Rethinking market performativity beyond the management school of marketing: in defense of a decolonial option

Abstract

In recent years, a predominantly European research movement known as Constructivist Market Studies (CMS) has been gaining projection within the field of Marketing. Influenced by Michel Callon’s performativity thesis, this movement establishes a line of research that explores how marketing knowledge produces market realities. However, the emergence of neoliberal markets by the hegemonic Management School of Marketing seems to go unquestioned, even with the proliferation of criticism aimed at these versions of the market developed by academia and society in territories marked by colonial experiences. Based on this gap, this article aims to look into how the concept of “border thinking” can be used to decolonize the market performativity produced by the Management School of Marketing. To this end, an initial effort has been made to provincialize the emergence and consolidation of the dominant marketing school of thought in the United States, subsequently revealing its dimensions of coloniality. Such dimensions help explain why it is so difficult to perform alternative market realities. In this sense, the goal is to contribute to the Constructivist Market Studies movement in Brazil by not only producing neoliberal market realities, but also fairer and more inclusive pluriversal alternative versions that should benefit and ensure better conditions for the majority of lives, both human and non-human, in both the Global South and North.