Knowledge that Transforms

This section is based on a selection of article abstracts from a comprehensive business literature database. Marketing-related abstracts from over 125 journals (both academic and trade) are reviewed by JM staff. Descriptors for each entry are assigned by JM staff. Each issue of this section represents three months of entries into the database. M wishes to thank UMI for use of the ABI/INFORM business database. Each entry has an identifying number. Cross-references appear immediately under each subject heading. The following article abstracts are available on-line from the ABI/INFORM database, which is published and copyrighted by UMI. For additional information about access to the database or about obtaining photocopies of the articles abstracted here, please call (800) 626-2823 or write to UMI, 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, Ml 48106. Each article costs $10.75. Customers with deposit accounts of $200 or more pay $8.75 per article.

The author summarizes 11 hypotheses from agency theory, transaction cost analysis, and Ouchi's theoretical approach about the impact of environmental, company, and salesperson characteristics on the design of sales force control systems (outcome- versus behavior-based) and tests them on a data set of 270 German sales organizations. Many of the hypotheses receive empirical support. Sales force size, the only construct for which the author derives two opposing hypotheses, is related negatively to the use of behavior-based control in sales forces. Thus, the hypothesis derived from Ouchi's approach is supported, whereas the contradictory hypothesis from transaction cost analysis is rejected.

Canadian-born Herbert Marshall once was described as a contemporary Aristotle and was even declared a national resource in Canada. In 1967, everyone, it seemed, wanted to speak to them during the Year of McLuhan (Gordon 1997, p. 226). Yet, how much do marketing specialists know of his work today? Marshall McLuhan's considerable body of work-a real intellectual treasure-sadly is hidden from most marketing scholars. The purpose of this review is to help marketing scholars rediscover McLuhan. Why review McLuhan's work at this late date? Simple; many of his ideas ring more true today than they did when he first wrote them. It also may come as something of a surprise that had so much to say about marketing and that his work challenges many areas of received marketing wisdom. The once-enormously popular English professor pictured himself as a blind man tapping his cane in all directions to discover the nature of the media environment. He wanted everyone who would listen to understand that the new electronic media had radically altered the way people think, feel, and act. Above all, wanted people to understand that electronic media had changed the world forever. After lying largely dormant for almost 30 years, is being brought back into intellectual currency because he studied the very subjects that so interest educators, managers, technologists, and other members of society today. In the wake of globalization, postmodernism, deconstructionism, and other intellectual movements, no longer seems as eccentric as he once did (Benedetti and

In my early years, I was a practical marketing and advertising research analyst. During this time, Lyndon O. Brown's (1937) Market Research and Analysis taught me the power of survey research in coordinating supply to demand. From Brown, I learned how to help managers make marketing decisions on the basis of what the market wanted. Brown's book was also instrumental in making marketing research courses commonplace in business school curricula. Related to this, in 1949, about the time I was thinking about an advanced degree, Robert Ferber's (1949) Statistical Techniques in Market Research appeared to remedy the use of faulty statistical methods in marketing research by advocating, among other things, the replacement of quota sampling with probability sampling. Ferber's book was important to me because it gave me my first exposure to the idea of the quest for in marketing. This meant the application of the scientific method, using sampling and correlation analysis to find the range and limits of relationships. Together, Brown and Ferber gave me a vision of reality testing for finding the truth. Never mind that no one yet knows whether scientific realism or relative truth should be adopted (Hunt 1990); after reading and using Ferber's text, I felt confident that I knew that truth and reality (hypothesis) testing went hand in hand. But those were heady days. Who among marketing scholars today would feel bold enough to say the same? After 50 years of scholarship, I have come to accept that human judgments are situationrelative. Stephen Brown's (1998) Postmodern Marketing Two provides an entertaining exposition of the view that marketing is and always will be an art, the knowledge of which can never be gained by scientific study alone.