Gaining access to agency and structure in industrial marketing theory: a critical pluralist approach

This paper is concerned with gaining greater insight into the interplay between agency and structure in industrial marketing scholarship. The paper’s intent is to embed Midgley’s notion of critical pluralism within this endeavour. The paper commends the movement towards increased deployment of critical realism, but cautions against the dangers of creating further atomism in marketing theory by creating another paradigm of thought with crenellated boundaries, impervious to outside influence. The paper advances a case for critical pluralism within industrial marketing scholarship and offers a three dimensional, theoretical, methodical and methodological framework to aid such critical pluralism. The discussion demonstrates how such critical pluralism can be deployed to gain revelatory insight into agency and structure using a number of ‘integrative’ theoretical perspectives.