مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد کشتیرانی از طریق بازاریابی (الزویر)

Over the last two decades or so, we have witnessed a profound transformation in how spatiality is viewed (Warf, 2009) and an extension of the geographical idiom to almost all social sciences (e.g. Anselin, 1999). Geographers have stressed the centrality of the spatial context for understanding any economic and sociocultural phenomena, maintaining that there could not be any proper understanding of how humans create and perceive the world without a rigorous analysis of geographical dimensions. Notably, place and space have emerged as two prominent sets of conceptual tools through which geographers have accounted for the spatiality of economic and sociocultural phenomena. The notion of place tends to emphasize ideas of “ground” and “soil”, by establishing a tight connection between the reproduction of economic or sociocultural phenomena and their situatedness within specific locations. In this view, the emergence of an individual or collective identity has boundaries and corresponds with a certain place to the exclusion of other places. This is consistent with a historical association of place with land, which has often fortified nationalistic accounts of nations and regions. Alternatively, the notion of space proposes more dynamic and fluid geographical accounts, often connected with the idea of “sea” (Nieuwenhuis, 2016). In this view, space is associated with the idea of being in motion and becoming, consistent with a more relational school of thought. Here, the importance of relationships and connections between and among locations are emphasized (e.g. Doel, 1999; Whatmore, 2006), often paving the way for appreciations of globalization that overlook, rather than celebrate, the specificities of place. Recent contributions in human geography have sought to re-examine (e.g. Jones, 2009) and problematize (e.g. Nieuwenhuis, 2016) the distinction between “place-oriented” and “space-oriented thinking” (ibidem), suggesting that resting on only one of these perspectives might not be the most appropriate idea in order to capture the evolution of contemporary societies. This move has resulted in the attempt to reevaluate the underlying assumptions behind each perspective and their methodological implications, in search of potential complementarities and ways to attenuate this dichotomy. Ultimately, this theoretical challenge has contributed to bring new conceptual vitality into the discipline. The present paper intends to critically assess the growing spatial awareness that is emerging within the marketing literature, by scrutinizing the conceptual contributions on place and space offered by marketing scholars. On the one hand, in fact, the significance of space and place has not escaped the attention of marketing researchers, who increasingly have come to realize that a considerable amount of companies and consumers’ activities have to do with space, not only with time (e.g. Hirschman, Ruvio, & Belk, 2012; Hackley, 2013; Chatzidakis, McEachern, & Warnaby, 2014; Demangeot, Broderick, & Craig, 2015). Nobody could deny that geography and marketing have shared an intimate relationship since the 1950s and 1960s, when the approach of “marketing geography” acquired international recognition. “Can store location research be a science?” asked Applebaum (1965), one of the founding fathers of marketing geography, in an effort to institutionalize an emerging area of study that aimed to investigate the spatial unfolding of markets and their functioning. In particular, Appelbaum positioned marketing geography as an empiricist and practice-oriented approach aiming to tackle those business problems that are inherently geographical: “The growing role of geographers in business signifies that our profession has something worth while to offer to business. This ‘something’ is professional help to solve problems” (Applebaum, 1961, p. 48). Recent conceptual meta-studies in the marketing literature show a thorough engagement in spatial theory. In fact, these meta-studies (e.g. Chatzidakis et al., 2014; Castilhos, Dolbec, & Veresiu, 2014) devote attention to the philosophical underpinnings of geography as applied to marketing. In other words, marketing has become an established field where spatial knowledge, not only practice, is being produced and discussed.