Marketing’s boundary-work with IT in the digital age

This article examines how the global marketing profession sought new ways to ensure legitimacy and sustainability in the digital age by conjoining professional and managerial logics. Through field-level professional discourse analysis, the article examines marketing’s efforts to control the movement of increasingly fluid professional boundaries in the digital economy through jurisdictional boundary-work with the IT profession. The article uncovers professional marketers’ efforts to: (1) regain ‘command and control’ within organisations through protectionist, expansionary and hybridising discourses designed to build digital capital for the marketing profession through collaboration with IT; (2) formalise the emergence of marketing technology or ‘MarTech’ as a new technology specialism reporting to marketing; and (3) assert new areas of control for marketing within the organisation.