Can society nurture humanistic marketing?

Aliakbar Jafari

pp. 113-125

in: Richard Varey, Michael Pirson (eds), Humanistic marketing, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

We are all guilty. For unethical business practices, increasing environ. mental crises, overconsumption, market misbehaviours, social injus. tice, falling rate of satisfaction with life, institutionalization of fraud, declining morality in society, and many other imperfections, we are all guilty. We are guilty because we have developed too much hope and faith in markets — "the idols of our own creation" (Wallis, 2010) — and market rules. Markets, which once upon a time cultivated the seeds of hope, prosperity, happiness, peace, and harmony in human society, have now become the breeding grounds for despair, difficulties, agonies, anxieties, and conflicts. Markets, which used to bring people together in society, have now become battlefields where people stand in opposition and anxiously blame one another for the imperfections of their habitat, "the market". In this battleground, angry voices are heard from all corners. Everybody in the field is simultaneously a plaintiff, a defendant, and a judge.