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This work calls for a paradigmatic shift from marketing techniques and concepts to markets as a social construction. Our argument is composed of six facets:(1) revisioning the creation of value in markets to include meanings; (2) reconsidering the efficacy and limits of working from the perspective of the marketer; (3) incorporating more conscientiously consumer subjectivity and agency; (4) reformulating the nature of relationships between consumers and marketers from individuals to social beings inhabiting communities; (5) addressing more explicitly cultural differences in the form of subcultures within nations and international differences between nations in level of development; and finally, (6) exhorting the importance of marketer reflexivity. In charting these key transitions and tracing them to particular academic communities over time, we work towards a more radically transformative marketing practice that is socio-historically situated, culturally sensitive, and organic, in accounting for and adapting to contemporary global, technological, and sociocultural developments.

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The author employs critical ethnographic methods to examine empirically marketers' processes of producing cultural meanings at a western stock show and rodeo. Western cultural meanings and values of freedom, naturalism, competition, and family values are produced by marketers in attracting a nonranch audience; juxtaposing business, education, and entertainment; making ample references to historical tradition; and using business activity as the basis for claims of authenticity. Marketing implications center on tapping into rich sources of cultural meaning by (1) attending to the cultural dimensions of economic activity, (2) taking industry as the unit of analysis through an examination of representations of production in market discourses and practices, (3) expanding history from a research method to a source of market meaning, and (4) considering the marketplace as a lived tradition.