Abstract
With this April issue, we mark a change in editorship at our journal. Doug Lincoln has provided tremendous leadership as editor over the last 10 years. Throughout his editorship, Doug has orchestrated and maintained an exceptionally smooth and efficient review process. With strong original submissions and the constructive nature of the Journal of Marketing Education (JME) review process, Doug has kept the JME in its position as the top journal in marketing education and overall as one of the strongest discipline-specific journals in the education discipline. The study of marketing education has benefited substantially from Doug’s efforts.
In my time as editor, my primary objective is to maintain and build on the momentum that Doug has established. While we have now transitioned to an online submission and reviewing system, I will do all I can to maintain the tradition of constructive and timely reviews. In this regard, I am deeply grateful to the Editorial Review Board and ad hoc reviewers, who continue to do their best work without missing a beat. My hope is that whether a paper is accepted at JME or not, the authors will gain helpful feedback leading to a stronger paper, as well as ideas for future contributions. I encourage authors to contact me directly, at any stage of a project, if they have questions about an idea that might someday be published in JME.
This April issue of JME provides ideas and insights on a wide range of topics, including mentoring in teaching, experiential exercises, marketing in developing economies, ethics, and student team projects. Several of these articles employ ethnographic research methods, and five of the eight articles are authored by scholars outside the United States. All offer rich insights into marketing education. The articles in this issue were shepherded through the review process by Doug Lincoln.
Tähtinen, Mainela, Nätti, and Saraniemi provide a rigorous review of the issues involved in faculty mentoring in teaching (FMIT). Drawing from their review of the research literature on the mentor–mentee relationship and their ethnographic-based case study of FMIT within a marketing department, the authors provide quite useful guidelines for overcoming the obstacles to effective faculty mentoring and for creating a formal FMIT program that develops mentoring relationships that are rewarding for both mentee and mentor.
Hunter-Jones also uses an ethnographic method to examine the different types of learner disengagement that can occur when students participate in experiential learning activities. She presents a continuum comprising three types of learner disengagement: the academically challenged learner, the ambivalent learner, and the formulaic learner. Hunter-Jones uses the findings of her research to suggest ways to increase student buy-in of experiential learning activities.
Clayton and Hettche present experiential exercises that focus on Internet marketing research—specifically how companies assess the usability and user friendliness of their respective e-tailing websites and the different ways in which a website’s products/services can be organized for user search (information architecture). These exercises are quite involving for students because they demonstrate how dynamic the process can be for creating a website that provides a very efficient and satisfying shopping experience for consumers. The exercises are well suited for courses in consumer behavior, marketing research, and Internet/digital marketing.
This issue contains two articles related to ethics and sustainability. I am pleased to announce that JME now plans to publish a special issue on ethics, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability in marketing education, with guest editors Victoria Crittenden and Linda Ferrell. For more information, please read the Call for Papers on page 108 in this issue.
Rosa and Adjunto call for the development of a neglected pedagogical and research area of marketing education—one that addresses the educational needs of more than two billion subsistence merchants. The authors explain the training approaches used by the Marketplace Literacy Project in south India and the value of those approaches in developing a marketing pedagogy for the global poor. Rosa and Adjunto introduce a fascinating and underresearched area of marketing education.
Donoho, Heinze, and Kondo extend our understanding of ethics in sales. Building on the Personal Selling Ethics scale (PSE, published earlier by Donoho and Heinze in JME), they identify gender-based differences. Interestingly, these differences are related to respondent differences in moral idealism and moral relativism. The findings support a call for more sales ethics training, especially a greater emphasis on moral idealism in teaching sales ethics.
Three articles in this issue concern student groups. Neu presented the preliminary findings from his study of the student group experience at the Marketing Educators’ Association conference in April 2011. Many of us in the audience were excited (and entertained) by the insights gleaned from Neu’s use of the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique and in-person interviews in his research. Neu’s final article delivers on its early potential. He offers rich insights for business schools, academic departments, and educators for improving group experiences. These observations are a must-read for future research directions on student groups.
Das provides a detailed description of an innovative student group project—the photo novel. Each student group scripts, directs, photographs, and publishes a photo novel about an assigned marketing topic. The entire class then discusses each photo novel, following the discussion guides distributed by each team. Das has found that visual storytelling substantially contributes to the student experience in several respects.
D’Alessandro and Volet provide additional insight into the student project experience in their study of the effect of employed students’ number of working hours on their learning in groups. The findings indicate that when several students within the group work a substantial number of hours outside of school, their group experiences suffer. The authors present recommendations for improving group experiences when a large percentage of the student population are employed.
The breadth of articles in this issue should offer something for every reader. I encourage you to read and share these with your colleagues as you strive to improve marketing education. I welcome any feedback on this issue, as well as any questions about future topics or possible papers. I know we will have some great articles for you in August as well. Until then, thank you for supporting JME.