Exploring Marketing’s Relationship to Society

William L. Wilkie is Nathe Professor of Marketing, University of Notre Dame (e-mail: [email protected]). How Did This Issue Come About? For much of my career, I have been intrigued with trying to comprehend what the field of marketing is actually about (and what it might be about, what it could be about, what it should be about, and so forth). In recent years, I have joined with my colleague Elizabeth Moore to pursue these questions in a structured manner, and I have come across many interesting findings and ideas. Some are reported in the article, “Marketing’s Contributions to Society,” which appeared in the special issue of Journal of Marketing (Wilkie and Moore 1999). Our plan had been to provide a brief, historical overview of the history of marketing thought as an introduction to that article, but when the section ballooned to 30 pages, we decided to pull it out entirely, revamp and extend its coverage, and develop it as a separate paper. That article, titled “Scholarly Research in Marketing: Exploring the ‘4 Eras’ of Thought Development,” appeared in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing about a year ago (Wilkie and Moore 2003). While the paper was going through the review process, Joel Cohen, editor of Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, asked whether I would be interested in pursuing some of the issues that Elizabeth and I were raising in these papers, specifically for me to serve as a special issue editor and encourage the sort of projects we were saying would be useful. I agreed, and this is the result, with which I am very pleased.