 Ditch the hacks: why learning from textbooks still matters
Marketing is deeply interwoven into the fabric of our everyday lives, yet all too often reduced to advertising and sales. Our goal as marketing educators is to show students the bigger picture. At its most powerful, marketing is a strategic force that shapes culture as much as it responds to it. It is what transformed Barbie into a billion-dollar franchise, and Spotify Wrapped into a cultural event. When misjudged, however, the fallout can be notorious: from Pepsi’s tone-deaf Kendall Jenner advert from 2017 to the fraudulent Fyre Festival, marketing failures can quickly become cautionary tales. Delivering a comprehensive marketing education should give students a sense of agency by enabling them to understand how organisations influence people, culture, markets, and society.
Marketing beyond the hype
Marketing is set to become a £1.39 trillion global industry by 2031, expanding at around 8% year-on-year and employing tens of millions of professionals worldwide. Many of our students will be employed in marketing-related roles. They will also have to navigate one of the most profound technological transformations in history, changing how new business ideas are conceived, launched, and scaled, and how consumers actively play a role in co-creating them. To deliver modules that truly prepare students for employment, marketing teaching must sit at the intersection of psychology, data, strategy, and creativity, anchored in the realities of a changing society. We translate this into practice through:
- Demystifying AI: Students have immense tech at their fingertips, but they often mistake automation for strategy. We need to teach them that data alone is insufficient; the modern marketer’s job is bridging machine intelligence with their own critical thinking, creativity, empathy, and sense of personal responsibility to solve real-world marketing and societal challenges.
- Exposing greenwashing: Today’s students are attuned to spotting disingenuous green rhetoric and eco-babble. We must ground our modules in authentic dialogue around sustainability, showing how marketing can be leveraged to guide ethical choices rather than mindless consumption.
- Navigating the trust crisis: In an era of deepfakes, algorithmic influence, and manipulation, strategic positioning and audience segmentation are not abstract ideas – they are fundamental skills to develop for any modern organisation with ever-scarce resources.
The elephant in the classroom
With an estimated 13,000-16,000 universities teaching business degrees annually and globally, according to AACSB, most of which would include at least one marketing module, we are training the next generation of business leaders. Yet, between short-form social media content, life hacks, and AI-generated answers, we face a pedagogical hurdle: how do we get students to engage more deeply with a textbook? Should we even bother?
The answer we should communicate to them is relatively straightforward: shortcuts and ‘hacks’ do not build strategic thinkers. Teaching ‘growth hacks’ without fundamental theory is like encouraging students to build a house with no foundations; it’s going to cave in with a bout of bad weather!
We believe that prescribing a comprehensive, structured, and evidence-based textbook provides our students with:
- Rigour: A clear operational map: from market research and segmentation to crafting value propositions and evaluating long-term return on investment (ROI).
- Empirical evidence: Frameworks built on decades of peer-reviewed research, enabling students to make predictable, evidence-led decisions over expensive guesses.
- Critical thinking abilities: An opportunity to weigh conflicting theories, ethical trade-offs, and broader societal impacts.
Putting theory into practice
When updating Marketing, our objective was to make it as relevant and engaging as possible for today’s students. We have woven artificial intelligence, social media, and digital transformation into every chapter, so the book reflects how the industry works today. Working with practitioners from organisations such as Google, Klarna, and eDreams ODIGEO, alongside start-ups, we have developed case studies that spark rich discussion about marketing as it operates in real life. The text is also backed by an embedded digital suite, from interactive self-assessments and flashcards to practitioner video interviews, author podcasts, and the glossary, all accessible via students’ own devices.
From classroom to career
University courses are often judged on graduate outcomes. Every year, thousands of marketing graduates head into interviews and make the exact same mistake. When asked why they want the job, they tell hiring managers: ‘I’m creative, I love making videos, and I enjoy social media’. By embedding a rigorous text into a marketing course, lecturers can help students stand out from the crowd through:
- Real-world Lexicography: Learning to speak the marketing language of senior leadership—walking into interviews confident about key performance indicators (KPIs), return on sales (ROS), net promoter score (NPS), next best action (NBA), and customer lifetime value (CLV), among many others!
- Case problem-solving: Building a mental library of structured, real-world case solutions to draw upon during assessment centres and live interview tasks.
- Strategic AI literacy: Developing the ability to demonstrate good prompt engineering, explain how predictive analytics work, and explain the importance of ethical campaign design.
Tools and algorithms will forever mutate, but students trained in marketing in depth, fostering commercial acumen and behavioural insight, will consistently win at interview. Prescribing a rigorous textbook isn’t just about helping students pass an assignment—we believe it’s about empowering them to step out of the lecture theatre as confident, capable professionals ready for whatever surprises the world brings.
Featured image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.
OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
 What is gender? Why and how does it matter?
Gender is everywhere. For most of us, it structures almost everything about almost every daily interaction, from our choice of words to the tone and body language that we use. It affects our choices of friends and partners, our role in our families, the work that we do, and how much, or whether, we are paid for it. And it operates at a thousand different levels, from the broadest institutions of law to the smallest, most private details of our selves and relationships. For some people this might feel so normal that it disappears into the background; for the rest of us, especially those of us who are queer or otherwise at odds with our local mainstreams, gender can feel omnipresent, suffocating.
At the same time, gender is nowhere. Since the English word “gender” began to take on its modern meaning sometime in the mid-1950’s—roughly, as a feature of human social organization, loosely connected to “sex” but importantly distinct from it—scholars, from the queerest of queer theorists to the most heteronormative voices in what was once called “sexology,” have spent lifetimes trying to pin it down. For something so central to so many lives, gender is notoriously ephemeral, hard to define.
Part of the problem is that, depending on where you go, “gender” changes radically. In a gay bar in Rio de Janeiro; in a primary school classroom in Jodhpur; in a rural farming town outside of Knoxville; what gender is, which rules govern it, and who occupies which roles within it may have little or nothing in common. This becomes even more clear if we travel in time. Not only does gender change, sometimes it disappears altogether—particularly if we look outside the lens of Western-centric, colonial thinking. “Gender” is an English word, and it doesn’t necessarily translate, even as the impacts of Anglophone cultural imperialism are felt globally.
The “Gender Justice” project works towards gender expansion and liberation. But if gender is so many things—if it is everything, and nothing, everywhere and nowhere—then where do we start?
In our section on Oxford Intersections, “What is gender? Why and how does it matter?” we start wherever we can. We think there are answers; we think theory can help; but even as we seek answers, we refuse to declare the question answered. Instead, we seek perspectives. If gender is that many things, then we need as many tools as we can find, as many dimensions as we can see, as many places, spaces, and peoples as we can think with.
This means a diversity of methodology. We’ve already published articles from law, philosophy, literary theory, and music studies, and we currently have work from biology, sociology, history, and dance theory on the way—to name just a few.
It means a diversity of geography and culture. We seek especially to raise the voices of those from the global South. One piece already published examines resistance to hetero-colonialism among the Mapuche people, an Indigenous group from what is now called Chile and Argentina. Another investigates the role of the law in shaping gendered subjectivity in India.
It means a diversity of generations, and of relationship to the academy. We are publishing work from emerita and from graduate students; from tenured faculty and from independent scholars. We recognize that academic status and prestige can point to some forms of wisdom, but it ignores others. We seek that wisdom wherever we can find it.
And it means putting folks in conversation with one another across these divisions, even when we don’t speak the same (disciplinary, cultural, generational, even literal) language. It means learning from each other, even when we disagree. It means refusing to elide these differences, even if that’s messy. We resist the urge to translate, to force agreement, to give a single answer.
If there is “gender trouble”—if gender is trouble—then our task as scholars is, as Donna Haraway taught us, to stay with that trouble, and to see what it can teach us.
If you’re interested in getting involved with Oxford Intersections: Gender Justice, let us know.
Featured image by Florian Olivo via Unsplash. Public domain.
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 Why the West’s critics speak a Western moral language
For many critics, the West is uniquely responsible for colonialism, racism, oppression, and exploitation. America, in particular, is portrayed as a society built upon these injustices. Many of these critics were themselves raised in the West and educated in its schools and universities.
Whatever one thinks of such critiques, there is something profoundly ironic about them: many of the moral standards used to judge Western civilization are themselves products of the Western tradition. The demand for justice and human rights, the insistence that the powerful must answer for their actions, the refusal to accept that might makes right—these ideas have a distinct history. That history is complex, drawing on classical philosophy, biblical religion, Roman law, and the Christian tradition. An important, though often overlooked, stream in this history is the Calvinist tradition—a subject explored more fully in the second edition of my Calvinism: A Very Short Introduction.
John Calvin is not who most people think of when they think about ideas of justice, equality, and human dignity. He is more commonly associated with predestination, austerity, and the execution of Michael Servetus. Yet the Reformed tradition Calvin helped shape contributed ideas whose consequences reached far beyond anything he could have anticipated—and perhaps beyond some things he would have welcomed. Those ideas helped nurture forms of political liberty and moral accountability that many of his modern critics now exercise, whether they recognize their origins or not.
Consider first the profound equality Calvin placed at the center of his understanding of humanity. Because all people are created in God’s image and belong uniquely to him, Calvin insisted that no human being could ultimately be reduced to a mere possession of another. His discussions of slavery and servitude in his expositions of Exodus and Deuteronomy are among the clearest expressions of this conviction. While later generations would identify tensions between Calvin’s theological convictions and the institution of slavery as it existed in his own age, his writings nevertheless rejected the reduction of human beings to property and emphasized the obligations owed by those who exercised authority. Before God, the nobleman and the beggar stand on identical ground. Human dignity does not depend upon wealth, status, or power. These were not merely theological abstractions; they were principles whose implications later generations would develop in ways Calvin himself could scarcely have imagined.
Second, Calvin helped reshape political thought by reinforcing the conviction that rulers themselves are subject to moral judgment. He did not invent resistance theory—medieval thinkers had long wrestled with tyranny—but the Reformed tradition became one of its most influential vehicles. In the final (1559) edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin argued that rulers who command what is contrary to God relinquish their authority. French Huguenots, Dutch rebels, Scottish Protestants, English parliamentarians, and American revolutionaries all drew, in varying degrees, upon political arguments developed within the Calvinist tradition. The enduring principle was simple: power is never its own justification.
Third, Calvin revived a prophetic tradition of moral criticism. The biblical prophets denounced corruption, exploitation, and injustice among the powerful. Calvin adopted their posture with striking boldness. At a time when monarchs increasingly claimed sacred authority, he did not hesitate to rebuke rulers for their corruption. In a lecture on Jeremiah, he lamented that “kings are ashamed to appear humane and turn all their labors towards exercising tyranny.” In another, he complained “great kings draw human blood and do not care at all when many people perish because of them.” Such criticisms expressed Calvin’s conviction that no ruler stands above moral scrutiny. Calvin repeatedly lamented the suffering of the poor and condemned those who exploited them. Through generations of Reformed preaching and political thought, this prophetic impulse was carried far beyond sixteenth-century Geneva. It would echo through later movements that challenged entrenched authority, from campaigns against slavery to the civil rights movement and beyond.
The irony, then, becomes clearer. The critics are, of course, right to point to injustices like inequality, racism, and exploitation. These are enduring features of human societies, and the West has hardly been immune to them. Yet many of the moral concepts used to expose these failures were themselves nurtured within the Western tradition. Indeed, one of the West’s distinguishing characteristics has been its extraordinary capacity for self-criticism. America and the broader Western tradition have produced intellectual, religious, legal, and political traditions that have repeatedly exposed, criticized, and sought to reform the very injustices that exist within their own societies.
Part of that capacity arose from Calvin’s realistic assessment of human nature, his conviction that people are prone to sin and self-interest. Influenced in part by this conviction, Western political institutions increasingly sought to restrain power rather than trust it. Constitutional limits, divided authority, the rule of law, and institutional accountability were not designed to eliminate injustice altogether. They endeavored to create durable mechanisms through which injustice could be challenged and corrected. In so doing, these institutions have helped many Western societies become among the freest, most prosperous, and most legally protective in history.
None of this is evidence of either the West’s perfection or its unique immorality. It is, rather, evidence that the Western tradition has bequeathed to the modern world a moral imagination capable not only of exposing injustice but also of imagining and pursuing reform. Many of the West’s fiercest critics remain heirs to the very moral tradition that furnished them with the language through which they now judge it. That, perhaps, is one of the Western tradition’s most remarkable legacies.
Feature image: Palestine solidarity protest in Berlin. Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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 Abraham Lincoln and the election of 1860 [timeline]
The presidential election of 1860 was, in the words of eminent Civil War scholar James McPherson, “undeniably the most important – and pivotal – in all of American History.” But the election, which culminated with the election of Abraham Lincoln after a chaotic campaign which saw parties disintegrate, dark horses flourish, and secessionists plot the undoing of the republic itself,
Explore the timeline below to follow along on some of the key moments in the nation’s most momentous campaign.
Featured image credit: Photo by Naomi August on Unsplash.
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 The right-wing revolution is guaranteed to continue long past Trump
Analysts are taking the pulse of the MAGA movement, seeking to understand whether it can sustain its momentum without its godfather, Donald Trump. In fact, the right-wing movement energetically was rolling along in the early 2010s, before the MAGA label emerged and while Trump was starring in The Apprentice.
In the late 2000s, a group of right-wing thinkers broke off from traditional free-market conservatives and the small-government Tea Party movement. They developed instead a new focus on social issues and organized a careful, often unseen, movement to drive change by gaining power over key political institutions. Donald Trump had little—if anything—to do with the genesis of this movement, but he was extraordinarily successful in riding it to the presidency, driving historic changes in what government does and how it does it.
Trump might slowly fade from the political scene and national commentators might debate whether MAGA still lives. But the right-wing idea factory is continuing to work, especially in state and local governments. It is generating a large and ongoing collection of issues, guaranteeing that right-wing ideas will continue to live on through an ongoing campaign for political power and influence.
Here are some of the reasons why.
- The money pipeline is open wider. Until recently, donors had to obey strict contribution limits to candidates. Political parties could collect piles of cash, but they couldn’t coordinate their advertising with the candidates. In a June 30 decision, the US Supreme Court ruled that donors could funnel money to the parties and the parties, in turn, could spend as much as they liked in direct coordination with candidates. That decision effectively blew off contribution ceilings. At least for the time being, that gives Republicans a huge advantage, since the party has more than $100 million more in the bank than Democrats. This will give the right-wing tremendous additional fuel for its ideas.
- Transgender bans get the green light. Idaho and West Virginia have both enacted bans against transgender players on women’s and girls’ sports teams. The Supreme Court ruled that the states could indeed establish such bans. That’s sure to ignite more debates in more states about where they can draw the line on LGBTQ+ rights. The Court didn’t decide whether it was permissible for states to specifically allow transgender individuals to compete on the teams. That issue is sure to come before the Court, along with more tussles about how far the states can go in dealing with LGBTQ+ rights.
- Religion creeps into the classroom. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that a Washington state school board was wrong in disciplining a former football coach, who knelt in postgame prayer in the middle of the field. That set off a scramble throughout the country to push religion into other school programs. Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas require local schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Texas went even further by building Bible study into the curriculum, beginning with Noah’s Ark in the first grade and David and Goliath in second grade. How far will they be able to go?
- State policy upsets traditional higher education policies. Florida is leading a broad revolution against what colleges and universities teach and how they are run. Gender studies programs are gone. So are DEI initiatives. A “back to the classics” movement has sprung up in a bid to push out what the right-wing sees as the “woke” bias in the classroom. Tenured professors undergo new, tough, regular reviews. Undocumented students are blocked from enrolling. Similar initiatives are rolling out across the country, led by Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas, all designed to uproot what are viewed as powerful liberal forces in higher education.
- The fight to prohibit abortion is red-hot. Medications, not surgical procedures, account for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the US. That compares with just a third in 2014, and it scrambles the efforts from the right to shut down abortions. When abortions take place in a clinic, it’s relatively easy to end them: close the clinic. But medication-induced abortions are far more difficult to prevent. Women can obtain a prescription and take the drugs at home. Some physicians prescribe the drugs remotely and mail them to patients, and that makes it possible to circumvent abortion bans in 41 states. Louisiana indicted a New York doctor for mail-order abortion medications, and a Texas judge fined a physician $100,000 for, the judge said, prescribing pills to a Dallas-area woman. New York countered that its “shield law” protected the doctor. The US Supreme Court might have overturned Roe v. Wade, but the abortion battles in the states are far from over.
- Policy leaders are campaigning to make all public employees at-will. The Trump administration won a big victory with the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter, in which the Court ruled that the president could fire members of independent regulatory commissions. The administration followed the Court’s decision with a new regulation that would allow agency heads to fire employees if they didn’t meet “suitability and fitness” standards, as the officials chose to define them. The Trump administration says the changes are necessary to make public employees more accountable. In fact, they push accountability from effectiveness in administering the law to loyalty to the president. The decisions might seem subtle, but they are very likely to shift the balance of powers within the nation’s democratic system, in favor of the president at the expense of the Congress.
The list could easily go on—and Trump has had little to do with most of them. They are only loosely connected with the national MAGA movement, but they all have long legs in the states. And, put together, they point to why the right-wing idea factory will continue to anchor a big movement in American politics.
Feature image: Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.
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