To what extent is marketing a hindrance or help to democracy in the Essay

To what extent is marketing a hindrance or help to democracy in the 21st century - Essay Example How can we explain the effects of marketing in a democratic political system? This question cannot be addressed without establishing marketing as a concept and its relationship with the dynamic social, technological and economic landscape of the 21st century. The terms, mass-market, consumer culture, commodification, among others, characterize the 21st century societies. This underscored how marketing dominates the public sphere with the advent of technology. Here, the masses are either homogenized and heterogenised by marketing through technologies and media platforms that could deliver messages to a whole population simultaneously and real time. The consumer seduction has been so successful that economic models such as Fordism was able to develop expansionist strategies wherein mass markets have worked against the perpetuation of material class distinctions as economies of scale expanded the size and composition of the consuming population. (Dunn 1998: 119) Schumpeter (1976) talked about this agglomeration of people as some phenomenon that deprives individuals from their capacity to reflect rationally, arguing that when gathered together, people are easily worked into a state of excitement in which primitive impulses, infantilisms and criminal propensities’ replace moral restraints and civilised modes of thinking. (pp. 257) In relating this phenomenon to democracy and politics, we have the fact that leaders compete for votes in the same way that business people compete for customers. Subsequent application of economic theory to politics reached similar, if not identical, conclusions. John Corner and Dick Pels (2003), for instance, drew attention to the impact of imperfect information on political behaviour in a democracy, to quote: In a situation where views of voters are not immediately transparent to parties and party policy is unclear to voters, each has to incur costs in finding out information. Such costs have to be weighed against the benefits of the

Business Strategy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Business Strategy - Essay Example The vast existing literature based on strategic management reflects both these perspectives from the firm’s point of view. The traditional economic theories embrace the firm’s resource position while conceptualizing strategies to be adopted by the firm (Andrews, 1971). On the other hand, a majority of the formal tools used in economics nowadays emphasize upon the product-market facet of a firm. Although these are two different perspectives of studying a firm’s resource position and its market activities, these are both focused on the role of resources used by the firm in determining its strategic decisions. Hence, one might expect to yield the same insight on following either of these two perspectives of the resource based view of a corporate organization. However, these insights might arrive with differing levels of ease, depending on which perspective the analyst has chosen. Literature review Economists traditionally consider economic units (firms) in terms of the resource endowments each firm has. These resource endowments are typically confined to three factors, namely, land, labour and capital. Authors that espouse the resource based perspective of the firm accredit Edith Tilton Penrose for laying the building blocks of this theory (Rugman and Verbeke, 2002). Penrose (1959) has made direct contributions to develop the modern view of resource based management. She has as well indirectly influenced the proposition by contributing further into these theories; the theory of creating competitive advantage, theory of sustaining the competitive advantage for the firm and the relationship between economic rents and competitive advantage (Penrose, 1959). There are debates regarding the work by Penrose. Rugman and Verbeke (2002) have put forth the argument that Penrose’s work was not aimed at providing strategy prescriptions for the creation of a sustainable flow of rents. The ideas put forth by Penrose have been used by several scholars as the foundation for models depicting the relationship between rents and competitive advantage of firms and they emphasise that this relationship plays a significant role in the achievement of sustainable competitive advantage. However, the argument against the espousing of the resource-based view (RBV) of Penrose by these scholars, is that, she had given a rigorous description of the growth process of firms in her works and did not intend to build up a strategy prescription for firms (Rugman and Verbeke, 2002). Till 1984, when Wernerfelt presented his work ‘A resource-based view of the Firm’ this perspective of looking at firms did not become well accustomed with economists and analysts. While other papers did not yet receive much formal attention, the paper by Penrose (1959) had received wide acclamation from contemporary and modern economists. According to Wernerfelt (1984), some of the resources used in firms have certain properties that are unpleasant and unhelpfu l for modelling purposes. Due to this reason economists might not have considered these resources as a good measure for strategizing competitive advantage of firms’. While products of a firm are easy to identify and the characteristics of their production and sales can be categorised and measured easily, a firm’