An Indigenous Perspective of the Australasian Marketing Academy

Welcome to my provocation

This paper is intentionally non-traditional in its format. Yes, this non-traditional format is to prove a point, well actually, to prove quite a few points. This format is a demonstration of resistance to the dominant, monocultural marketing publication protocols and the seemingly slavish conformity to the ‘proper’ ways of a marketing academic. This non-traditional format also serves as a model and gives permission to others at the margins of the marketing academy who are exhausted by the status quo and those simply bored by the unquestioned, archaic publishing formalities inherited from previous marketing generations but which are an increasingly awkward fit with the 21st century marketing academic.

As Tourish (2020, p. 101) put it, academics have blindly adopted an impersonal writing style and, as I’m sure you will agree with, ‘most papers in mainstream journals are formulaic, cautious, dull and unreadable’. I use first-person pronouns, direct quotes, as well as informal and vivid prose to pique your curiosity, afresh the ordinary, create a memorable paper and one that you may possibly read to the very end (when was the last time you did that?). After all, our scholarly endeavours have ‘no value if no one reads it, remembers it or gets inspired to take the ideas further’ (Meier & Wegener, 2017, p. 194). I want the ideas in this paper to not only surprise you but to linger, to connect you, the reader, with the text as it is only when ideas resonate with us that we make an effort to translate and compare them to our lived experience and, importantly, extend them into our professional practice (Meier & Wegener, 2017).

This paper is not a historical account of First Nation Australians, nor does it neatly summarise Indigenous Australia so the non-Indigenous reader does not have to exert the effort to expand their essentialist understanding. This paper talks directly to you, the reader, to be a catalyst to move the needle and to take responsibility for your own learning. I want you to move beyond the politics of politeness with verbal platitudes about the need for more Indigenous perspectives in marketing and to take purposeful action that progresses social and epistemic justice.

Remember, this paper is a provocation. It is designed to stir, to take you aback, to make you think and ultimately to encourage you to do something different, to do something that makes a real difference. I was courageous enough to accept the challenge by the AMJ Special Section editors to be provocative as it is through these awkward moments that new thinking and meaningful change is seeded. Are you equally courageous enough to take up the challenge, to engage in critical reflexivity, to not only be open to becoming aware of your positioning, assumptions and unconscious biases but to act on these personal insights with thoughtful action? The potential reputational risk I am taking on by writing this article weighs heavily on me; but I must place my trust in you, the reader, the Special Section editors and the ANZMAC Fellows who respond to this paper to do so with grace, an open mind and to remember, it is a provocation.

In case you were wondering, yes, I am an Aboriginal woman. I live, work and play on Gubbi Gubbi Country and am a descendent of the Kalkadoon, Thaniquith and Bwgcolman peoples. If you are in Australia, who are the Traditional Owners of the Aboriginal Country where you are presently reading this paper? Do you know what is meant by Country and why it matters? If not, why have you not researched Country and what does your inertia say about you? Should Australian marketers include their Aboriginal Country in their author by-lines when publishing in academic journals? Yes, that was your first taste of this provocation. Open-ended questions are a catalyst for reflexivity, prompting self-discovery and professional conversations.

This paper uses Aboriginal ways of knowing and learning with elements of autoethnography via story sharing as well as interconnected explanations (see Yunkaporta, 2009). Regarding nomenclature in this paper, you would have noticed that the following terms are used interchangeably – Indigenous (yes, with a capital ‘I’), First Australians, First Nations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (yes, ‘peoples’ plural as we are not all the same). I was advised by Aboriginal Elders (yes, with a capital ‘E’) to use these terms interchangeably as each is politically loaded, and it respectfully recognises the diversity and intersectionality among and between Indigenous Australians.

This paper is organised around the three domains of university scholarly activity that frame our professional lives, being governance, teaching and research. After all, scholarly activity is what binds us and defines us. ¹

Governance

Governance, broadly speaking, includes internal and external engagement and service. Universities do not exist in a vacuum separate from society and as powerful social institutions; universities have social responsibilities. Universities social justice agenda regarding Indigenous Australians was first framed by the Department of Employment Education and Training (1990) in A Fair Chance for All, followed by the Review of Australian Higher Education (Bradley et al., 2008); the Universities Australia (2011) National Best Practice Framework for Indigenous Cultural Competency in Australian Universities; then by Behrendt et al. (2012) Review of Higher Education Access and Outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People; and lastly by the Universities Australia (2017) Indigenous Strategy 2017 to 2020. Universities Australia (UA) is our peak body and the 39 member universities committed to the UA Indigenous Strategy, pledging:

The takeaway here is that the university social justice agenda for First Australians is decades old. Were you aware of this decades-old national agenda? If not, is your lack of awareness because of a lack of leadership in the marketing academy to prioritise and act on this agenda? Do you think that your job as an academic does not extend to social justice prerogatives related to Indigenous Australians? Is this the result of your own professional framing or is this because of systemic ignorance in the doctoral studies and early career mentoring in the marketing academy? Now that you know about this agenda, what will you do now and what will you do differently?

Having been a part of the marketing academy in Australia for two decades, my lived experience ² is that an epistemology of ignorance regarding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is prolific in the marketing academy. For a community of learned scholars at the cutting edge of research about people (e.g. consumers, marketplace behaviour, social trends), how can it be that there is a lack of knowledge about Indigenous peoples? Indeed, the absence of discourse about First Nation Australians is deafening. An epistemology of ignorance is more than an accidental lack of knowledge, but also includes active neglect or avoidance of information, a failure to understand information, or refusal to know and acknowledge imbalances in social power (i.e. privilege and oppression) (see El Kassar, 2018; Smithson, 1989, 2015; Sullivan & Tuana, 2007). Why has the marketing academy buried it’s ‘head in the sand’ with regards to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples?

One manifestation of this epistemology of ignorance in marketing is that despite being a social science, there is little acknowledgement of the notion of intersectionality and how this plays out in the governance, teaching and research endeavours of marketing academics. Who are you, and who are we?

Intersectionality is a popular framework for understanding how aspects of ourselves (such as our gender, race, physical appearance, religion, dis/ability and sexual orientation) bestow some with privilege (i.e. advantages within a given society) and others with oppression (i.e. disadvantages within a given society) (Collins & Bilge, 2020; Gopaldas, 2013; Steinfield et al., 2019). In the marketing literature, intersectionality makes a rare appearance with disappointingly low citations. Marketing intersectionality literature is largely relegated to the margins of the transformative consumer research agenda or public policy marketing and focussed on oppression of the marginalised group with apparent silence as to the privilege of the marketing researchers conducting the studies as no author positioning statements are included (see Cappellini et al., 2014; Corus et al., 2016; Crockett et al., 2011; Gopaldas & Siebert, 2018; Steinfield & Holt, 2020).

As marketers, on an almost daily basis, we talk of market segmentation, target markets and consumer personas, dissecting people into parts and reducing them to the attributes they possess. So, why the reluctance to turn the mirror onto ourselves? Why do we not explore and acknowledge our intersectionality, particularly the current privileges most marketing academics enjoy and the privileged backgrounds that most marketing academics herald from? What are we afraid of? What are we resisting? How do uncomfortable issues like white guilt, fragility and saviour complexes play out in our university hallways and how are these biases reflected in our marketing research outputs?

My role in this provocation is to call out the epistemology of ignorance regarding First Nation Australians, but who amongst the academy is brave enough to pick up the batten and lead the charge? My guess is that many readers will remain inert, and some even apathetic. Is this because the privileged want to maintain the status quo and prefer sanitised rhetoric? As I write this, I cannot help but recall a lyric from the song, I’m Number One, sung by Kermit the Frog in the Muppets Most Wanted movie: ‘I believe in equality as long as you get less than me’. I’m curious, where are the heroes amongst us?

Our intersectionality and multiple social identities shape our opportunities and the way we navigate careers in higher education (Turner, 2002). Being an Indigenous woman who is a Professor of marketing means I experience cultural taxation. Have you heard of cultural taxation? Well, it exists, and it is the lived professional experience for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who work in Australian universities. Padilla (1994) and Joseph and Hirshfield’s (2011) articulated the governance burdens placed on ethnic/people of colour in academia and that these additional responsibilities impede career progression, reduce job satisfaction and create a pronounced work-life imbalance.

Cultural taxation is the unspoken expectation that Indigenous academics attend to Indigenous-related issues and help the institution meet its need for representation on committees and in service-focussed roles. Despite these citizenship roles exceeding the traditional 20% governance workload cap, Indigenous academics are still expected to achieve the same research standards and are apportioned the same teaching workload as non-Indigenous colleagues. Effectively, cultural taxation means Indigenous Australians work beyond their paid hours and sacrifice their personal time to catch up on the research and teaching responsibilities. I could not agree more with Padilla’s (1994) discussion of the forms that cultural taxation takes, including being called upon to be the expert on Indigenous matters beyond my discipline or lived experience, being asked to educate learned colleagues about Indigenous matters even though this is not part of my job description and being called in at a moment’s notice to help solve Indigenous-related problems where issues of sociocultural differences arise between staff, students and community. This invisible and distracting work is emotionally draining. It is an unspoken structural inequality. For the non-Indigenous readers who are thinking ‘just say no’; well I do, but this also means I must pay a more disparaging tax. There are deep-seated consequences of saying no to Indigenous-related governance, the most abhorrent being the silent questioning of your Indigeneity and the most cutting being the conjecture that you are absconding from your ‘kinship’ cultural obligations. For the non-Indigenous reader, when you say no to a work request regarding non-Indigenous service, is your ethnicity questioned? Yeah, I thought not.

Teaching

There’s a seemingly persistent reluctance to embed Australian Indigenous knowledges (yes, plural) and perspectives (also plural) in marketing courses and teaching resources. This also appears to be the case for the broader business discipline. ³ Marketing programmes and courses attract First Nations peoples but they do not ‘see themselves’ represented in the curriculum. I acknowledge that some universities and the Australian Business Dean’s Council (ABDC) have made some steps forward in recent times, perhaps spurred by the #BlackLivesMatter movement. But overall, the slow progress is troubling. How can ANZMAC and its Fellow’s accelerate progress? After all, it is a decades-long agenda. What’s the hold up?

There is much research about embedding Indigenous knowledges and perspectives in university curricula. If you would, kind reader, indulge me as I share my own research. My externally funded project, The ‘university place’: how and why place influences the engagement and retention of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander university students, found that the vast majority of academics were open to the idea of embedding Indigenous knowledges and perspectives but had not undertaken Indigenous cultural awareness training. Academics harboured a range of concerns and fears. They talked of fears included difficulty finding information, a lack of guidance on how to incorporate that information, concerns about being seen as patronising, misappropriating knowledge, student resistance and negative class discussions and simply getting it wrong and not knowing who to ask for assistance (Raciti et al., 2018). Furthermore, those respondents that had limited personal and/or professional involvement with Indigenous peoples and, consequently, had underpinning worries about teaching Indigenous topics relevant to their discipline, while those who were confident had personal and/or professional involvement with Indigenous peoples (Raciti et al., 2018). In this project, I collated the findings and formulated ‘Hesitant Hugh’ (see Table 1). ‘Hesitant Hugh’ is the academic persona most resistant to Indigenising curriculum. This persona could be used to develop targeted strategies and tactics. To illustrate, a strategy might be to communicate the importance of and priority to Indigenise curricula with an associated tactic being an onboarding programme that requires participation in tailored workshops, for which a workload is provided, following the first semester of teaching.

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Table 1.

‘Hesitant Hugh’ Academic Teaching Staff Persona Academic Persona Most Resistant to Indigenising Curriculum.

Hugh is new to academia and to his current university. He does not have extensive teaching experience or training and is still learning what his current university expects of him and what its priorities are and Hugh teaches large classes, and while he has heard of the importance of embedding Indigenous topics in his curriculum, he is not clear as to why this is important. He questions how it is relevant to what he is teaching and if it is part of his job to prepare relevant materials for his classes without an additional workload allocation.

Hugh is not aware of the voluntary Indigenous cultural training offered by his current university and has had limited personal experience with Indigenous Australians. Teaching so many students, Hugh is concerned about saying the wrong thing in class and is not sure how he might handle negative class discussions that may emerge. Unsure of what Indigenous topics are relevant to his discipline – after all, this was not a part of his studies – he does not know where to start, who to ask for help and what resources he can call on.

Having spent much of his early career focusing upon his disciplinary research, Hugh feels inadequate, underprepared and unsupported with this teaching activity and wonders if it is the best use of his time at this stage of his career. Indeed, some of Hugh’s mentors caution him against spending too much time on his teaching at the expense of research and Hugh has decided to wait until he is instructed by his Head of School to embed Indigenous topics in his curriculum with the hope that training, resources and workload will be made available at that time.

Source. Raciti et al. (2018, p. 53).

So where to next? I’d recommend that the ABDC, ANZMAC and the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management (ANZAM) partner and pool resources to develop an online, self-paced Indigenous cultural competency training programme that is freely available to all business academics, business sessional/casual teachers and doctoral students. Further, I would recommend that this partnership also create an online library of examples and resources that academics nationwide can freely use to embed First Nation Australians knowledges and perspectives in their curriculum. This library could be accessible via the ABDC, ANZMAC and ANZAM websites. The rather obvious last suggestion is for a community-of-practice be formed to guide others. Such groups should be led by non-Indigenous people to not further exacerbate the aforementioned cultural taxation First Australians experience, but also because embedding Indigenous knowledges and perspectives are university ‘core business’. Also, my experience has been that non-Indigenous leadership is more likely to engage non-Indigenous staff, get traction and bring forth accelerated change. Actionable tips for Australian marketing academics can be found in their institutions Reconciliation Action Plan which will detail how meaningful changes can be made to teaching practices.

Research

Padilla (1994) articulated my own lived experience and the dilemma of deciding to be a ‘mainstream’ or ‘ethnic’ researcher. And like those Padilla (1994) wrote of, this dilemma was solved by doing both, which required working twice as hard. Beyond being stereotyped, doing ethnic research is career-limiting in marketing as it is not valued, is rarely published and highly unlikely to get into the so-called ‘right’ A* and A ranked journals. Interesting isn’t it how the ‘best’ marketing journals, according to the ABDC list, are headquartered in the Global North with overrepresentation of American editors and editorial review board members.

Marketing journals are our key vehicle for knowledge, and their hegemonic discourse encodes an ideology about what ‘right’ and ‘proper’ knowledge is, and our ranking system tells us that what ‘counts’ as marketing research is generalisable to the dominant Anglo culture. Systemic inequality, much? Small sample sizes from hard-to-reach minorities, especially from the Global South, don’t stand a chance. As Bennett (2015) notes, this hegemonic power is executed by teams of referees and editors via the peer review process, excluding all those that do not conform to the dominant ideology and, in actuality, they are executing epistemicide with rival forms of knowledge, including nuanced written expression, going unpublished. Epistemicide is a consequence of colonisation whereby colonisers have installed their Northern/Western Anglo knowledge and methodologies as the only credible sources of and ways to construct knowledge and this is achieved by silencing Indigenous knowledges and methodologies through non-publication (de Sousa Santos, 2015). As epistemicide is a consequence of colonisation, decolonisation is the process needed to usurp these unequal knowledge hierarchies (de Sousa Santos, 2015).

Most academic disciplines have been working on the decolonisation of research for some time. So why the resistance in the marketing academy? After all, the 2020 Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification now includes a Field of Research code for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander marketing research (FOR 450516). Why is it that Australian-based marketing journals or conferences do not actively seek research by, with and for (not about) Indigenous Australians, and why have the ANZMAC Fellows not pushed this agenda? Indeed, are there any Indigenous ANZMAC Fellows?

So, as I’m sure you all know, there is nothing like being awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (ARC-DP) to signal credibility and affirm idea fidelity. Again, please indulge me as I share my recent ARC-DP success, entitled Implementing Indigenous knowledge approaches to Australian doctoral education (2021–2023). Our ARC-DP is led by my Co-Director of the Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre at USC, Professor Catherine Manathunga. Our team of eight will elevate Australian doctoral education and expand Australia’s capacity to contribute to the world’s diverse knowledge systems. Unlike other countries, Australia has a monocultural approach to PhD research that overlooks Indigenous, migrant and refugee peoples’ knowledge systems. This project calls out the dominance of the Western/Northern scientific research method, logical empiricism and neo-positivism ingrained in Australian researcher training. We challenge the ‘rules’ of how ‘proper’ scientific knowledge is produced, such as the commitment to reductionism, preference for deduction, quantitavism and mathematical theory construction and the view that there is a single, objective reality (or truth) which falls into a standard pattern (generalisability) that must be verified through experience (empiricism) where facts are based on analytic posteriori knowledge. We will achieve this via a decolonisation lens rejecting the Western/Northern imposed ontological, epistemological and methodological approaches to knowledge production by reinstating and privileging Southern, First Nations and transcultural ways of knowing. The takeaway is that irrespective of discipline nuances, decolonisation can be done at scale.

Do you want to decolonise marketing research? Decolonisation will deliver the more potent social and epistemic justice outcomes (see de Sousa Santos, 2015) that will truly shift the dial for the marketing academic community. In the first instance, ANZMAC Fellows could publicly support the need for a research refresh and the importance of decolonisation to address systemic injustice that percolates through our current research protocols. A subsequent process by which the Fellows deconstruct what decolonisation means in the discipline could result in a position paper or similar for the consultation and dissemination among the wider ANZMAC community. ANZMAC Fellows are best to lead decolonisation efforts as leading by example and leading from the top in a manner that demonstrates genuine and authentic engagement is critical so that this agenda does not deteriorate into rhetoric, empty promises and hollow platitudes. Indeed, a coherent and principled approach to the decolonisation of marketing research is needed as consequences of not doing this right will not bode well for the reputation of the academy.

Okay, so now what?

I’d rather not rehash the suggestions I have offered, as per a ‘proper’ conclusion, for reasons already provided in the paper. I would like to remind you, the reader, that this is a provocation and I have risked much in writing it. I can only hope that it is received well and that good will come of this provocation.

A part of reflexive practice is not only unpacking issues but being inspired to make meaningful change in our professional practice. My guess is that those of you who have read to this point in the manuscript are ready and willing to make a change and no doubt have already considered ways that this might occur. What will you do to voluntarily elevate your professional practice with regards to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples?

The time is right to progress goodwill rhetoric to more formalised architecture, starting with our peak body, ANZMAC and the 32 Fellows at the helm. Going forward as an inclusive marketing academy that authentically subscribes to a strengths-based perspective of Indigenous Australians, such commitments must be articulated and promoted by ANZMAC. Diversity, inclusion and a commitment to reconciliation are conspicuous by their absence in the current ANZMAC Strategy, with none of the seven priorities lending themselves to social or epistemic justice. Also absent from our peak body’s online presence is an Acknowledgement of Country, a Reconciliation Action Plan and a community-of-practice or special interest group centred on working with and for First Australians. While this is disappointing, it is our starting point. We should also have Indigenous representation on the ANZMAC Executive and a commitment to fund and promote the research, teaching and governance efforts of First Nations marketing academics. ANZMAC Executive Committee, Fellows and community, the ball is now in your court.