Make ethical marketing happen: a performative approach to managers’ identity work in the food industry[Faire advenir un marketing éthique : analyse de la performativité du travail identitaire des managers agro-alimentaires]

Although it claims a growing involvement in sustainable development, the marketing profession suffers from a negative image because it is accused of stimulating overconsumption and greenwashing. In order to analyze how marketing managers deal with these ethical tensions in their identity work, this article mobilizes theories of performativity. The aim is to understand how managers' discourses on the marketing profession shape their practices and their processes of subjectivation. Based on 15 in-depth interviews, this work identifies five registers of performativity through which marketing managers discursively construct their professional identities: i) reflexive realist, ii) reflexive destabilized, iii) reflexive detached, iv) voluntarist defensive and v) conquering utilitarian. This article shifts the literature on ethics in marketing from positive (what marketers do) and normative (what marketers should do) approaches to a performative approach (how marketers construct their profession). This research highlights that the relationship between discourse and practice is not antagonistic in nature, but must be understood as mutually constitutive, which opens up a reflection on how to bring about ethical marketing within organizations.