissertations as part of their normal work career, not as life’s mission. Finnish business tends to shun people with a doctoral degree. That’s because they so old when they defend their theses (P6). He argued that a PhD degree is a handicap in the business world, but explained that this is also due to old suspicions: People just do not know what other people do, so assumptions go before knowledge. “Although we are scientists and rational decision makers, it is with feelings these issues are decided”. Disagreeing somewhat with those who considered practice to be the most important factor in marketing education, and even though he himself also seemed to hold the same opinion, P5 said that companies appreciate the fact that local universities are at the top of the scientiﬁc community; managers understand that someone needs to read the articles and books and translate the knowledge into practical language. There is no point in copying what already exists, but universities need to create new knowledge that will eventually be absorbed into practice, concluded P22, adding that a certain amount of theorizing is part of university work, although students tend to be critical when there is too much of it. Well, of course the universities need to hang onto their foundation—doing science. That is the starting point, and also companies value that we lead in science (P5).

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The criterion for competence in universities is scientific, P5 maintained, whereas it should be fifty–fifty: scientific and practical. When you study esoteric issues, even if they are called marketing, the interest of the business world falls, argued P9. What someone has published in some academic journal, he added, has absolutely no relevance for Finnish

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business. No–one has made it to the Journal of Marketing yet, he noted, a statement which implies that making it there would have some relevance for Finnish marketing. The basic purpose of marketing education, he believed, is to “teach them to do something”. Taking the argument further, P9 called marketing professors with pure academic orientation “poor creatures that are far too scientific”, and added that that has always been his opinion, and that others are coming closer to that opinion. There is a competence requirement for a professor’s position, “third section in the decree”, as he recalled, where sufficient practical experience from the area of teaching is required, but, according to P9, that criterion has not been taken seriously. P11 actually commented on this same decree from a different point of view, and recounted how he was faced with this requirement when applying for a researcher’s position. He had consulting experience, but had not been in one company for three years, as he understood was the requirement. However, it turned out that there are clear guidelines for the way such experience can build up for academics who have not actually been away from the academia for such a long time. Company case written for teaching material and seminar work done for a company, is counted as practical experience for academic positions. P17, who reflected on the issue when asked, said that there could be no other opinion than the need for both a theoretical orientation and a practical orientation. He acknowledged himself to be a practically oriented teacher, because he made a virtue out of a vice: he admitted having always been a lazy reader, not having been able to concentrate on theories. In summary, the practice–oriented interviewees criticized their more theoretically oriented colleagues, saying that marketing scholars provided knowledge more for each other than for present and future practitioners (see Whitley 1992, Grey & Sinclair 2006). Hence, the work of the more theoretically oriented actors, the teaching and research they provide, was—according to their critics—irrelevant. These critics gain support

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from the Commission on the Effectiveness of Research and Development for Marketing Management (Myers et al. 1980, in Holbrook 1995, 310): “Early on, the Commission adopted the position that the objective of research should be to improve marketing management practice.” Holbrook (1995, 311) also quotes one business school dean who is concerned about the “overemphasis placed on scholarly research at most business schools”, and another who says that “as much as 80% of management research may be irrelevant ... I wonder if the majority of it is of any significant value in terms of influencing their daily actions, behaviours, or business practices.” An almost identical opinion was uttered by P5. These critical voices receive support from a few other, less scientific journals, such as the Economist and Harvard Business Review. In an HBR article titled “How business schools lost their way” (Bennis & O’Toole 2005), the authors argued that business schools produce graduates with limited skills for work life in business. This is a consequence, they contend, of being too scientific and of placing too much emphasis on mathematical methods—methods that blind rather than illuminate—and refer to it as ‘physics envy’. Business school professors have no real–life experience, they argued, and there is no pragmatic writing in business schools, because business academics are writing for each other. People in the academy are not engaged in the same profession that businesspeople practice, they contend, and new MBAs are lacking the skills that organizations require.

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The pedagogy: general education or practical skills? At the other extreme of the movement of theory–practice pendulum, there was concern for students who no longer learn critical thinking, and have no skills allowing them to evaluate the relevance of certain knowledge. The closeness to practice is overly appreciated, said P26—anything with a relationship to practice is uncritically good or valuable. I think the value is that a person is trained analytically and intellectually so that she or he can speak out and bring in surplus value. […] To succeed in a work community, in a group; social skills, communication skills, language skills, such basic abilities to accept that which is strange and unknown, those abilities cannot be obtained by some unspecified addition of practical cases. […] These are basic skills behind a lot of hard work (P26). Also, as P7 stated, students are exactly the ones lacking the practical experience that they so readily ask for, and therefore do not know the type of knowledge or skills they need, either. He further explained that students sometimes come back later with thanks, as only when they apply it to practical contexts—to their own experience—can they begin to realize the benefits of their education. But this criticism is really a problem, as the new graduates could be the best spokespeople for academia, he said. P23 praised marketing students for their academic skills, and told of an experience from an exercise in which his students worked on a practical assignment, and the practitioners present were amazed by their analytic skills. P21 saw the success or emergence of “relationship marketing” as a half–consulting concept that, according to him, is both shoddy and non– intellectual. The researchers who have more serious scientific ambitions should consider issues from other than the managers’ point of view, as that is not necessarily theoretically and intellectually deep.

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There has to be social sciences as a base, and marketing researchers should remember, that it is social scientiﬁc research, even primarily so, it is not like developing some tricks or building up models (P21). Those who think the practical orientation is praised too uncritically receive support from Morris Holbrook (1995, 313), one of the few writers in marketing who addresses these issues, has argued that “the intrusion of outside interests into the research process constitutes a potential threat to the independence of free inquiry”, and further: “Yet, no–one shows any real concern for this problem when it arises in the case of business schools.” According to Holbrook, business schools in general and marketing departments in particular avidly seek corporate funding and consulting attachments; yet such intrusion of outside interests has raised alarms when in other disciplines. He believes that the mandates of managerial relevance inevitably damage free inquiry and quotes former Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti: A college or university is an institution where ﬁnancial incentives to excellence are absent, where the product line is not a unit or an object but rather a value–laden and life– long process; where the goal of the enterprise is not growth or market share but intellectual excellence (p. 305).

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He then cited spokespersons from various universities as proclaiming ”the need for caution”, ”the danger of seducing faculty into narrower research”, ”the possible erosion of academic values”, and ”the threatened diversion from teaching and basic research into more applied investigation” (Holbrook 1995, 306). For Holbrook, research is an end in itself, and academic freedom must exist if academics are to contemplate issues that may not apply to current, everyday problems.

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When the interlocutors talked about practice, they were usually referring to anything that happens outside the university. What is, then, the practice of academic marketers? Czarniawska (1999, 8) has written that: “[R]esearch and education within business administration are a practice in its own right, with its own rules and its own action theories”. But I cannot claim that purpose of being of academic marketing is the practice of research and education, if—and apparently when—the interviewees do not see it that way. This issue is further discussed in Chapter 6, but before entering that debate, I will present the last, but certainly not the least controversy that was discussed in the interviews. What is marketing?

Marketing: an activity or a way of thinking? “What is marketing?” is a question with many answers. I seldom asked it directly, but many of my interviewees chose to address it. Of course, it is hardly surprising that professors who were asked for an interview about their careers in marketing for a study that deals with academic marketing, would choose to discuss marketing. Although the Definitions Committee of the American Marketing Association (AMA) sought to define marketing in 1948, and despite of the outspoken purpose of Marketing Science Institute ‘to contribute to the emergence of a more definitive science of marketing’, Rewoldt et al. (1973) admitted in their Introduction to Marketing Management: “Marketing is not easy to define. Nobody has come up with a clear definition that would gain international acceptance”. One of the first Finnish marketing professors, Martti Särkisilta (1969), suggested that because marketing needs to maintain its dynamic nature during the rapid changes in the operational environment it is difficult to provide a stable definition. How, then, do the interviewees see it? P21 was one of the few professors to whom I addressed that question directly, and he seems slightly perplexed.

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E: What do you think marketing is? — It is everything (laughter). Well that is an exciting question, you know. It is everything that happens in the company (P21). Was P21 laughing because the question was so banal, or because he recognized it as a difﬁcult question? In another interview, the interlocutor criticized different cliques within the area, and said that it did not enhance the development of academic marketing if people always elevated new ideas and killed the previous ones, instead of discussing what marketing actually was. At this point I asked what P4 thought it was. He replied: I think that it is not an activity, but a way of thinking. And the way of thinking starts with the realization that the organization can inﬂuence what happens between it and the interest groups (P4). I then asked, if marketing was something else than a way of thinking, to which he answered: Well, of course we can say that marketing is a subject, but … for administrative reasons the funny situation in universities is that we keep marketing separately, leadership separately, and accounting separately. That could not be so in any viable company (P4).

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P20, on the other hand, suggested almost the opposite: Marketing used to be an obscure entity, and the concept of marketing was not well–known; but today in large– or middle–sized company, the sales and marketing departments were separate. However, P4 continued, what marketing is, is also a “matter of taste”. It has its speciﬁc features, but it is not something that can be done separately from anything else. Just persuading the personnel to do something, is marketing, he said.

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P6 also endorsed this line of reasoning; for him marketing is a way of thinking—an approach rather than a dogma—and in this marketing mindset, there are various theories and insights about its nature. For P25, marketing means taking good care of the customers, and that one should try to get rid of marketing as a separate activity. In universities, marketing is a separate matter, but in organizations every employee is involved in marketing to a greater or lesser extent. As long as the old marketing terms are maintained, he argued, the old idea that marketing is a function among other functions remains a straightjacket for companies. With regard to structures in companies versus those in universities, P22 stated that in the former the borders are not the same as those, which define professors’ chairs in universities. P3, in turn, saw marketing as a function—and a demanding one at that. In order to succeed in marketing, he said, one needs to be in the external environment, searching for needs, problems, or demands. He literally used the expression of throwing oneself into the society, which I understood as meaning that he saw marketing as being among the grass– root level activities of companies. Together with accounting, suggested P29, marketing guides the actions of companies; as markets are not stable, the activity of the whole company is directed towards adapting to these changes or influencing them so they will be favourable for the company. P19 said that there were two essential aspects to marketing: the psychological education for understanding consumers, and the familiarity with counting and calculating. Nevertheless, marketers still do not know what the performance of marketing is: The whole side of profitability and success, what does marketing provide, what kind of a contribution does it make, after all, to the success of a company. It is always said that it is the core, and that it is needed, but in this area there is very little knowledge (P19).

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Marketing defines exchange as its object of interest. However, P16 said, exchange is not a research object only for marketing; there is a whole school of thought that studies exchange in social psychology. On the other hand, marketing is not alone in being unclear about its research object. All young disciplines have suffered such phases in their history, he noted, when they have been accused of being humbug because they could not define their focus of interest clearly enough. P16 thought it would be important for marketing to consider its roots and connections to be within the philosophy of science. As P21 stated, the reading of marketing academics is extremely limited in other areas, and P7 said that he regretted having not read enough other literature. P16 and P20 reminisced about the early 1980s, when there was a short but intensive period of discussion about the philosophy of science in relation to marketing. What is the relationship between empirical or positivistic research and qualitative research, hermeneutics, or phenomenology? What is historical, comparative, and clinical research? Do they have a unified base? However, this discussion grew from the interests of a few peoples, and once their interest ceased, the Finnish debate on these issues ended as well. As P20 pointed out, Shelby Hunt (1976) wrote the first book on marketing theory in the USA, discussing the roots of marketing research through the philosophy of science. It is now considered a classic. The date of publication indicates that the Finnish debate was synchronic with a similar interest at other places.

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The span of research has widened since 1970s and 1980s. Yet, P22 maintains that the older group still often asks in national tutorials82 how a certain research issue relates to marketing. Younger academics, on the other hand, tend to think it less “dangerous” that research topics or approaches cannot be clearly deﬁned as belonging to a certain school or approach. The “youngsters” would also like to see more ideas imported from other ﬁelds of science. 82

As Finland is a small country, doctoral get–togethers are often arranged as “national tutorials”.

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Students who seek their way to marketing tend to believe that it is a technology like accounting, or hocus pocus and tricks that can be taught in order to succeed in business, said P21. Marketing also seems to be seen as a general body of knowledge; according to P9 it is a popular secondary subject in universities. Even those training to be physical education teachers, or humanists like linguists, consider it to be a necessary part of their education. The demand for further education is also enormous, claimed P9. But how has the interlocutors’ own education affected what they think marketing is? At one time, P26 said, marketing studies included large amounts of books that needed to be studied for exams at one go; it was seen as an “intrinsic value” to have many answers, but nobody really knew to which questions. As if in a confirmation of this observation, three interviewees (P5, P10, P19) said that they had no idea what marketing was when they started their studies. A few interviewees thought that their studies were irrelevant, as they included the same 4P–based stuff from first year to final exams (P1), or were fragmented bits and pieces that nobody seemed to know how to relate to, or how they would form any kind of entity (P19). Marketing felt totally like Hebrew, we had the slim booklet by NN, and, well, it was mostly consumer behaviour. Then we learned these large sheets by heart and we didn’t really get a coherent idea that what in the heaven’s name this was (P19). Marketing was truly self–education, as it is today, with the difference that currently it is supervised self–education, said P5, and added that despite his great hopes for higher education, the studies of business administration were not so high after all. With this he was not only referring to the literature, but also to the level of teaching, which was criticized by P1 as well.

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As Finland is a small country, doctoral get–togethers are often arranged as “national tutorials”.

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P27 admitted that he once had doubts about taking a job, because it was situated within the subject of management. What are the relationships between marketing and other sub–disciplines of business administration, if moving over borders can sometimes cause uncertainty? P25 reminisces about his choice of a major subject: …there were all kinds of interesting topics to study, economics was interesting, statistics was interesting. Everything else was a bit… accounting was slightly boring, management was so incoherent that I remember thinking… but marketing was only slightly incoherent. That was my impression from the basic course (P25). However, there seems to be a consensus that the content of marketing became clearer in the 1980s, which might have been due to the strengthening of consumer behaviour as a marketing subject. According to P10 and P19, there is only one area within the scope of marketing that has a proper theory, and that is consumer behaviour: There wasn’t really one coherent core theory of marketing, because there is no such book, but the courses were dispersed according to the basic parameters: logistics, pricing, product design, and marketing communication, and then… consumer behaviour was added to it, quite signiﬁcantly, so that even the teaching of marketing communication started from the consumer point of view (P10).

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For P10, the choosing of marketing as major subject actually depended on the fact that consumer behaviour “happened to be in the subject of marketing”. The popularity of consumer behaviour peaked in the 1970s and 1980s—P24, who studied and wrote his thesis at that time—said that marketing was, in fact, consumer behaviour, whereas one interviewee who wrote his thesis earlier said that marketing was logistics.

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Thus, consumer behaviour seems to be the area of marketing that is closest to what could be called “the essence” of marketing: what is it that makes people behave the way they do, as P26 pointed out. For him, consumer behaviour represents the basic research in marketing: “What people most want to know when they turn to marketing”, he said, “is why people reject certain things, why they interpret the way they do, and how one can persuade people”. Hence, marketing is persuasion: it is techniques to affect people, as both P16 and P26 argued. If marketing is not influencing people, said P16, then what is it? Marketing is rhetoric. What does one need to read if one wants to study marketing? Rhetoric by Aristotle, of course. […] If Aristotle says that expertise can be attached to anything, even to brushing a horse, and if we talk about the skill of brushing a horse, we can talk about a skill in marketing. Both have different objectives. For brushing, the objective is to brush the horse as well as possible, and the objective of marketing, perhaps, is to fulfil consumers’ needs (P16). P18, on the other hand, saw that his task was to “understand people and try to take this understanding to managers”. The number of theories that can be included in the field of marketing science is countless, said P16. There are, for instance, theories of communication, of products, and of prices. And once one enters these sub–fields—communication, for example—one notices that there are tens, if not hundreds of theories, out of which marketing picks the ones it uses according to current fashion. Well, actually, these qualitative methods, they are newcomers there [in marketing], and actually qualitative research came, let’s say, to behavioural sciences, joined the company of social psychology and sociology. Marketing always follows some field of science, and then it hurries to borrow the best bits from there (P22).

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Philip Kotler and the 4P model that is often attributed to him, even though it was originally fashioned by McCarthy (1960/1971), are an essential part of the content of marketing, so much so that P9 alleged, “marketing theories are mostly trawled through when Kotler has been read well”. The marketing mix, or the 4Ps (product, price, place, and promotion) will never disappear, said P8, because products need to be designed and priced and their logistics and communication organized. However, he pointed out, at some point, the relationship marketers suggested that the there is no need for the old marketing mix now that this new relationship paradigm is here. However, marketing parameters are still needed, as they are central parts in marketing education: It’s ok that we have all these softie researchers and qualitative researchers and so on, but I think that the majority of the graduates receiving marketing education anyway end up, in one way or the other, amid the 4P’s (laughter). And damn it, if in ten years we have nobody who can teach it or be enthusiastic about it, well… (P22).

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On the other hand, Kotler’s theory is considered mechanistic and as reducing marketing into sales promotion, advertising, and selling (P29, P31). “It was just 4Ps to and fro”, said P1, reminiscing about his early days as a marketing student, “but now there are other things that ﬂourish”. But do they ﬂourish too much? There have been many schools of thought; a fact that some considered to be positive as they give marketing more variety; they are seen as proof that marketing develops. However, as P2 pointed out, the emperor may need new clothes, but the basic issues do not change that much, “no matter through what kinds of lenses we look at things”, added P4. Nevertheless, new ideas are positive in a sense that they liberate from the old, dogmatic or mechanistic ways of thinking, said P20, explaining that, at one time, a marketing academic had to belong to some school of thought, and stay there.

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P16 said that marketing has concentrated on the discussion about what is important or new in marketing research, using much the same language as advertising uses to promote new products, rather than concentrating on expanding itself more towards general scientific discussion: This is new, something brand new that has never been before… It is like, talk in this language and you’ll have friends, talk like this if you want to be one of us… (P16). P4, cited in the beginning of this chapter, thought in a similar manner; marketing will not develop as discipline if all the energy is used for killing old ideas and elevating new ones, instead of concentrating on what marketing actually is. P2 added that these “paradigm wars” and the emphasis on everything that is “new” were the most disagreeable phenomena in the academic world, together with belittling those who think otherwise. Often, he laughed, there were articles in which the author alleged that the issue at hand was revolutionary and brand new, although it really could have been quite basic. The interviewees were almost unanimous about one thing: that the field has spread enormously. However, the expansion of different ideas is also dangerous for the development of the field, suggested P18: Marketing is becoming too specific, holding the smallest details or crumbs in focus. This phenomenon is also seen in teaching, he believes, when advanced studies in marketing are considered deeper if they concentrate on a specific area, although the quality of depth or progressiveness should be based on whether studies are problem–oriented or not. For some interviewees, these various schools and their comings, goings, and sometimes stayings, are mere mayflies: fads that come and go and one could well do without (P2; P4; P6). As P2 asked, rather theatrically: Wasn’t the old village shopkeeper the best relationship marketer? Didn’t he have the best networks? If so, what is so new and different about these new schools with those new names?

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Students can be misled by new names. If marketing becomes “international business”, how is it so new and different from the “old” marketing? Surely the issues in marketing do not change that much, whether products or services are marketed in Finland or elsewhere in the world—a point made by both P22 and P29. That criticism goes for other areas as well: If you develop new marketing research areas through slogans, it doesn’t lead to any good scientiﬁc research. Like how does services marketing diverge so much from the rest, or should the marketing of cultural services become an independent subject? They conform to the same laws (P10). However, international marketing or international business—the names vary from school to school—has become popular among students. P3 sees internationality is also seen as a mindset—like marketing, a way of thinking—so that everything should have an international aspect to it (P3). When I asked him about it, P21 reﬂected on the difference between marketing on the one hand and international marketing (or international business) on the other: Well, it is an obscure… well here [professor] has always wanted to stress the difference between these subjects, but myself, if you ask me […] I don’t see a difference, and I don’t think the difference should be made. […] I don’t think it is important that international marketing and marketing are two separate subjects. Internationality is just one aspect of marketing phenomena (P21).

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According to the critics, these new lines of thought or paradigms, or merely new names to existing phenomena seldom give any new substance to marketing. Rather, they make it more confusing for practitioners. If the same phenomenon is given a new name too often, people lose interest, P13 argued: “Who in business knows what ‘relationship marketing’ is? Or what ‘internal marketing’ deals with, an affair that most people have

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known as ‘personnel administration’?” P31 said that uniting practice with these newer schools of thought—especially network and relationship approaches—has not yet succeeded. P13 suggested that in Finland, marketing thought spread from universities to business, although often these two groups of people meant different things when they talked about marketing. P22 reasoned in a parallel way and said that at one time trades people considered marketing to be either sales work or something similar, but that people in academia knew what marketing was. According to them, the spreading of the current conception of marketing expanded slowly from academia to practical life. However, it is its practical use that decides whether a new approach prospers or not: There’s not a hope that all these fads will stay alive. If some do, it will be because they will prove their durability in practice and, well, will be adopted there (P22). Marketing textbooks often begin with a definition of marketing and a few answers to the question “Is marketing science?” In my licentiate thesis (Vironmäki 2003, 43–44), I presented nine definitions of marketing from textbooks published over the past four decades. Because the phenomenon is not unambiguous, neither are its definitions. I picked the marketing textbooks from a business school library from the shelf that was titled marketing, and like anybody who stands before these shelves, I noticed that there was a large supply of marketing textbooks. For the purpose in the licentiate, I picked books from different periods in order to see how the definitions have changed over time. Despite of the abundant supply of marketing textbooks, texts by Philip Kotler have gained a status that has never seemed to waver, at least in Finland, but apparently elsewhere as well. In the earlier phases of this study (Vironmäki 2000a) I counted the marketing textbooks that were used most often between 1952 and 1997 in three Finnish universities

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and business schools: Helsinki and Turku Schools of Economics and the University of Tampere. The leading books were almost all written in the USA, and in all three schools, Marketing Management by Philip Kotler has been in the top three. Hence, it seems reasonable to assume that the Kotlerian view on marketing would be dominant in Finnish marketing, as his books are assiduously used also in other Finnish business schools83. Marketing Management by Kotler was referred to as “the marketing bible” by P19 and nominated by P9 as being the only marketing theory book needed. It seems, however, that the “marketing bible” does not remain unchanged. In the 1976 edition of his Marketing Management, Philip Kotler defined marketing as “human activity directed at satisfying needs and wants through exchange processes”; in 1994, marketing is a “social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering and exchanging products of value with others”. In the Millennium Edition (2000), the definition is the same, save that “and services” that has been added after “products”84. “Marketing management is the art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping, and growing customers through creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value” (Kotler 2000, 8). The concept of exchange and the notion of fulfilling needs are still present in an edition one year later, with the addition of making profit (Kotler & Armstrong 2001). This Kotlerian approach to marketing as an exchange process, dealing with what happens between companies and their interest groups, was well represented among the interlocutors. The interpretations of marketing by the interlocutors did not drastically divert from one another or from the 162 83

In addition to HSEBA, TSEBA, and University of Tampere, according to the curricula material, Marketing Management by Philip Kotler has been used in Åbo Akademi University from 1969 onwards, in University of Vaasa from 1993 onwards, and in Hanken in Helsinki from early 1970s. 84

This is rather late considering that services marketing has been a relatively strong school in Northern Europe throughout the 1990s.

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definitions that marketing is given in literature. I would say, in fact, that they are surprisingly unanimous. Although some of the interviewees see marketing as a state of mind and some as a function, both of these notions include the basic issues, such as taking care of customers and guiding the companies’ action, together with accounting and working in the interface between companies and their interest groups. Actually, the biggest difference is whether or not marketing should be considered as something separate or not. Hence, there are those who see that the “marketing state of mind” (Czinkota et al. 1997, a definition espoused by quite a few interviewees) or the “marketing mindset” is involved in the actions of companies, and thus the responsibility of general management rather than of marketing department, and those for whom it is a distinct activity. The most critical voices concerned the fragmentation of marketing through excessive number of schools of thought. Only one interviewee suggested that the impact of marketing or the economic performance of marketing activities has not been the subject of research, and we have little knowledge about it. Only one interviewee discussed the ethical implications of marketing, adding environmental issues to his list of current important topics within marketing. Two interviewees, P1 and P21, mentioned that in the subject of leadership (or management), the level of critical research is higher than it is in marketing, and that it is, in fact, still absent in marketing. Critical management research, summarized by Glenn Morgan (2003), for instance, has been developing during the 1990s, so its implications may not yet be seen (heard) in these interviews. Morgan discusses the penetration of marketing ideas to all fields of society as well as the concept of “governed consumers”, whose lives are defined by how and what they choose to consume. Hence, from being the innocent voice for and protector of consumers, marketing has become a power to which everyone is subjected, and whose means are present in all areas of human life, such as schools, sports events, and in media. Morgan (2003) refers to Naomi Klein’s “No

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This is rather late considering that services marketing has been a relatively strong school in Northern Europe throughout the 1990s.

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Logo” as an important critique of the consumption society; however so far that book does not seem to have become part of the curriculum in schools providing marketing education in Finland. In sum, marketing is difficult to define, and the interviewees did not seem to believe that it was necessary to define it. It deals with various phenomena that occur in the interface between companies and consumers, and marketers need to understand both calculus and psychology. Marketing is influencing people, and understanding the exchange processes. Philip Kotler should be read, although not in excessive amounts—not at every level of marketing studies. There are various schools of thought, and if consumer behaviour can be seen as one of them, it is definitely the most important one. The rest varies; relationship marketing is seen as both a non–intellectual, half–consultancy and an important paradigm. As marketing is difficult to define, so it is difficult to decide whether someone’s contribution belongs within marketing. Nevertheless, it seems that as time goes by and generations change, the borders blur, and it may be less dangerous to cross them.

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Summary of the controversies The twelve topics that contain contradictory elements—the controversies in academic life and marketing—can be classiﬁed in two groups. The ﬁrst group includes everything that are seen to be actual problems, but that can be solved by changing the system or striving to improve certain aspects, or debating the contents within the discipline. Such controversies deal with the following topics: 1. Becoming a (marketing) academic: accidental or not? Specialists or general workers? Individuals or parts of community? More administration—less control? Collaboration or lonely work? Marketing: an activity or a way of thinking? All these issues are important for academic work, and are often topics of continuous discussions within different disciplines. Growing bureaucracy, diffuse career prospects, and loneliness in academic work are topics of many studies within science studies (e.g. Becher 1989; Ylijoki 1998; Välimaa 2001; Aittola & Ylijoki 2005). Likewise, the content of marketing—whether an idea, mindset or an activity—have been subjects in different studies (e.g. Hunt 1983, Holbrook 1995 and 2002).

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The second group deals with more insolvable problems, or the ones that are established deeper in academic work and in such practical disciplines as marketing:

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The second group deals with more insolvable problems, or the ones that are established deeper in academic work and in such practical disciplines as marketing:

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2. Of academia: Superhumans or merely professors? Teachers: at the centre of the faculty or its margin? Students: products or clients? Of marketing: Open or closed university? (Relationship with practice) Marketing practice and theory The pedagogy: general education or practical skills? Finnish universities dove into managerial planning and controlling systems before the central aspects inherent in such principles were thoroughly discussed. The ﬁrst three topics under No. 1 above deal with issues that are symptomatic to universities of today, caught between productivity demands and insecurity about the nature of the product or its outcomes. The next three are typical for practice–based disciplines such as marketing.

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In this chapter I remind readers of the main circumstances surrounding the appearance of marketing as a discipline and about the separation between the work of practically oriented and scientiﬁcally oriented marketing scholars. Next, I discuss the dilemmas related to the university culture of business schools, with management by results principles and its consequences for the everyday work of professors. Finally, I discuss the differences between ways of knowing.

The emerging discipline and separation in it Marketing started with bits of accumulating information, and descriptions of what happens in business. The first marketing scholars were hybrids who moved between business and academia, transforming into classroom education the knowledge they picked up as and from businesspeople. The accumulated knowledge about these activities slowly became standardized by definition committees and by foundations emphasizing the importance of a scientific approach to marketing problems. In the 1950s, the Ford and Carnegie foundations criticized the field of Business Administration for the highly descriptive nature of its research. They began to allocate funds for bringing behavioural scientists and statisticians to business school campuses, thereby rendering marketing education less vocational and more scientific. Especially when consumers rather than products became the central point of interest (Keith 1960), marketing became less descriptive

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and based more on quantitative research techniques for collecting data on the actions of consumers (see Cochoy 1998). As Westing (in Hunt 1983) reminisced about the consequences of this development: Our research, at that time, began to be quite arcane, quite esoteric. We were not as interested as before in studying business problems. We were more interested in ﬁnding a data base somewhere, and processing the daylights out of it (p. 40). He then further discussed reasons for this development, besides the funding principles: It’s not hard to understand why this happened because it coincided with the period when universities were putting greater emphasis on publication. And, our journals, perhaps mistakenly, took the position that since articles of this kind sounded scholarly, they were deserving of publication (p. 40).

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These quotations are taken from Professor Howard Westing’s opening statement in a panel discussion in 197985, a discussion initiated by his own article from 1977, where he suggested that marketing is not an academic discipline. His main point was that after a decade of behavioural research academic marketers were not much wiser about the actions of consumers. In his opening statement in the panel, he further argued that if marketing academics want their area to become a discipline, they need to challenge economics and replace it as the foundation of their discipline—which he doubted marketing scholars could do. He also worried that marketing journals were no longer useful to businesspeople, and predicted that if marketing academics continued along the path they seemed to have chosen, the area would lose the allegiance of clients, but would still not become accepted by university colleagues in other disciplines. 85

The panel discussion was originally published in Conceptual and Theoretical Developments in Marketing (1979), edited by O.C. Ferrell, Stephen W. Brown and Charles W. Lamb Jr. (Chicago, AMA).

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There were two other scholars in that panel: one practitioner and one who was described as presenting a combination of practitioner and academic points of view. The opening statements of these scholars were primarily advocating the academic status of marketing, unsympathetic towards Westing’s claims that behavioural research was a useless endeavour. They generally agreed, however, on the need to discuss the deficient experience of marketing scholars in concrete marketing tasks— and if such experience was necessary. The panellist representing practitioners began his statement by saying that his first months in the business world were “a rude awakening as to the tremendous differences between what I had been taught and what I was expected to do”. He argued that there was no connection between what was done within academia, and what happens in the everyday lives of practitioners, and suggested that marketing practitioners did not read scholarly journals, the contents of which they considered to be irrelevant. He also wondered if such a connection even needs to exist: [P]erhaps we should ask ourselves whether they should interact; whether they should influence one another; and finally, if there is no immediate influence, is there, over time, an adoption and diffusion process occurring? (Maiken in Hunt 1983, 44–5). As explained in Chapter 4, the development of marketing in Finland has also moved from the descriptive, practical orientation of, for instance, Professors Raninen and Kaskimies (in HSEBA) and Piha (in TSEBA) to a quantitative, behavioural emphasis, first represented in Helsinki by Professor Leivo, and later by his doctoral students. In Finland, the 1970s and 1980s were the era of strong scientific orientation, when marketing research became, and continued to be, quantitative and positive. In the interview narratives, there were remarks similar to those made by Hunt concerning the excessive diversification of marketing through the emergence of new schools of thought. Namely, Hunt (1983, 3) wondered

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The panel discussion was originally published in Conceptual and Theoretical Developments in Marketing (1979), edited by O.C. Ferrell, Stephen W. Brown and Charles W. Lamb Jr. (Chicago, AMA).

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if a new discipline was required to cover that which was previously called marketing, as every year a new fad emerges with unfounded promises and magical formulas. In due time, this development met with criticism within business administration. The critical management school argued that marketing has become “more scientiﬁc than science”, using rigid research techniques that may not be the most effective for understanding such complex phenomena as those dealt with in marketing. After all, as Philip Kotler and Sydney Levy (1969) said, marketing is a “pervasive social activity”, and social activities are usually complex by nature. Donald Schön (1987) has suggested that what students of management most needed was knowledge about how to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty, which is difﬁcult to teach within the culture of modern research universities. This criticism has raised demand for a more practice–oriented marketing research and education (e.g. Bennis & O’Toole 2005). It did, after all, spring from an interest in business activities, and was created in order to provide information for future business practitioners. As Hunt (1983, 4) also argued, the dichotomy of theory and practice is a false one. If research is theoretical, it does not mean that it would not have practical implications. In the next section I summarize how the interviewees saw that these relationships among academia, the business world, individual scholars, and teaching would best be arranged as systems of academic research in marketing.

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There seems to be something called practice—not the practice of being a researcher or a teacher, but the practice of business. There is also science, with different values and expectations, most often embedded in the narratives, but not always explicitly discussed. Although the logical

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counterpart of science is art rather than practice, and although the logical counterpart of practice is theory rather than science, I have to a certain extent retained the terms “practice” and “science”, as these are the words most interviewees used. These differences can be seen in the classification presented in Chapter 2, in which I divided the interviewees according to their orientation towards academia (20), practice (4) or both (7). This division must not be understood as a taxonomy of Finnish marketing, but as an overview of the interviewees’ outlook on the role of marketing as an academic discipline. This classification is thus based on the interviews; it is my interpretation of the general focus of the interlocutors’ narratives. As outlined in Chapter 2, the interlocutors whom I identified in the group academia had their interview narratives situated in the context of marketing as a discipline, its history, and its current existence. The narratives could touch upon the connection between marketing education and practice, but mostly in the context of ways to help the students learn independent and critical thinking and to communicate with other professional areas with which marketing graduates will work in the future. The interlocutors of the group practice had their narratives embedded in the context of business. Students need to be taught to do something, and research needs to be oriented towards issues relevant for business. In the group both, the narratives were situated in the context of university life, but emphasized the necessary link to business. Good contacts with economic life are essential, but the purpose of education is broader than today’s business problems. Being academically oriented is the default position among marketing scholars, and sidestepping that default implies a need to justify the deviating role—using harsh criticism of the default. Hence, the practically oriented actors were explicitly critical towards the academic orientation, whereas those whom I have considered to be academically oriented seldom criticized an over–enthusiasm towards everything that has a practical side to it.

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Even though, as Hunt (1983, 4) argues, the dichotomy of practice and theory may be a false one, it was very real to the interviewees who discussed it. Hence, I argue that a separation has occurred between the practical and theoretical orientations within marketing discipline in Finland. It is possible to discern two extremes in perceptions of the role of marketing as science. According to the more practical orientation, there are techniques with which one should be familiar: how the product makes its way to a grocery store, for example. The marketing professional also needs to know how to discover the customer’s wants. In this sense, marketing is a practical skill like that of a doctor or an architect, as Hutchinson argued in 1952, and therefore includes techniques that students should learn.

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Academic research in marketing: Different views Figure 3 depicts a system of academic marketing research from the point of view of the academically oriented actors. The academic community outside the borders of the university is usually the main focus of contribution and the starting point of inspiration. Students play a central role in many of the narratives; in others, it is only the discipline that receives attention.

According to the more scholarly view, marketing can, indeed, be part of the world of science; and marketing academics need to know, in addition to certain techniques, how to look beyond the present–day needs of companies. Academic skills are based on communication skills, the ability to face uncertainty in decision making and a tolerance for insecurity. Students need to be able to conduct research reaching beyond the present–day needs of companies. Business school graduates should be known for their analytic skills and attitudes, and the purpose of university is to provide tools for evaluating knowledge and phenomena, often summarized by the interviewees as “critical thinking”. This issue is discussed further at the end of this chapter, but ﬁrst I describe how the interviewees built the system of academic marketing research through their different orientations. Then I describe “an ideal marketing scholar” in a middle position between these two, based on the descriptions in the interviews. 172

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Figure 3. The system of academic research in marketing. Opinions of the interviewees with academic orientations.

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Figure 3. The system of academic research in marketing. Opinions of the interviewees with academic orientations.

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As can be seen in the ﬁgure, contacts with the business world take the form of training sessions and occasional lectures, and business is present primarily from the point of view of the students: acquiring research topics for their theses and the much–requested guest lecturers. Hence, the more academically oriented interlocutors do not seem to communicate with practitioners through their own research, but mostly through teaching, as part of the curricula. The students are to be located between the individual scholar and academic community, although there is certainly a connection between students and the business world in many of the narratives. However, this connection is most often activated by the scholar. Figure 4 summarizes the views of the interviewees with more practical orientation:

For those who claim to have a practical orientation or an orientation to both the academic and the practical, practitioners and scholars seem to stand more side–by–side. The academic community exists in the back, hence the dashed line. The necessary scholarly parts of their work come from there, but it is not really present in their everyday activity, especially that of the interlocutors with practical orientation. The academic community is present more explicitly among those whom I have identiﬁed as being oriented towards both. Nevertheless, both groups saw themselves as providers of useable and relevant knowledge—the starting point of which is the practitioners. Students are often present in their narratives too, but in the sense of helping them get good jobs and providing them with current, relevant, practical knowledge. The Figure 5 shows my interpretation of how the interviewees describe that the system ought to be —a summary of the ideal research machine.

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Figure 4. The system of academic research in marketing. Opinions of the interviewees with practical orientation, or orientation to both.

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Figure 5. The system of academic research in marketing. A summary of the interviewees’ opinions.

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Figure 4. The system of academic research in marketing. Opinions of the interviewees with practical orientation, or orientation to both.

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Figure 5. The system of academic research in marketing. A summary of the interviewees’ opinions.

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In an ideal loop, ideas and potential research problems flow from the business world to the marketing scholars, who have skills to identify the fruitful ones and transform them into research problems through their scholarly expertise, which stems from the academic community. They are up–to–date with the latest scientific discussion, attained through reading journals and attending conferences and through their participation in academic networks. They collaborate simultaneously with both the academic community, where they present their research findings and obtain new ideas through discussion and reflection; and the business world, where they continually engage in discussions with practitioners, in order to help them in their endeavours, and out of scholarly curiosity for new and fruitful research problems. The academic community and the business world are connected via individual marketing scholars—hence the dash line. The loop circles around the marketing students, through whom the knowledge is then transferred back to daily business functions.

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The people in the middle of this picture—marketing scholars—should be ahead of their time in their ideas, follow the cutting edge research of the field, and listen to practitioners in order to maintain relevance. They should have at least some experience working in business, and possess top– level skills in high quality scientific research. They must be competent as research project leaders and in applying for research financing, and must have the ability to place business problems into wider frames—a skill that managers themselves do not necessarily possess. In short, marketing scholars need to be mediums for understanding business phenomena and should have the abilities (and the time) to contextualize and develop them into relevant research problems.

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Thus, the university should be a hatchery of ideas, providing business with hatched ideas that originate from the business itself, and turning them into language that practitioners can relate to and work with. They should be neutral and distanced, in order to hold on to the ideal of free knowledge production—free from financial incentives and corporate interests, as Holbrook (1995) put it. Universities should not copy something that already exists, but their task and mission should be to bring in new ideas that—after a small delay—will be absorbed into practice. In sum, the ideal loop in academic marketing research implies that those who, in the words by Hunt (1983), contribute to the “knowledge base of marketing”, should first acquire their knowledge from present–day problems of business practitioners or other current issues in society. Once the problems that arose in business have been identified by the scholars with analytic skills, they will be contextualized by induction into a wider academic discussion: the knowledge base of marketing. Such ideal scholars are close to what is often seen as the ideal intellectual. For instance, Zygmunt Bauman (1997, 53) discussed the “essence” of academics, which requires the guardianship of truth and objectivity, and the possession of a world view that reaches beyond narrow group interests and partisan prejudices. Academics should be the experts in general cultural values and collectively able to oppose the power of elected politicians. In other words, intellectuals are those who possess both the ability and the willingness to act as the collective conscience of the nation. Intellectuals are defined for what they do over and above their professional duties. Descriptions of the ideal research system and the ideal scholar include some issues that might deserve a closer look. On the basis of what has been discussed in the previous chapters, one can ask if the academic scriptures really are “the latest research”, and hence an inspiration for new and fruitful ideas and research problems, or if the are primarily contributions written in order to obtain more academic achievements, as for instance

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Grey and Sinclair (2006) suspect. The gist of their criticism is that most academic articles do not necessarily include much of value to anybody save the authors, who need more publications to their resumes; and to the administration of universities that follow the principles of quantitatively measured efﬁciency. In summary, the ideal scholar is multitalented, capable of high– quality research, both independently and in groups. The ideal scholar has the time to discuss issues with marketing practitioners, supervise the next generation, and be simultaneously a general worker and a specialist.

Managerial university: Clients, employers and products The notion of the “managerial university” does not refer only to the new management principles, but also to the university’s new role in the current knowledge–production markets in which they should participate (see Czarniawska & Genell 2002). The current university culture, in general, emphasizes openness towards society and need for lowering the barriers between universities and their reference groups.

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As discussed in Chapter 3, academics are currently also subject to the growing uncertainty of ﬁnancial resources, toughening competition, and increasing demands for productivity (Pirttilä & Eriksson–Piela 2004, 10) that leave few possibilities for being “collective consciences of the nation”, as Bauman (1997) would say. The present–day university is a dual society in which permanent–job professors have the greatest power and possibilities among academics, and the rest are teachers and researchers86, most of whom have limited–time employment, low salaries, and uncertain futures.

Also referred to as ‘project slaves’ in coffee room discussions.

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Since the introduction of “proﬁt responsibility”, universities are also expected to function in a company–like manner, although their activities in that regard include several grey areas, such as: What is the product? Who is the client? And to whom are university employees responsible? The client is supposedly the State. The State pays most of university’s funding in exchange for an educated work force and in order to maintain the country’s competitive position in research. Hence, the guidelines for academic education, given by the State, are decided by analysing the current needs of work markets (Välimaa 2004). However, as a dynamic actor following demand and supply, the State may not be effective, especially in the area of business administration education, where it is unclear who is demanding and who should be listened to: commerce and industry, academics, or students. A few interlocutors said that they see their students as clients, and that the positive side of the current managing–by–result principle was the willingness of the faculty to help students ﬁnish their degrees. However, this principle, as well as the slight uncertainty of quality measurements other than quantitative degree production, may also mean that the opinions of students do weigh in constructing the curricula. As described in Chapter 5, students may imply that academically merited professors are “dusty” and know nothing of relevance for their education. In Finland students give feedback to professors and other teaching faculty through anonymous reports. Although this practice forces teachers to listen to students’ opinions, it has the potential to encourage teachers to please students. As one interviewee explained, if a course deals with advertising or some other trendy area of marketing, or includes lectures by visiting practitioners, the course gets positive feedback from the students. Some interviewees were concerned about this tendency to please students, as they believed that students should be taught that the acquisition of some skills require a great deal of effort. Real life is not so much fun, they cautioned, not even in advertising; it is full of anxious situations and hasty decisions.

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Also referred to as ‘project slaves’ in coffee room discussions.

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On the other hand, today’s students know what they want, are active and critical, and ask questions. In short, they differ greatly from the students that many of these professors were in earlier times. Many of them told about sitting silently and copying whatever their teachers wrote on the blackboard, learned their lessons by heart, and answered questions mechanically on exams. Professors were respected, never openly criticized, rarely approached. Studies were certainly not much “fun”; lectured courses, let alone group work, were rare; and literature consisted of obscure books in several languages. If students are the clients of university education, does the higher marketing education reach the correct target group? With the exception of professors from HSEBA, the interviewees told stories of students who seem to expect to learn hands–on, practical things; they are primarily interested in lectures by successful, real–life practitioners and expect the academic faculty to be able to recount experiences that they can relate to. An academically respected and successful professor does not raise the students’ hopes for the best possible education as much as lectures by well–known practitioners do. As a few interviewees pointed out, many students apparently expect a different kind of education, and leave business schools after graduation with critical minds and, feelings similar to those of Jeffrey Maiken, “that somehow the entire business educational system had let me down” (Hunt 1983, p. 44). Hence, there seems to be a discrepancy between the expectations of students, and the reality they face in the business schools.

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Because they believe that the students are too young and inexperienced to know what they need, the professors were concerned about student inﬂuence on the curriculum. Some interviewees pointed out that students seem to know little about the everyday activities of universities, other than teaching, which is for them the critical activity. They do not necessarily know what it is that teachers do when they are not in a classroom. They are even less aware of the University Act, according to which universities should both “enhance free research” and “give highest

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education based on research”. If one listens to students’ expectations, the interviewees suggested, the basis for higher marketing education is not free research but practical skills explained by someone who uses them every day. On the other hand, some students—after leaving the university with critical mind—might later say that they have only now begun to understand the contents of their education. Once theories come alive in their real contexts, they start making sense. According to some studies examining the attitudes of CEOs of small– and medium–sized ﬁrms, 83% of those with Master’s degrees believed that PhD degrees represented the results of some kind of highest vocational exam providing expertise in a narrow subject area (Virmasalo 1998). Although this research was conducted in 1997, and although there are more PhDs in the business world now than there were then, it relates to the idea that even university graduates do not understand what constitutes higher education and research. Their images of PhDs sound like formed by the stereotype of a researcher, i.e. a natural scientist. In other words, in the marketing research loop another discrepancy may be that business practitioners, including its business school graduates, do not know what scholars do for living. Nevertheless, it is stated in the University Act that universities should work in collaboration with the society, which in the case of subjects within business administration is often understood as the industry and commerce87, at least by those interviewees who are critical towards the academically oriented research in marketing, i.e. the ones whose contribution goes primarily to academic community. Hence, also the business world itself can be seen as the marketing professor’s client. The other possible clients, students, are present in the legislation as receivers of teaching, and as a market force whose demands professors listen to. In a sense, professors have several clients, then; they must listen to the demands of students, should provide industry and commerce with useable and 87

As mentioned in Chapter 3, in the Polytechnics Act business is explicitly named.

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As mentioned in Chapter 3, in the Polytechnics Act business is explicitly named.

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relevant research, and accomplish all this in an economically satisfying way for their third client, the State, which needs qualiﬁed employees in both public and private sectors. Thus, the future employers in commerce and industry are present in two ways: demanding useable knowledge based on academic research and demanding skilled employees.

Students who are unwilling or unable to ﬁnish their degrees are assisted in completing their studies, as each degree is needed to obtain the objectives set for each year. Individual academic performance is measured by the number of publications and other activities, such as international collaboration, teaching, and supervising graduate students. However, as explained in Chapter 5, publications carry the heaviest weight as a benchmark of effectiveness and the number of academic journals is increasing. This development has led to criticism, according to which academics write more for each other than for a wider public (see e.g. Grey & Sinclair 2006).

Or is the State the professors’ employer? In a sense it is, as most professors’ salaries come from the State budget, which is based chieﬂy on tax money. However the academic community is, in a sense, the professors’ employer as well, as the internal rules set by the community should function in a similar manner as those of the employer—rewarding the behaviour and punishing unwanted behaviour. Yet in the usual employer– employee relationship there is no rivalry, as in the case of academic community and the professor, and in that sense the State may be a more proper choice for the role of employer. Nevertheless, the State does not punish nor reward the professor as an employer does. That is usually the role taken by the academic community. Thus, there are stories of professors who do not care about the sanctions of the community, and if they hold a permanent position, there are few means of punishing or ﬁring them. The quality of work then becomes a matter of the individual’s consciousness, as a few interviewees said, whereas earlier, the community maintained quality.

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The blame for this diminishing power of academic community and its internal rules is often placed on the new managing–by–results principle. As often discussed in coffee rooms, but rarely openly acknowledged, this management principle has led to lowered quality in academic work. Doctoral candidates are pressed to ﬁnish their doctoral theses, even though they are not yet mature enough. University departments set the target numbers for each year, and receive their ﬁnancing according to these targets, and a dissertation may be needed before the end of a year in order to receive the points.

In sum, the role of a professor in the managerial universities is multi–faceted. Especially in the case of marketing, where the society—for which academics should be providers of knowledge—is present in the form of business life, there are a number of voices whose demands they should, and often do, listen to. Practitioners expect them to provide useable knowledge, students want to learn a profession, and the State expects a certain number of qualified employees for labour markets each year, provided in a cost–effective manner. Other than through increasing bureaucracy, the State is not present. As stated many times, the efficiency of universities is measured by numbers of degrees, and the individual academic’s efficiency primarily by number of publications, and in recent times, by the ability to lead research projects and find financing for them. If this is measured, then what is the product?

Producers of knowledge Zygmunt Bauman (1997, 47) stated that although the roots of the European university are deep in the Middle Ages, its role in society is modern; “a marriage between knowledge and power”. This marriage placed the practitioners of knowledge in the very centre of institutional network and in a top rank of spiritual authority. Knowledge, however, is

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a(nother) concept with negotiable contents. As Starbuck (2006) observed, when he organized a faculty seminar on knowledge management, there was little agreement on what was meant by it: So varied were the contributions that one could say that the speakers agreed on only one point: none of them agreed with the others about the proper definition of knowledge. Indeed, every speaker began by explaining his or her distinctive definition of knowledge (p. 45). Universities should promote independent research and scientific education, and instruction of the highest level based on research, says the University Act. Hence, universities apparently have two products—research and teaching—which might be summarized as knowledge. In the current academia, however, these two products are moving farther apart, as noted by Pirttilä & Eriksson–Piela (2004), partly due to the emergence of the new academic profession of project researchers with external financing, who have no teaching duties. Also, the new operations model urges doctoral students to concentrate on their own research only in order to finish it as quickly as possible. They do not participate in teaching or other department work, a situation criticized by a few interviewees. But what does the “highest level teaching based on research” really mean?

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It seems that there is another discrepancy in academia, –that between research and teaching. It is embedded in our academic culture that scholars both teach and do research. “A doctor is he qui docent, and hence a teacher88”, as Twardowski reminded his colleagues in 1933. Earlier, when doctoral dissertations were relatively rare, and practically all PhDs stayed in the academia, their careers revolved around these two tasks. They started teaching almost as soon as they entered academia. However, now, when the sheer number of PhDs makes it impossible for all of them to be employed as academics, there are many who do not teach at all; they are trained as researchers and obtain their doctorates with little or no experience in teaching. On the other hand, there are many skilled university teachers

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with long careers, who have never done research89. Hence, one can argue that as university teachers need to present other people’s research rather than their own, it also follows that teachers do not need to do research— they need to read it (Czarniawska 2003, 355). However, it is argued that the literature (textbooks) on which teaching is based, especially in early phases of study, is not necessarily the research referred to in the University Act. Of course, the textbooks are written by academics, but they represent textbook reality, which is not necessarily the same reality in which researchers dwell90. Czarniawska (2003) discusses the difference, or split, between textbooks and research results. She argues that textbooks depict a reality in which issues in business and life are simple, understandable, and controllable; they contain representations of the rationality myth. Research results, on the other hand, reveal a reality of undeﬁned business relationships, organizational changes that are never fully manageable, and conditions that are neither simple nor controllable. She wonders why teachers hide research results from their students, and continue to preach realities that they know do not even exist. Why, she asks, are research results forbidden knowledge? For some of my interviewees, teaching is relevant as long as it is based on academic literature; for others, it is relevant if there is a practitioners’ point of view present. As one interviewee said, it is good to be able to tell about our own experiences, successes, and mistakes; and not to rely on what is written in the books. However, even though not explicitly discussed, this issue was present when they discussed the relevance and usefulness of university research and the demands they keep on meeting. 88

I do not have the original Polish text. In its re–printed and translated version from 1997, this sentence goes: “A doctor is he, qui docet”. However, I changed it because qui docent is the correct form. 89

The new salary system that was introduced in Finland 2005 emphasizes research and places such (often highly skilled) teachers, who do not do research, in an awkward position. Now, despite their decades of teaching, the system leaves them on a lower salary grade because they have not acquired doctoral degrees. 90 Jeffrey Meiken (in Hunt, 1983) considers that young marketing professors should get closer to business, and doubts the relevance of such closeness gained through expensive consulting contacts, replete with textbook solutions. That, he believes, would only aggravate the problem (p. 46).

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As marketing has been criticized for its overwhelming scientiﬁcness— which, as I understand it, supports the rationality myth—the gap between textbook reality and research reality may not be recognized as often as it should be. The Czarniawska–induced debate on “forbidden knowledge” elicited the following comment by the editor who introduced it: I think that Czarniawska may overstate the gap in that, looking across the business school community as a whole, much research operates within similarly rationalistic parameters as textbook and classroom expositions (Grey 2003, 351). There may, in fact, be a recognizable gap between “knowledge we have; knowledge we teach” (Czarniawska 2003, 355) in business administration, but it was not present in the narratives of the Finnish marketing professors, except as a memory from the 1960s. For them, the separation seems to occur as “knowledge we have, knowledge they want”. At this point, I look more deeply into these “knowledges”, with the help of the worldviews or logics, of theory and practice.

Theory and practice revisited What is a theory, and, especially, what is a “practice theory”? Schatzki (2001, 3) deﬁnes theory in both simple and broad terms:

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‘Theory’ means, simply, general and abstract account. A theory of X is a general and abstract account of X. A theory is of the practice variety, consequently, when it either 1) proffers a general and abstract account of practices, either the ﬁeld of practices or some subdomain thereof, or 2) refers whatever it offers a general and abstract account of to the ﬁeld of practices (p. 3–4).

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For Schatzki, theories are, for instance, generalizations, descriptions, typologies, and models of social affairs—as long as they are couched in general, abstract terms (ibid. p. 4). Defining practice, on the other hand, is a more complex task, and involves broad discussions on how and why people do things, and act the way they do. Wittgenstein (1953/1999, §202) sought, for example, to define rule–following as an example not of theory but of practice, because when we follow rules, we act as we do because we are the sort of creatures we are, and have been trained to act in that way (Bloor 2001, 96). The US pragmatist philosopher, John Dewey (1910/1991), distinguished between concrete and abstract thinking: When thinking is used as a means to some end, good, or value beyond itself, it is concrete; when it is employed simply as a means to more thinking, it is abstract (p. 138). From this notion, it follows that an idea is adequate to a theorist because it rewards thought; whereas to a medical practitioner or a merchant it is complete only when it is furthering some interest in life. Consequently, because abstract thinking seems so remote, the practical and successful executive feels contempt towards the “mere theorist”, and sees that certain things are fine in theory, but will not do well in practice. One can be too theoretical or too practical; these are questions of degrees and adjustments, not an absolute separation. Truly practical persons can think about a subject without asking about its advantage at every point. On the other hand, interest in knowledge for the sake of knowledge is necessary for the emancipation of practical life; it makes it rich and progressive (Dewey 1910/1991, 138–9). Nevertheless, knowledge for the sake of knowledge is not always seen as emancipating practical life. As an interviewee (P9), one of the most critical voices of “irrelevant scientific research”, stated:

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Theory and practice revisited What is a theory, and, especially, what is a “practice theory”? Schatzki (2001, 3) deﬁnes theory in both simple and broad terms:

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You don’t really study AIDS because you want to know what it is, but because you want to know how to cure it. Right? In other words, he suggested that the knowledge he provides when working as professor of marketing would need to be useable. However, being useable is not that simple, as Czarniawska (2003, 354) noted: “Use is not an attribute of knowledge but of a user”. The simplest (and probably most usable) definition may be drawn from pragmatist thought: If it works, it must be right. In other words, there are no clear objective criteria for knowledge to be good or bad; if an actor is successful using that knowledge, then it must be right (for the pragmatist view see, for instance, James 1907/1995; Rorty 1999; Gustafsson & Wikström 2004). Another issue, then, is how to define whether knowledge is being used or not. Knowledge is not a machine that one can turn on and off. People tend to think in dualisms. Differences are made between us and them, not to mention good and bad. In the history of scientific thinking, the first dualism might be that of appearance and reality, introduced by Plato (Rorty 1999, 48), which implies that there is a difference between what we comprehend and reality “as it is”. Perhaps the most typical dichotomy for marketing is that of theory and practice. Shelby Hunt (1983, 4) described dichotomies inherent in marketing science (e.g. positive/normative; theory/practice) and remarked that the dichotomy of practice and theory is a false one, because the explanation and prediction of marketing phenomena are practical concerns. From this follows that the study and generation of marketing theory are practical pursuits. 188

One famous statement on the practice/theory discussion originates from Kurt Lewin, who noted, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory” (see Lewin 1951). Czarniawska (1999, 6) notes that to him, it meant that theory was an idea that was to be tested using practice. Even though it sounds like a reasonable statement, it is not as simple

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as it appears. For instance, a researcher’s ambition to theorize the action plans of practitioners meets with the problem that most action is based on action theories that are not conscious, and are much more intuitive and incomplete than the academic ones. In that case, how does the researcher manage to study practitioners’ actions? Czarniawska (ibid. p. 7–8) separated (and united) action and reflection as follows: “Action is the subject of the researchers’ reflection; reflection offers to action the possibility of change and renewal”. Hence, the product of research in business is theory and reflection. The emancipation of practical life also requires abstract thinking and knowledge for its own sake, and, as Dewey (1910/1999) remarked, should be done by practitioners as well. The interlocutors in this study discussed practice as that which happens in business, not the practice of being a scholar, nor the practice of theorizing. When presenting the split between knowledge that is taught and research results, Czarniawska (2003) referred to the latter as representing a worldview in which theory, which is also one kind of a practice, comes after the practice that is its subject. Theory is thus a product of the reflection over that practice. Further, the goodness or validity of that theory is proved only in the next similar situation. If the reflection was insightful, it might be helpful in the next action. If this reasoning is correct, one may wonder how often the much–used textbooks in teaching are insightfully reflected upon. And if they are not, how useful are they for a student interested in business life practice? Nevertheless, in marketing it is exactly these monumental textbooks, such as Marketing Management by Philip Kotler, that hold the top positions in the list of the most–used textbooks in teaching. Students also seem to like them, and the most practice–oriented interlocutors emphasize their importance. As these same interviewees simultaneously criticize irrelevant research, which, one might argue, is exactly that which is represented in the textbook reality, one can be nothing but puzzled.

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The appearance of a theory, the contents of a good story… Czarniawska (2003) speculates about the persistence of the rationality myth. She refers to the art of representation as a central feature in our world of representations. Hence, the way in which they are represented makes the “proper” theories so appealing. Representation, as I understand it, refers to how I want things to appear to others. By now I am inclined to conclude that students want narrative knowledge in the package of normative theory. This means that they value stories by practitioners, containing knowledge—or, rather, representing knowing—that they can relate to, but preferably in the form of everything that is seen as academic and scientiﬁc. The marriage between knowledge and power (Bauman 1997) is still lucrative.

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As presented earlier, there were differences in the orientations of the academic marketers. However, the views of the interviewees were often closer to each other than the interlocutors themselves might believe. All of them valued science and being scientific, but those with more practical orientation saw the “scientificness” of the others as esoteric and irrelevant, aimed at gaining academic merits; whereas their own academic activities were seen as tools for acquiring useable knowledge for marketing practitioners. This appreciation of “being scientific” and criticism of irrelevance towards those who are too scientific is slightly ambivalent. It is seen, for instance, in the interview where the interlocutor first claims that academic publishing does not enhance the well–being of business life at all, and in almost the next sentence states that nobody in Finland has made it to the Journal of Marketing yet, and that the firms appreciate it if marketing scholars are at the top of the science. Hence, making it to the Journal of Marketing can, after all, have relevance in the business world. It seems that all interviewees, regardless of their orientation, want “scientific knowledge”, and, according to them, so do practitioners and students—they want text that is in the form of the logic of theory,

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which can then be criticized it for its uselessness or irrelevance. However, different people actually yearn for the same things: a halt to the increasing bureaucracy in order to be able to concentrate on research; more collaboration; more appreciation of values of scientiﬁc research and education in its broad meaning, as Bildung– even if such values are differently deﬁned.

Final reflections and future research Education and research are a large sector in the State’s budget, and according to the current general opinion, more funding should be allocated to research, because it is what helps maintain economic growth. The whole university sector has been subjected to dramatic changes over a short period without much follow–up of their consequences. Likewise, a yearning for more research funding belongs to a sphere of university life where the general discussion of the benefits of such investments is rather weak. Hence, I hope to have contributed to these discussions with my thesis, because I believe it shows how much confusion there is, and how different the ideas of good and effective academic work are. Of course, I only describe such issues within one discipline, but I argue that my descriptions are relevant in many other fields of social sciences as well. Students of education desire more practical examples exactly as students of marketing do. On the basis of my thesis, I cannot make straightforward claims as to whether research investments really enhance economic growth, but one issue seems to be clear: There is a lot of bureaucracy in universities, it has risen during the past years (as seen from the time of the interviews), and it makes doing research difficult, if not impossible, for some professors, and hence also lower their effectivity. Likewise, it seems unclear where the contributions of one’s research should go, to academic community or to business, and whether students are clients of products. It is equally unclear

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what the product of managerially run universities should be: research, education, number of exams, or what. Hence, in order to make full use of its investments in research, the State should perhaps either refrain from managerialism—or become managerial all the way. At the moment, as well as at the time of the interviews, it seems that universities live in no–mans–land; they have some of the economic pressures of a company, but not the liberties to properly inﬂuence to their economic success. At the time of the interviews, I felt as if I was talking to inhabitants of a small village, where everybody knows each other. Hence, I also wondered whether a general story of marketing could be seen in the interviews. The interview material contains stories of marketing and academia, embedded in personal experiences, and at some points their voices are almost unisonous. This happened especially when they were discussing academic work, but not so much when discussing, for instance, the relationship between academia and business, or the contents of marketing. I presume this is because academic life is often openly discussed in coffee rooms, seminars and conferences, whereas questions such as “what is marketing”, that took some interviewees by surprise, are more contemplated in private. Then, along the line with Gubrium and Holstein (2002), certain issues contain more of the public story, and some reﬂections are more individual.

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As I consider my choice of the interview method, I wonder how much I might have affected their narrations with either my questions, comments, or even the initial letter of request for an interview. Did some respondents discuss practice so much because I prompted them to do so? However, as the notion of marketing practice, or the relationship between theory and practice, were not mentioned in either the letter of request for an interview, or the initial interview question (“How did you become a marketing professor”), I believe that it was brought up by the interviewees themselves. As mentioned earlier, those whose emphasis was most on the practical use of marketing as science, seemed to consider the interview as a possibility to stress this point of view, whereas the more towards academia oriented interlocutors were rather neutral in their statements.

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The amount of “accidental” career moves was a surprise, even though I am inclined to think, in line with Charlotte Linde (1993), that it is also a common strategy in telling life histories. All factors on which one’s career decisions are based, might not be remembered when these events are accounted for. Also, even though happenstance is practically absent in Frost and Taylor’s (1996) book on academic careers, it is generally known that academic careers, especially within social sciences where graduates have a number of other career options, tend to start by “remaining” in the university after graduation. Talented, or nice, student is given a possibility to take on a short teaching assignment, followed by another, and so on. Such careers then lack the culturally accepted orderliness, and are accounted for as accidental. As, when writing this, ten years has passed since I embarked on the interviews, I would like to do a follow–up round of interviews to see what has changed. Of course, the new interviews could not be compared with the existing ones in a straightforward manner, as interviews are always situationally and temporally bound. The interlocutors would have this dissertation as background, and would know what I am interested in. Also, the interview situation and context would be different because I am more experienced, and hence the inequality between the interviewees and me would have somewhat diminished. In other words, the new interviews could be more focused and more like dialogues. I am also inspired by one research that I learned about at the ﬁnal stages of my dissertation project: “The Making of an Economist” by David Colander and Arjo Klamer (1987). They conducted surveys and interviews among students of economics in order to show sets of beliefs on topics such as “The importance of reading in other ﬁelds”, or “Perceptions of success”. I am tempted to copy their research approach, and implement it on Finnish marketing students from different schools. My other research plan for the next few years will have me continuing in the area of management studies. I am particularly interested in the types of issues practitioners discuss when trying to solve their organizational

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problems, and how (or if) they take academic knowledge into account in the process. I also want to examine the research that has been generated in Finnish management studies over the past 20 years. Neither of these goals is to be achieved through interviews, but with “naturally occurring data”: reviewing a selection of academic publications to unearth the academic research trends, and a selection of practitioners’ publications in order to examine any connections that may exist. If there is diffusion from academia to practitioners, as argued by a few interlocutors, it should be seen during that 20–year period. On the other hand, if the interlocutor who argued that all academic scriptures are useless and irrelevant is correct, I will see two quite separate worlds. This research journey began with an interest in what has happened along the way when marketing as a discipline developed and formed its present content. The emphasis was primarily on curriculum material, and focused on the topics covered in marketing education over the year. Interviews with marketing professors were designed to cover the gaps that the curriculum information or the ofﬁcial histories of various schools did not cover. The description of the contents of their curricula was shorter than I had originally planned. Yet the emergence and development of the discipline of marketing has, I hope, received adequate attention to provide enough background for the main topic of this thesis: what Finnish marketing professors themselves think of the discipline; its contents, development, and raison d’etre.

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Marketing was an interesting topic to study, but at the end of the research journey I am inclined to agree with the humble statement made by one of the interviewees. This quotation is taken from the end of the interview, when the interlocutor asked me if I had any more questions to ask him: E: I don’t have any further questions, unless you have something else to say about academic marketing. P: I have nothing to say… E: (laughs) P: …because I don’t know anything about it (laughs). E: (Laughs) Thank you! [For the interview] P: I think I understand something. But not so much (P9).

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EPILOGUE 29.8.2006 One of my interviewees happens to be in town for a seminar, and I have a chance to talk with him about marketing and how he perceives the current situation in his area. I enquired about his activities outside university work—not to snoop into his private life, but to verify my idea that most academically minded marketing professors have little contact with the external environment. After all, that is one of the points the more practically oriented actors were critical about. “Oh”, he sighs, “you can run in companies lecturing and training as much as you want to. There is no limit to the interview requests by media either”. “But”, he continues, “I have started to delegate the company lectures to younger ones, as they have more time and may also need the extra money”. I am perplexed and get a hollow feeling that my ﬁndings are totally irrelevant. Did I not just recently argue that marketing professors are seldom asked to lecture in companies, seldom asked their opinions on matters of business?

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He asks about my central findings, which I find difficult to explain, not because they would still be too obscure, but because I believe they are out–dated. Here is a person for whom they are, quite literally, yesterday’s news.

He tells me about his vision of how research should be done: in groups and projects, sharing empirical data, discussing and testing ideas with others, moving back and forth between companies and scholars, uniting in order to form a critical mass, combining Master’s and doctoral theses into larger entities in order to create some relevance for the research. Relevance, it seems, means societal impact. Anyway, the days of doing research alone and in isolation must be over. We must learn to think big. I test one of my ideas on him: Is it true that companies expect to obtain knowledge neatly packaged in the logic of theory? My point of view is that the marketing scholars do not dare to go companies in order to reflect and test their ideas, if the audience expects to hear “scientific truths”. He does not think so, but admits that on the other hand, the managers often have no idea how and what people do in universities. He also stresses that working with companies is not the same as consulting. You don’t go there with ready answers, but in order to communicate with the world in which your research is based. The image of marketing should be better, he thinks. Now, marketing students are the ones who want to study advertising and start working in advertising agencies. The brilliant researcher types do not seek their way to marketing. Furthermore, he wonders, why does a business school need to act in a manner similar to that of a faculty of humanities? There are not so many lucrative or well–paid jobs outside universities for humanities students, but if the brilliant students of business administration get better salaries and work conditions outside, why would they stay in the academia? We also need to get out under from the old idea that every school from Kainuu to Helsinki must be of the same form. I start to relax as I realize that my findings are not irrelevant or wrong, but that my text explains where marketing is coming from, rather than where it is going. I also realize that here is a professor of another generation, of another way of working, another culture and academic heritage than the majority of the interviewees.

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When I ask him his opinion about the different Finnish business schools and the ﬁeld in general, I get the feeling that we are in complete agreement. From his standpoint, the current marketing seems different than it does from the place where I stand (after all, I have been immersed in my books and interview material for the past few years). Yet we seem to share a vision of how marketing should be done. Towards the end of our discussion he says: “You need to keep on repeating that it will be just ﬁne, language constructs reality, doesn’t it? If I don’t believe it myself it will never happen”.

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Sammanfattning

AKADEMISK MARKNADSFÖRING I FINLAND: ATT LEVA MELLAN OLIKA FÖRVÄNTNINGAR Vad förväntas av en professor? Det Humboldtska forskningsuniversitet och bondförnuftet säger: forskning och undervisning. Men om professorn arbetar inom ett område som grundar sig på ett praktiskt kunnande, som marknadsföring? Då stiger en tredje part in i bilden: företagsvärlden och dess representanter med sina förväntningar. Studenterna, å sin sida, förväntar sig att lära sig praktiska färdigheter. Då det gäller undervisning är det inte så enkelt. Det nutida universitetet styrs av ekonomiska principer, baserade på målsättningar i form av antalet examina. Dessa mäter inte nödvändigtvis rätta faktorer, och tillväxten av professorernas administrativa uppgifter äter upp den tid som borde ges till forskningen.

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I min avhandling beskriver jag utvecklingen av marknadsföring som ett akademiskt ämne i Finland. Jag börjar med att se på det medeltida europeiska universitetet som organisation, och fortsätter sedan med att berätta om hur universiteten i Finland och speciellt den högre undervisningen inom företagsekonomin har utvecklats. Jag diskuterar också förhållande mellan universitet och yrkeshögskolor, och hur universitetens roll i samhället har förändrats genom deras förvandling till massutbildningsinrättningar. Jag beskriver även den akademiska marknadsföringens

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tillväxt i USA, eftersom dess finska motsvarighet har influerats av den. Förutom på litteratur, baserar jag mig i min forskning på narrativa intervjuer med 31 akademiker inom marknadsföring, varav majoriteten är professorer. Intervjuerna utfördes år 1997 och 1998 och reflekterar således ämnet marknadsföring vid den tidpunkten. Narrativa intervjuer betyder i det här sammanhanget att de intervjuade berättade fritt om sitt arbete och sin karriär som akademiker inom ämnet marknadsföring. Jag har också använt mig av studiehandböckerna från tre olika institutioner (Tammerfors universitet, Åbo och Helsingfors handelshögskolor) och på basen av dem beskriver jag vad som har undervisats i marknadsföring under tidsperioden 1952–1997. Därtill har jag som forskningsmaterial använt förorden i doktorsavhandlingar skrivna av nuvarande och tidigare professorerna inom marknadsföring. Genom dessa formas den finska akademiska marknadsföringens nätverk, eftersom skribenter i sina förord framför sitt tack till andra akademiker som har påverkat deras forskning på något vis—som handledare, kollegor eller opponenter. De kartor, som jag har konstruerat på basen av dessa förord, presenteras i kapitlet 4. Avhandlingens huvudkapitel (kapitel 5) baserar sig på Bruno Latours (2005) idéer om olika kontroverser som kan observeras i intervjuer. Jag beskriver 12 olika kontroverser, till exempel: Borde man ha bredd i sitt kunnande, eller vara en specialist? Borde man samarbeta, eller streta ensam? Är marknadsföring ett sätt att tänka eller är den en aktivitet? 200

I det sista kapitlet ser jag närmare på sådana kontroverser som på något vis är ”olösbara”, inom universiteten och i ämnet marknadsföring. Inom universiteten är frågorna följande: Kan professorer vara ”vanliga dödliga”, eller borde de vara supermänniskor; ligger undervisningen i centrum eller

på sidan om, och; är studenter produkter eller kunder. Inom marknadsföring är dessa frågor följande: Hurudan är vetenskapens förhållande till praktiken, och hur borde undervisning vara, allmänbildande eller basera sig på praktiska erfarenheter? På basen av intervjuerna konkretiserar jag i tre ﬁgurer hur man ser på förhållandena mellan det akademiska samfundet, studenten, forskaren/ professorn själv och företagsvärlden. Jag diskuterar också kring förhållandet mellan yrkeshögskolor och universitet. Gränsen mellan dessa är ibland svåra att dra, trots att det ofﬁciellt heter att yrkeshögskolorna baserar sin undervisning på praktiska färdigheter, och universiteten på de teoretiska. Men i praktiken, när de förstnämnda kliver upp på teoretiseringens stege, och de likt företag ledda universiteten konkurrerar om studenter som vill ha praktiska färdigheter, är dessa gränser ibland ganska suddiga. Studenter förefaller kräva mera föreläsningar av näringslivsrepresentanter, och kan först vara kritiska mot den teoretiska utbildning de fått. Men efter en viss arbetserfarenhet kan de börja uppskatta sin utbildning. Således är det farligt att tillmötesgå deras önskningar, och sänka den teoretiska nivån. ”I verkligheten är det hårt arbete, snabba beslut och tolerans som gäller. Sådana kunskaper får man inte genom obestämd höjning av praktiska cases”, som en professor påpekade. Mot slutet tar jag upp problematiken kring det likt företag ledda universitetet: Vad är produkten? Vem är kunden? Inför vem är professorerna ansvariga? Också frågan om sambandet mellan forskning och undervisning kommer upp. Är det så att undervisningspersonalen också borde forska, eller räcker det med att de läser sig in på forskning?

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Sammanfattningsvis kan jag konstatera, att professorer inom den akademiska marknadsföringen i allmänhet längtar efter ungefär samma saker: Att det skulle sättas stopp för den växande byråkratin för att de skall hinna forska, mer gemenskap och samarbete, och mer uppskattning av den vetenskapliga, allmänna utbildningen. Dessa förhoppningar konstrueras på olika sätt. Jag tar också ställning till den eventuella kontribution som min forskning ger. Det investeras mycket i forskning och utbildning, och många tycker att mera borde investeras. Det är nog viktigt med forskning och utbildning, men alltför okritiskt borde man inte uttrycka sig om investeringar i dem. Jag anser, att jag i min forskning visar, att det råder ovisshet inom det akademiska om mycket grundläggande faktorer: För vem arbetar vi? Vem borde dra nytta av vår forskning? Hur kan denna nytta bevisas? Är studenten en produkt eller en kund? Det likt företag ledda universitetet ligger på ett ingenmansland: Det har ekonomiska målsättningar på samma sätt som företagen, men inte någon frihet att påverka dem. Också min fortsätta forskning skall jag anknyta till dessa frågor. Jag har planerat att diskutera med mina intervjuade på nytt för att se vad som har förändrats under de senaste tio år.

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AKATEEMINEN MARKKINOINTI SUOMESSA: ELÄMÄÄ ERILAISTEN ODOTUKSIEN KESKELLÄ Mitä professorilta odotetaan? Maalaisjärki—ja Humboldtilaisen tutkimusyliopiston periaate—sanoo, että opetusta ja tutkimusta. Vaan entä jos professori onkin alalla, joka pohjautuu käytännönläheiseen toimintaan, kuten markkinointiin? Tällöin opetuksen ja tutkimuksen kuvioon liittyy mukaan kolmaskin osapuoli; liike–elämä ja sen edustajat omine odotuksineen. Opiskelijat puolestaan odottavat oppivansa käytännön taitoja, ja kuulevansa liike–elämässä menestyneiden kokemusperäisiä luentoja. Myöskään opetuksen ja tutkimuksen osalta asiat eivät välttämättä ole yksinkertaisia. Liiketalouden periaattein johdetun nyky–yliopiston tutkintotavoitteisiin perustuvat tehokkuusmittarit eivät aina mittaa laadun ja kehityksen kannalta oikeita asioita, ja jatkuva hallinnoinnin lisääntyminen syö professorien tutkimukseen käyttämää aikaa. Kuvaan väitöskirjassani markkinoinnin oppiaineen kehityksen Suomessa aloittaen kertomuksen eurooppalaisen yliopistolaitoksen synnystä ja kehityksestä. Kerron myös, miten yliopistolaitos ja korkeampi opetus kaupan alalla ovat alkaneet Suomessa, ja mitä nykyään korkeamman koulutuksen saralla Suomessa tapahtuu—lähinnä yliopistojen ja ammat-

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tikorkeakoulujen välistä suhdetta sekä yliopiston yhteiskunnallisen roolin muuttumista sen massoittumisen kautta. Kuvailen sitten markkinoinnin oppiaineen kehityksen ensin USA:ssa, sitten Suomessa. USA:n kehitys on oleellinen suomalaisen markkinoinnin ymmärtämiselle, sillä täällä saatiin Yhdysvalloista paljon vaikutteita aina oppiaineen alkuvuosista 1950– luvulta eteenpäin. Tutkimus perustuu kirjallisuuden lisäksi 31 suomalaisen markkinoinnin professorin haastatteluihin. Ne tehtiin vuosina 1997 ja 1998, joten työni kuvailee nimenomaan tätä ajanjaksoa. Haastattelut olivat tyypiltään narratiivisia; haastateltavat kertoivat tarinansa työstään markkinoinnin parissa. Toinen aineistokokonaisuus perustuu kolmen eri kauppakorkeakoulun ja yliopiston (Tampereen yliopisto, Helsingin kauppakorkeakoulu ja Turun kauppakorkeakoulu) markkinoinnin oppiaineen opinto–oppaisiin. Näiden perusteella kuvailen, mitä markkinoinnin alalla ajanjaksolla 1952– 1997 on opetettu. Lisäksi hyödynnän Suomessa markkinoinnin professoreina olleiden ja olevien, ennen vuotta 1998 väitelleiden, omien väitöskirjojen kiitoksia. Näistä ilmenee, ketkä ko. henkilöön ovat tavalla tai toisella (esim. ohjaajana, kollegana tai vastaväittäjänä) vaikuttaneet, ja laadin niiden perusteella kartat, joissa näkyvät sekä sukupolvien vaikutukset toisiinsa, että eri koulujen muodostamat keskittymät, ja niiden vaikutuksen toisiinsa. Kartat esitetään luvussa 4.

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Tutkimuksen pääluku (5. kappale) perustuu Bruno Latourin (2005) ajatuksia mukaellen haastatteluista ilmenevien, akateemiseen työhön ja erityisesti markkinointiin sisältyvien ristiriitojen kuvailuun: Ollako vain professori, vai pitääkö olla superihminen? Ollako yleismiesjantunen, vaiko kapeaan osaamiseen erikoistunut spesialisti? Onko opetus toiminnan keskipiste, vaiko vain sen marginaalissa? Tehdäkö yhteistyötä vaiko

puurtaako yksin? Onko markkinointi toimintaa, vaiko ajattelutapa? Kuvailen yhteensä 12 tällaista ristiriitaa, joista yllä muutama esimerkki. Työni johtopäätösluvussa otan kantaa niihin ristiriitoihin, jotka ovat jollakin lailla ”ratkaisemattomia”. Yliopiston tasolla näitä ovat kysymykset siitä, ovatko professorit enää ihmisiä, vai odotetaanko heiltä supervoimia; onko opetus keskiössä vai laidoilla; sekä ovatko opiskelijat tuotteita vai asiakkaita. Markkinoinnin oppiaineen tasolla näitä ovat puolestaan kysymykset tieteen suhteesta käytäntöön, sekä opetuksen sisältö: yleissivistystä vaiko käytännön taitoja? Haastatteluihin perustuen havainnollistan piirroksin kolme erilaista tapaa nähdä akateemisen yhteisön, opiskelijan, professorin/tutkijan itsensä, ja yritysmaailman väliset suhteet: Käytännön ymmärtämistä painottava näkemys, ensisijaisesti akateemista yhteisöä työllään kontribuoivien näkemys, sekä eräänlainen ideaalikuva—synteesi näistä molemmista. Pohdin myös ammattikorkeakoulujen ja yliopistojen välistä suhdetta. Markkinoinnin kaltaisella alalla rajoja on välillä vaikeaa vetää—huolimatta siitä, että julkilausuttuna tämä ero on selkeä: Ammattikorkeakoulujen tulisi keskittyä käytännön taitoihin ja yliopistojen teoreettisempaan opetukseen. Kun kuitenkin edellä mainitut jatkuvasti kiipeävät teoreettisuuden tikapuita ylöspäin, mm. tarjoamalla jatkotutkintoja, ja yliopistot tehokkuuden nimissä kilpailevat käytännönläheisyyttä kaipaavista opiskelijoista, alkavat nämä kaksi lähentyä toisiaan. 205

Haastattelujen perusteella vaikuttaa siltä, että opiskelijat ovat tyytyväisimpiä käytännön kokemusta omaavien luentoihin, ja saattavat suhtautua kriittisesti saamansa opetuksen teoreettisuuteen, kunnes työkoke-

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muksen karttuessa ymmärtävät myös sen arvon. Niinpä opiskelijoiden miellyttämiseen viihdyttävillä luennoilla ja kevyillä aiheilla ei pitäisi lähteä: Todellisuus on kovaa työtä; nopeita päätöksiä ja epävarmuuden sietämistä. Sellaisia kykyjä ei saavuteta ”käytännön keissien epämääräisellä lisäämisellä”, kuten yksi haastateltava totesi. Lopuksi pohdin vielä tavoitejohdetun yliopiston ongelmatiikkaa seuraavien kysymyksien ympärillä: Mikä on tuote? Kuka on asiakas? Kenelle professorit ovat työstään vastuussa? Kuvailen myös opetuksen ja tutkimuksen suhdetta. Tämä sitten Humboldtin ajoista yhteen kuulunut pari alkaa hajota projektitutkijoiden ansiosta—kaikki yliopistotutkijat eivät välttämättä enää opeta. Kuten Czarniawska (2003) toteaa, yliopiston opettajan ei välttämättä pidäkään itse tutkia, vaan lukea tutkimuksia. Akateemisuuteen liittyy representaation, ilmaisutavan, voima. Opiskelijat kaipaavat käytännön (narratiivista) tietoa, mutta mieluiten pakattuna normatiivisen tieteen representaatioon. Myös käytännönläheisyyttä korostavat professorit kritisoivat herkästi kollegoitaan liiasta tieteellisyydestä, mutta toteavat myös että kukaan ei Suomesta vielä ole päässyt Journal of Marketingiin. Siis jotain relevanssia parjatuilla akateemisilla journaaleilla kuitenkin on, ja jokin arvo ”oikeana” pidetyn tieteen toimintamalleilla.

menestyksen kannalta oleellisena tekijänä. Tutkimus toki on yleisesti ottaen tärkeää, mutta täysin kritiikittä ei siihenkään voi suhtautua. Työni osoittaa, että yliopistomaailmassa vallitsee epätietoisuus monista oleellisista asioista: Ketä varten teemme työtä? Kenen tutkimuksesta pitäisi hyötyä? Millä tämä hyöty voidaan osoittaa? Onko opiskelija tuote vai asiakas? Entä valtio? Kenelle olemme työstämme vastuussa? Managerialistisesti johdettu nyky–yliopisto sijaitsee eräänlaisella ei–kenenkään maalla: Sillä on taloudellisia tavoitteita, mutta ei vapauksia vaikuttaa niihin toivomallaan tavalla. Jatkotutkimukseni tulee liittymään näihin kysymyksiin. Olen myös suunnitellut tekeväni uuden haastattelukierroksen professorien parissa nähdäkseni, mitä kymmenessä vuodessa on muuttunut.

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Yhteenvetona voi todeta, että markkinoinnin professorit kaipaavat suunnilleen samoja asioita: Byrokratian paisumisen pysäyttämistä jotta he ehtisivät keskittyä tutkimukseen, enemmän yhteisöllisyyttä ja yhteistyötä, ja arvostusta tieteellistä työtä ja yleissivistävää koulutusta kohtaan, vaikkakin nämä arvot usein määritellään eri tavoin. 206

207

Lopuksi otan kantaa väitöskirjani antiin, sen kontribuutioon. Tutkimukseen käytetään ja investoidaan Suomessa suuria summia, ja ns. tutkimus– ja kehitysinvestointien osuutta bruttokansantuotteesta pidetään

TIIVISTELMÄ

* * *

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