This major reference collection, Critical Marketing Studies, directs its attention to highlighting how marketing as academic discipline and practical endeavour have developed and continue to change. As a practical exercise, marketing is concerned with meeting and satisfying customer needs, provided, that is, such an exercise would benefit the organisation and its stakeholders. Much more than that, marketing has become a highly influential activity in social, political and economic arenas. Consequently, it is now an appropriate time to call attention to marketing theory and practice, revealing those background assumptions that pervade the discipline and the effects of marketing as a societal practice. Volume I provides the basis from which more critical marketing studies can be introduced and focuses on the ′broadening of marketing′ from its initial focus on business and market exchange, towards the promotion of social and societal wellbeing. Volume II offers contemporary criticism of marketing and consumption, specifically how marketing and advertising allegedly contribute to the production and stimulation of consumer needs, wants and desires. Volume III takes the concerns and issues outlined in the previous two volumes one step further, highlighting how marketing practice and the ′political economy of social choice′ are shaped at levels beyond the control of individual actors.
