Reading Wroe: on the biopoetics of Alderson’s functionalism

Wroe Alderson (1898–1965) is generally considered to be one of the giants of post-war marketing scholarship, a titanic thinker who did much to legitimize the study of marketing theory and thought. He is also widely regarded as someone who was incapable of communicating his ideas cogently. As Holbrook (2001: 37) unequivocally observes, ‘here was a writer who could not express himself clearly to save his soul’. The present article seeks to challenge this regrettable scholarly stereotype by showing that Alderson was a gifted literary stylist whose reputation as a prodigious academician is partly attributable to his allegedly ‘unreadable’ writing. It utilizes the tools and techniques of biopoetics, an emerging school of literary criticism, to provide a reflexive reading of Wroe’s published works. That is to say, it adopts a functionalist approach to functionalism by applying Alderson’s concepts to himself.