Advocacy bias in the green marketing literature: Where seldom is heard a discouraging word

Abstract

Advocacy bias is characterized by a preponderance of published articles that support an academic discipline’s favored causes and paradigms, and by the consequent relative absence of bias countering skeptical/falsifying publications. Such imbalance between paradigm/cause advocates and skeptics can be an indication of a research process that has been corrupted by a widely shared scholarly desire to generate supportive results. The current research makes an empirical contribution to the advocacy bias literature with a content analysis based framework that assesses the level of green marketing (GM) advocacy bias among 107 GM related articles from marketing’s Financial Times (FT) list journals and 9 GM related special issues (SI). Evidence of widespread GM advocacy bias is indicated by the almost complete lack of GM skeptical/falsifying articles. It is hoped that this first empirical examination of advocacy bias within the marketing discipline will inspire more discussion and research on the topic.