Marketing’s boundary-work with IT in the digital age
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines how the global marketing profession sought new ways to ensure legitimacy and sustainability in the digital age by conjoining professional and managerial logics. Through field-level professional discourse analysis, the article examines marketing’s efforts to control the movement of increasingly fluid professional boundaries in the digital economy through jurisdictional boundary-work with the IT profession. The article uncovers professional marketers’ efforts to: (1) regain ‘command and control’ within organisations through protectionist, expansionary and hybridising discourses designed to build digital capital for the marketing profession through collaboration with IT; (2) formalise the emergence of marketing technology or ‘MarTech’ as a new technology specialism reporting to marketing; and (3) assert new areas of control for marketing within the organisation.
Source: Journal of Marketing Management
Author: Clea Bourne
Institutions: University of London, Goldsmiths University of London
Language: English
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4411708690