Marketing and compromising for sustainability: Competing orders of worth in the North Atlantic

• Published in: Marketing theory 2017-03, Vol.17 (1), p.71-93
• Main Authors: Finch, John H., Geiger, Susi, Harkness, Rachel Joy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Marketing
• ISSN: 1470-5931; 1741-301X
• DOI: 10.1177/1470593116657924

The purpose of our article is to propose that compromising is a constitutive characteristic of those marketing systems that entail matters of public interest or concern. In such markets, actors design compromises as they encounter criticisms of and contending justifications for the market’s products, as these refer to price, efficiency in production and use, regulatory compliance or ecological sustainability. Tests and justifications are vital in order to determine what is valuable and by which measure. As a theory framework, the economic sociology of conventions provides a basis for assessing these contests, compromises, and justifications over the issue of worth in a marketing context. Through an ethnographic study of the regulated activities of chemicals service companies supporting the upstream petroleum industry, we assess how actors evaluate and justify the market’s products and services in this environmentally sensitive setting by means of tests drawing from different orders of worth: the green, the industrial and the market order. Our contributions show that by artful and pragmatic compromising around exchanges, actors in marketing systems can balance several conflicting orders of worth over the question of worth without needing to converge on an overriding institutional logic.