Marketing ethics and CSR in marketing: research challenges for the next decade

introdUction the purpose of this chapter is to share a 'big picture' commentary about the status and direction of marketing ethics (ME) and corporate social responsibility in marketing (csr-M) -two streams of literature that increasingly and synergistically interconnect.there are some dangers in trying to provide a snapshot of any research area in a relatively short space; one must be both selective in the scope of topics discussed as well as attenuated in the depth of treatment provided.but in our constrained attempt to strike multiple themes, we will try to be both historically grounded and forward thinking about what academic marketing researchers can build upon and about what scholars need to be concerned with as they advance investigations into the inevitably merging areas ME and csr-M research.to pursue the above theme -marketing ethics and csr in academic marketing research -we articulate some important 'strengths' and some critical 'challenges,' each informed by the academic literature. in particular we especially draw on our publications.in addition we rely on the inspiration of other scholarly overviews and analyses separately addressing either ME or csr-M.However this chapter itself is not a traditional literature review.the comments below reflect mostly our personal assessment regarding various ME and csr-M issues based upon many years' experience.For those desiring to quickly get abreast of the current corpus of literature on ME we would refer them to nill and schibrowsky (2007) and schlegelmilch and Öberseder (2010), both excellent reviews of ME work.similarly for those wishing to familiarize themselves with the body of csr-M publications we strongly recommend Vaaland et al. (2008) as well as Ferrell et al. (2014).the main contribution of this particular commentary is to highlight the positive strengths of the increasingly blended literatures of ME and csr-M as well as point out some critical and challenging areas that seem to demand enhanced scholarly analysis.before attending to that, some baseline definitions about these two areas would be in order.