In marketing, it’s either you have it or you don’t : a study of knowledge and knowers legitimated in the marketing diploma curriculum in South Africa
Authors:   , Ncube Kevin 
Published: April 2021

This study was undertaken in the South African higher education system in which the differentiation of institutions still reflects racial inequalities from the country’s history of colonial apartheid. As an educator in an institutional type referred to as Universities of Technology, I had become increasingly concerned about who succeeds, how they succeed, who fails, and who drops out. The South Africa education system broadly suffers from low student retention and high drop out with lower success rates mostly affecting Black students. By the end of apartheid in 1994, Black students had been entering Technikons en masse and were the dominant student group in these institutions which changed designation to Universities of Technology in 2005. Technikons offered programmes with a stronger technological and vocational orientation focusing on qualifications directly linked to the job market. They did not offer postgraduate programmes and today, Universities of Technology still produce little research. These institutions also battle with a far lower throughput rate than Traditional Universities and a higher graduate unemployment rate. This has led to a call for better theorised accounts of applied knowledge to replace unhelpful common-sense understandings. There was thus a call in the literature for studies, such as this one, that focused on the nature of knowledge in a diploma curriculum. Furthermore, the field of Marketing is under-researched. The field of Marketing has been characterised as having a weak theoretical foundation and as appropriating knowledge from other fields without growth of the field per se. In Marketing, importance is placed on the possession of a broad spectrum of general knowledge, rather than specialised accounts of the field. The study sought to examine the following research questions: 1) What kind of knowledge is privileged in the Marketing diploma? 2) How does the positioning of actors in the field of Marketing education impact on the choice and structure of knowledge privileged in the curriculum? The study was undertaken mainly through the use of interviews to explore academics’ perspectives on what is valued in the Marketing curriculum. Thirty-one academics from 11 institutions participated in the study. I also analysed course guides and other documentation related to the curriculum. The study analysed the organising of knowledge in the Marketing curriculum. To do this, the study drew on Legitimation Code Theory and in particular the tools of Specialisation and Semantics. These tools allowed the analysis of data to establish the basis on which it is specialised from other fields and the extent to which the field is contextually or conceptually coherent. The data demonstrated that academics who lecture in Marketing entered Marketing education from a diverse range of disciplines. The data also confirmed, in line with the literature, that the field of Marketing draws from multiple disciplines and fields for the purposes of serving the world of work. In Bernsteinian terms the nature of the Marketing curriculum is identified as a ‘region’. However, the data also demonstrated that the field of Marketing serves a heterogenous world of work characterised by constant changes which do not seem to allow a stable development of the field. The field of Marketing was thus portrayed as a region tending towards a generic, raising questions about the reliability of its knowledge base. The nature of generics often leads to an openness which is associated with instability, a weaker autonomy, and an inability to differentiate the field from others with further implications that knowledge in the curriculum is likely to be unsettled. One of the key findings was that while there was significant focus on knowledge, this was not the main basis on which success is achieved. Despite the ample evidence of knowledge in the Marketing curriculum, there was little agreement as to what constituted that knowledge, the actual nature of that knowledge was not settled, broadly agreed upon, nor particularly complex, drawing as it did on ‘everyday’ understandings of the world. The data revealed that there was little evidence that the knowledge was particularly specialised nor that it allowed for cumulative acquisition of ‘powerful knowledge’. Rather, the knowledges in the field of Marketing were characterised by a horizontal knowledge structure consisting of a set of languages acquired separately. The knowledges were based on different and sometimes even contradictory assumptions and thus presented few opportunities to integrate previous theories to build a more powerful knowledge structure. The knowledges tended to be context specific as opposed to being abstract or conceptual. There are social justice implications for fields in which the acquirer is only afforded context specific knowledges and as such has to acquire an endless series of low-level knowledges. They are not given access to powerful knowledge characterised by induction into a system of meaning which enables a more meaningful engagement with the complex world and thinking the not yet thought. In such instances, the education arguably does not provide access to the kind of specialised knowledge which allows for powerful meaning making in the world. The study calls for a strengthening of the epistemic spine of the Marketing diploma to provide access to more abstract, principled knowledge. A major finding was that most of the lecturers’ responses focused on the need for being a particular kind of knower to be successful in Marketing. The kind of person valued in Marketing was portrayed as possessing a particular personality and natural talent which were rarely seen as dependent on the knowledge acquired during the diploma, but rather on the dispositions that students brought. The respondents also mostly raised concerns that most of the students enrolled in Marketing did not to have the requisite ‘Marketing personalities’. Students were expected to be from a particular social class intimated through reference to their backgrounds, the schools they went to, their access to technologies, and the geographical regions they came from. They were expected to bring a particular language competency. Social class and language were arguably also used as coded reference to racial category, and this was more explicitly indicated by some respondents. The dominance of the knower in the data revealed that in Marketing, “you either have it or you don’t” indicating a strong view that Marketers are born with the necessary inherent characteristics of “confidence and people-skills” or belong to the social group that develops them. The implications were that if you do not have it, there is nothing one can do to get . This particular finding raises serious social justice issues on access and success in Marketing. If there is nothing that can be done to develop these characteristics, allowing such people into Marketing is setting them up for failure. On the other hand, denying access based on birth and social grouping raises concerns of the justice in the societies we live in. The study calls for an explicit engagement with the assumptions about the knower’s dispositions. While it was consistently evident that such dispositions were key to the specialisation of the field, the assumption that students either had these dispositions or lacked them is a social injustice and raises a number of unanswerable and painful questions given the racially differentiated success rates. The study concludes by calling for academics to explicitly curriculate for the target dispositions so that students are exposed to the value of these dispositions and given opportunities to engage with them.