Agency practitioners' meta-theories of advertising

Research on practitioner theories of advertising uncovered that agency practitioners not only have definite theoretical beliefs about how advertising works, they also have meta-theoretical beliefs, fundamental presuppositions about the nature and possibility of knowledge in advertising.

Agency practitioners' meta-theories of advertising

Gergely Nyilasy and Leonard N. Reid

Introduction

In an earlier article, we addressed the academician-practitioner gap in advertising (Nyilasy & Reid 2007) through an analysis of key writings on the subject. The analysis determined that the literature describing the causes of the disconnect between academicians and practitioners misses one potentially key aspect, which we labelled practitioners’ ‘knowledge autonomy’.

We conceptualised knowledge autonomy as structural knowledge differences between academics and practitioners about how advertising works. We hypothesised that practitioners may have their own sets of theoretical beliefs about advertising, independent from academic knowledge. We argued that,...

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