Marketing Theory: Foundations, Controversy, Strategy, Resource-Advantage Theory

摘要

To date, Shelby D. Hunt has written five versions of Marketing Theory, and it is this fifth version that I am reviewing here. Ser-endipitously perhaps, it has been my pleasure to have used, in one way or another, all four of the previous volumes. As a first semester doctoral student, I was introduced to the first version or "little green book" as Shelby refers to it. This was my introduction to marketing theory, and it helped me immensely to understand how to conduct scientific research. I have used the succeeding three editions to regularly teach a marketing theory class to PhD students in Marketing and other disciplines over the succeeding 25 years. Each of these versions has had its unique strengths while maintaining the basic philosophy of science tenets that were in the original version. The second version or "big red book," as Shelby calls it, added a number of complementary outside readings to the text. The third edition or "blue book" added several new chapters offering an historical perspective of various philosophies of science including various forms of relativism. The fourth version was really two separate texts, one (Foundations) containing the philosophy of science chapters that traced their origins back to the "little green book" and the other (Controversy) that covered many of the traditional debates concerning various philosophical approaches to science. While containing almost too much material to cover in a single semester, I routinely assigned, to the chagrin of students, the bulk of the chapters from each book for my marketing theory seminar.