Power, paradigms and dominance in marketing research in Brazil: an analysis of the national production of the discipline from the point of view of epistemic matrices

Abstract

Literature has indicated the insufficiency of the paradigmatic logic to study the social phenomena encompassed by marketing, also revealing the need for a maturation of the discipline’s epistemology. Considering this, we used epistemic matrices, an alternative approach to knowledge production in organizational studies, whose application to marketing is presented and discussed in this paper. Thus, this article articulates a debate on power, paradigms and dominance issues in marketing research in Brazil, presenting the results of an epistemological analysis that included 311 papers from the Anpad Marketing Congress (Encontro de Marketing da Anpad – EMA) in the last five years. The information extracted from the articles were framework of the study and epistemological orientation. This analysis allowed us to identify the most frequent topics that were conceptually debated, the dominant logics of the empirical studies and the perspectives for the development of future investigations. Among the main findings are the need fortheoretical construction within the discipline, the emergence of interpretative and critical studies, and the strengthening of multi-method studies, that bring hopes of overcoming the duality between positive and interpretive logic, thus leading marketing to the study of phenomena as a whole.