Abstract
The number of submissions and the quality of submissions continued to rise in 2012, making it a very good year for the Journal of Marketing Education (JME). Although this development has created extra work for the Editorial Review Board (and many ad hoc reviewers), the result is continued strength of JME and the discipline of marketing education. As always, I am grateful for all the support from the reviewers, authors, and the management team at Sage Publications.
This April issue of JME includes a diverse set of articles. Two articles are both extensions of award-winning conference papers. Two articles address classroom management issues, including texting and managing student attitudes toward quantitative skills. An article touches on life beyond college and how we can better prepare students for the workplace. The issue’s last article offers a review of the literature that sets the stage for the upcoming special issue of JME on sales education and training.
The first award winner in this issue is an article by Rosenbaum, Moraru, and Labrecque, which won the Marketing Educators’ Association conference Best Paper Award in 2011. Rosenbaum and his colleagues build on the growing awareness that service providers may be agents of discrimination and may lack sufficient training to reduce customer-to-customer discrimination. For example, suppose two gay men are shopping together for a mattress at a major department store. Will the sales staff react appropriately and will they act appropriately if other customers behave inappropriately? An in-class exercise is introduced involving 25 unique examples of situations where inappropriate behaviors might occur, containing several different aspects of diversity. The authors provide evidence that the exercise can indeed enhance the extent to which students value diversity, and thus hopefully helps prepare them to administer service quality equally to all customers in their careers.
The second article is based on a paper that won a track award at the American Marketing Association’s Winter Educator’s conference in 2010. This article is also a teaser for the next issue of JME, which is a special issue focusing on ethics, sustainability, and corporate social responsibility. Hanna, Crittenden, and Crittenden use social learning theory as a foundation for their study, which ultimately includes an amazing sample of more than 6,000 students from 115 different institutions and 36 different countries. Importantly, and consistent with social learning theory, they find that role models in the workplace are one of the most influential factors affecting ethical behavior. The authors go on to discuss some interesting differences related to the dominant moral philosophy in the various countries in the study. This article should pique your interest in the upcoming special issue, and it serves as a quite useful foundation for future work in how we can help marketing students become ethical leaders.
We all know that students text during class, but how often do they text, and does this affect their learning? Clayson and Haley offer an impressive foundational article on texting and multitasking in general in the classroom. Surveying marketing students at two different schools, they found that close to 90% had sent or received a text during class. In one class studied, texting was associated with lower grades. Yet banning texting from your class may not be the answer. Many students had a class where texting was banned, but about half of the students texted anyway. Beyond reporting survey results, Clayson and Haley offer a thoughtful literature review that should help teachers gain a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. Several ideas are offered for dealing with multitasking in the classroom.
If you have taught marketing research, you are well aware of many marketing students’ discomfort with math. Tarasi, Wilson, Puri, and Divine drill down into this phenomenon and develop a four-dimensional scale for measuring math attitudes. The subscales are confidence, enjoyment, marketability, and importance. Not surprisingly, majors do not enjoy math as much as other majors, but taking a marketing research course did improve the perceived importance of math skills. Tarasi and colleagues’ in-depth analysis provides alternative learning outcomes to consider as we build quantitative skills into the curriculum, and they provide a measurement tool that can be used to evaluate our success.
A perennial concern in marketing education is the alignment of our curricula with the needs of employers. Finch, Nadeau, and O’Reilly offer insights in this area through importance–performance analysis. This analysis recognizes that it is the combination of outcome importance and outcome performance that drives priorities for improvement in our programs. For example, student outcomes that are very important but not yet that well achieved should be high priorities for improvement. The authors conduct follow-up qualitative research with an industry panel to gain deeper insight into top priorities for improvement, such as the need for evidence-based decision making. Their insights into how a marketing research course might be reconceptualized are provocative but consistent with conversations I have had with marketing professionals.
I am pleased to announce the special issue of JME on sales education and training that will be published in August 2014 (see the call for papers at the end of this issue). Jimmy Peltier and Andrea Dixon have graciously agreed to serve as coeditors. As regular readers of JME know, Peltier is the most published author of all time in JME. Dixon has also published in JME and is a frequent contributor to the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management (JPSSM). In the current issue, Cummins, Peltier, Erffmeyer, and Whalen lay the foundation for this special issue with their exhaustive review of the sales education literature that includes articles from JME, Marketing Education Review, Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, and several other relevant journals. This review provides a convenient reference to nearly all of the sale education papers published in the past 30 years or so, and it presents several ideas for future research. This article is clearly must-reading for anyone interested in contributing to the sales education literature.
With this issue of JME, we continue to provide ideas for classroom experiences that marketing faculty can use, new insights into the dynamics of our classrooms, and literature reviews and insights to guide more research in marketing education. The journal’s traditions continue in fine form. Until August, thank you for supporting JME.