The Integration of Marketing Concepts in Strategic-Management Courses: An Empirical Analysis

摘要

In the past decade, there has been much discussion about the usefulness of business education (Terjesen and Politis, 2015; Ungaretti et al., 2015; Jarzabkowski and Kaplan, 2015). Although widely expected to improve the practice of business, business courses often fall short in fulfilling their role of providing students with marketable skills (Ghoshal, 2005; Mintzberg, 2004). One factor contributing to this issue is that many business courses direct (or bias) students to single disciplinary solutions. For example, students in marketing courses generally solve marketing problems without much or any regard to finance, management, accounting, or management information systems considerations (Johnson and Werner, 1975). Although the capstone strategic-management course is inherently or supposedly interdisciplinary, we examine the extent that marketing is integrated in that course (Terjesen and Politis, 2015). Specifically, this paper reveals 1) particular topics in marketing that are deemed to be most important in strategic planning or case analysis, and 2) the extent of coverage of these particular marketing topics in strategic-management textbooks. Implications for business pedagogy, curricula, theory, assurance of learning, and research are also discussed.