Assessing and building upon Wroe Alderson's intellectual legacy

Citation

Shapiro, S.J. and Svensson, G. (2007), "Assessing and building upon Wroe Alderson's intellectual legacy", European Business Review, Vol. 19 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2007.05419faa.001

Assessing and building upon Wroe Alderson's intellectual legacy

About the Guest Editors

Stanley J. Shapiro received his MBA and PhD degrees from the Wharton School. He has taught marketing at Wharton, McGill University and Simon Fraser University. Dr Shapiro has authored 50 academic papers, edited 13 books or monographs and, over 25 years, Canadianized 10 successive editions of Basic Marketing, He is a Former Editor of the Journal of Macromarketing, a Past Governor and Distinguished Fellow of the Academy of Marketing Science and was an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Marketing for over 30 years. He currently serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Macromarketing, the Journal of Global Marketing, the European Business Review and the Journal of Business Ethics.

Göran SvenssonProfessor at Oslo School of Management in Norway. He holds a PhD at the School of Economics and Commercial Law, Göteborg University, Sweden. He is the Editor of European Business Review (Emerald) and the Regional Editor for Europe of Management Decision (Emerald). During the 1980s, he was an entrepreneur in South America. He has published in areas such as Business Ethics, Business Logistics, Supply Chain Management, Services Marketing, Industrial Marketing, Leadership, Quality Management, Human Resource Management, Public Sector Management, Higher Education, History of Management/Marketing, Academic Publishing/Journals and General Management.

Assessing and building upon Wroe Alderson's intellectual legacy

“An important legacy volume, A Twenty-First Century Guide to Aldersonian Marketing Thought, has very recently been published by Springer. That book – edited by Ben Wooliscroft, Robert D. Tamilia, and Stanley J. Shapiro – is designed to familiarize a new generation of marketing scholars with the life, the writings and the intellectual impact of Wroe Alderson, unquestionably the most influential marketing thinker of the mid-twentieth century. Half of the material in that volume was written by Alderson and the other half was written about him. However, this publication, it is hoped and expected, will mark not an end but rather merely a beginning: the beginning of renewed twenty-first century interest in the nature, the scope and the magnitude of Alderson's original contributions to marketing theory and thought.” With the above paragraph the European Business Review opened its call for papers for a special issue that would further explore Wroe's Alderson's intellectual legacy. Fortunately, there were scholars prepared to answer that call. Brief mention of the focus of each paper in this introduction provides an overview of what is to be found in the pages that follow.

The first contribution, by Shaw, Lazer and Pirog, present reasons why Wroe Alderson should be considered the Father of Modern Marketing. “Alderson's contributions to the marketing discipline can be organized into three broad categories, which collectively produced a tectonic shift in academic thinking about marketing: (1) from distribution (macro) to marketing management (micro); (2) from economics to the behavioral sciences; (3) and from description and classification to explanation and theory building. These epic transformations have become so embodied in the marketing literature that they are now taken for granted, but they are so significant they represent a paradigm shift in marketing thought.”

The next paper, by Terry Beckman, uses the metaphor of “the Wroe River” to provide a new way of thinking about Alderson and his intellectual impact. “Alderson could be described as `the river of marketing theory'. This man carved a course through which marketing theory would develop, drawing in streams of research from other researchers and other disciplines, eroding and shaping the assumptions of scholarly research in marketing, carving out an indelible path on the landscape of marketing.” The analogy of a Wroe River, a river flowing with irresistible force, is one that will seem especially appropriate to those who worked with or even knew Alderson.

Robert D. Tamilia's paper, “Placing Wroe Alderson's contribution to buyer behavior in historical perspective” does exactly what its title suggests. Tamilia pays particular attention to Alderson's conceptualization of the consumer as an information processor and problem solver in the behavioral process of first buying and then consuming. Alderson's thinking as regards consumer rationality, consumption behavior, functionalism and the consumer, the household as organized behavior system, these are but some of the buyer behavior topics that Tamilia puts into historical context.

The paper's mentioned above present assessments of Alderson's intellectual impact. They also, to a greater or lesser degree, put Alderson's work into historical perspective. In contrast, the last two refereed papers demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Aldersonian thought, especially as regards satisfying, as compared to creating, consumer demand. Kendall Goodrich's paper, “An Aldersonian explanation of mass customization,” first discusses four key Aldersonian concepts: heterogeneous markets; transvections; the principle of postponement; and routinized transactions. These concepts are then reexamined in light of the impact of the computer and internet revolutions as reflected in the practices of companies such as Dell and Cisco. These four bulwarks of Aldersonian thought are shown to have aged well. Their use in a contemporary context also leads the author to conclude that the traditional classification of consumer goods must be expanded to include a new category, that of “mass customized goods.”

The Hulthen paper, “Economizing in differentiated distribution networks: a transvection approach” is described by its author as one that “brings forward some `old' Aldersonian concepts in a modern setting and shows how these concepts can be used to understand economizing in differentiated distribution networks.” By using a transvection approach, three key concepts related to the economizing process, crossing points, sorting, and uniformity, can be identified. Hulthen's is the kind of theoretical paper, one with obvious practical applications, that Alderson would have been delighted to have had presented at his marketing theory seminars.

Two senior scholars were also invited to submit commentaries to this special issue. John Fraedrichs, the author of two previous journal articles on Alderson, was asked to provide any additional observations he cared to make. Dr Fraedrichs was also encouraged to update tables, first published in 1995, that show how frequently and in what disciplines Alderson is still found cited in the social science citation index. These tables, now covering the most recent 23 years, demonstrate that Alderson continues to be recognized by many from later generations as a relevant source. That many scholars today borrow from him without being aware of the fact, and thus fail to cite Alderson, remains another matter altogether.

This special issue closes with George Fisk's review of A Twenty-First Century Guide to Aldersonian Marketing Thought. Dr Fisk was not only asked by the editors to write such a review. He was also invited to present his own views as to Wroe Alderson's contemporary relevance. We believe that readers will share the Editors' view that, in choosing to focus on Alderson's multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge transfer activities, Dr Fisk has indeed made a unique contribution.

Fisk also notes that the book he reviewed contains no statement by Alderson on business or consumer responsibility or on the need for the stewardship of resources in contemporary marketing campaigns. Also lacking, Fisk regrets, is any effort by the twenty-first century marketing theorists who contributed to this publication to apply Alderson's concepts to contemporary issues of social equity, environmental sustainability and business responsibility. In light of Fisk's position, that none of the contributors to this special issue explored such issues is also worth noting. Hopefully, Dr Fisk's concern will encourage the preparation and publication of articles exploring, to the extent that these exist, the macromarketing-related dimensions of Alderson's many contributions.

This special issue provides readers both with a feel for Aldersonian thought and an appreciation of both the historical and contemporary relevance of that thought. Both those whose “remembrance of things past” has been reawakened and young scholars with no previous first hand exposure to Alderson will hopefully find this issue a rewarding intellectual experience. Wooliscroft et al. claimed Alderson was “unquestionably the most influential thinker of the mid-twentieth century”. A number of the reviewers of that publication have subsequently argued that “mid” should have not appeared in the preceding quotation. Wroe Alderson, close to 50 years after his death, remains a source of renewable intellectual energy, a source that should be used with increasing frequency.

Keep an eye out for other special issues that will appear in the European Business Review. Such issues forthcoming in 2008 include “views from global thought leaders III,” academic publishing and academic journals II, “business schools or schools for scholars” and “marketing retrospective.”

Welcome to the thought-provoking and challenging world of European Business Review!

Stanley J. Shapiro and Göran SvenssonGuest Editors