Is Marketing Management a Tool for Privatizing Education?

Abstract

Marketing, is usually described as those activities of a small corporate organization that have a direct impact on the acceptance by the customers of the organization’s product...The basic thesis of this paper is that the marketing concept can be applied in a diffused environment, even as complicated an activity as urban transportation in a complex metropolitan area with several organizations producing services (Kottler, 1972: 11). We can add to this, by saying that the basic thesis of the paper is that the marketing concept can be applied in an environment as complicated as education, and thus harvest the fruits of this post modern way of dealing with it. In order to understand what led us to the post modernistic way of shaping up the given status of education, we will go a bit further and analyze the relationship between globalization and postmodernism, education and globalization, the state model and the social movements, and capitalism. From a postmodern perspective, postmodernism is defined as the cultural logic of the late capitalism. What we now call late capitalism is actually the product of the free market, of the capital going from hand to hand all around the world, desperately asking for entrepreneurs educated according to the demands of the market, for more democratic states, for open, well educated minds, for more freedom, more respect on human individual rights, more private, individual initiatives. "The phenomenon of globalization is based on the transformation of capitalism…", what we already have mentioned as late capitalism (Morrow & Torres, :98).