A curva da demanda e seu papel na institucionalização do marketing

Abstract

The objective of this dissertation is to understand the role that the Economic Sciences, and, specially the Demand Curve popularized by the British economist Alfred Marshall, had in the process of institutionalization of the Marketing area. Marshall was one of the responsible for the institutionalization of the Economic Sciences, by the end of the XIXth century. We intend to evaluate whether the Demand Curve, one of the elements worked by Marshall in his most important book Principles of Economics vol.I (1890) was indeed present in the pioneering documents in Marketing, participating, even indirectly, in its institutionalization, too. Marketing as academic discipline appeared in the United States, in the first years of the XXth century. It was part of a strong process of professionalization in business since the so-called Second Industrial Revolution, in the second half of the XIXth century, and the emergence of the consumption society. From an eminently empirical origin, without the use of methodologies, and sometimes called distribution, the area sought, in the following years, the use of scientific principles, as a way of legitimacy, besides an improvement in its efficiency. To fulfill the objective of reaching legitimacy, a probable way would have been to incorporate principles and laws of Economics, social science that in one of its applied forms gave rise to studies in Business Administration, from which Marketing is a specialization. When we evaluate the current textbooks of Marketing, it is constant the presence of the Demand Law and its graphical mathematical derivation, the Demand Curve. Therefore, we will focus on the Demand Curve and its links with Marshall and the beginning of Marketing