Marketing and education — A clash or a synergy in time? Paul Gibbs Middlesex University, National Centre for Work Based learning Partnerships, Trent Park Campus, Bramley Road, London N14 YYZ, United Kingdom Received 1 June 2006; received in revised form 1 December 2006; accepted 1 January 2007 Abstract The notion of temporality receives little attention in the marketing literature and even less in recent literature on higher education. This paper discusses the notion of the temporality implicit in liberal higher education (where personal growth is its goal) and the temporality implicit in much of marketing activity. Marketing practice depends upon technique whilst the goal of education is practical wisdom transcending immediate time horizons. This situation creates a potential conflict that the hegemonic power of the market and its reproductive process, marketing, currently resolves. This marketing resolution constrains, enframes and forecloses what education might be. © 2007 Published by Elsevier Inc. Keywords: Marketing; Education; Time [T]ime refers not only to the way in which temporality is mediated differently by institutions, administrators, faculty and students, but also how it shapes and allocates power, identities, and space through a particular set of codes and interests. (Giroux and Giroux, 2004:226) This paper suggests that marketing has contributed to the foreshortening of educational horizons through representing the world-as-a-picture (to borrow from Heidegger) within which actions occur. The application of the concept of marketing to education tends to emphasize control of satisfaction and efficiency in the immediacy of the knowable present. The hegemonic use of Western social clock time changes the unexpectedness, excitement and creativity of the future to the predictability of accountable events situated in a linear extension of the present. To use the terminology of Giroux (2003) and Giroux and Giroux (2004), the corporate time of action, measurement and efficiency in the epoch of consumer- ism usurps the public time gifted for the use of the university for reflection and critical appraisal of society, its knowledge and its moral positioning. The premise of the argument is that current educational marketing supports a temporal system which renders the tem- porality of its entities temporal-less through the cocooning of temporality in a chrysalis of the present structured by the use of marketing which promises clear, predictable outcomes designed to satisfy customer expectations. Changing the issue of the uncertainty of the future gives legitimacy to one meta-economic narrative where the extra return on incomes for degree holders provides the main customer incentive to buy. One of the consequences of education so marketed is the promoting of higher education on the basis of a means to an end and not an end in itself. 1. The world of higher education — intentions or possibilities? The educational interpretation of people is about them having a potentiality or an actuality which their multifaceted action can realize, whereas the marketing interpretation of action is mainly concerned with consumption. For Heidegger, the potentiality of an entity is its standing-reserve, which its use and functionality realizes (Heidegger, 1977:117). Heidegger diagnoses modern technology as Ge-stell, ‘enframing’, a process of extracting which transforms the natural world into Bestand, ‘standing-reserve’— a state in which objects per se no longer exist in or for themselves but only in or for something else. Techne realizes their purpose (Heidegger, 1977). This concept is very helpful for it does not presuppose the essential purpose of the object, just all the things the object might be. This position differs from one based on an Journal of Business Research 60 (2007) 1000 – 1002 E-mail address: p.gibbs@mdx.ac.cy . 0148-2963/$ - see front matter © 2007 Published by Elsevier Inc. doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2007.01.025