Toward an integrative theory of marketing

Many scholars have observed that the marketing discipline has become too fragmented and myopic, straying away from its core managerial marketing issues. To some, the complex discipline-transgressing phenomena are knowledge-producing, while for others, it is the discipline's problem of an identity crisis. This article argues that continuities and discontinuities of theoretical and methodological processes result from the contextual forces that continuously create new perspectives, paradigms, and schools of thought. Many traditional schools of marketing thought have either become obsolete or metamorphosized into new schools of thought. It has led to several theoretical advances that promise to develop into a general theory of marketing. However, none have grown into a full-blown integrative theory of marketing to tie in the various subdisciplines of marketing. We present an overall framework of marketing that could become the basis for developing an integrative theory of marketing with views relating to the core marketing processes and how the evolving contextual forces interactively impact them. © 2021, Academy of Marketing Science.