Robert Bartels and the History of Marketing Thought

Abstract

Robert Bartels was one of marketing’s most prolific scholars. His research covered a broad array of marketing topics, including the marketing-as-a-science debate, theory, metatheory, the nature and scope of marketing, credit management, international marketing, comparative marketing, macromarketing, and marketing education, among others. Bartels’s most significant and enduring contribution, however, was his fifty years of ongoing research, from dissertation to last publication, in the area with which his name became synonymous—The History of Marketing Thought. Although not without criticism, no other work provides such a long view of marketing’s past and wide sweep of its subdisciplines. By tracing the history of marketing thought in the twentieth-century American academy, Bartels nurtured the interest in marketing’s heritage and established a common knowledge base for generations of marketing students.