Navigating Disciplinary Contradictions in Social Marketing: The DAfSM Framework for Critical Advancement

Abstract

Social marketing faces interconnected challenges across identity formation, educational provision, and global knowledge representation. Existing scholarship treats these as separate problems, but this paper argues they are manifestations of competing institutional logics: market logic privileging commercial orientation, academic logic rewarding methodological conformity, and public welfare logic demanding transformative social impact. Underpinning these tensions are epistemological questions about what counts as valid knowledge and whose knowledge is recognised, questions that existing frameworks have not systematically addressed. We introduce the Disciplinary Advancement Framework for Social Marketing (DAfSM), which provides analytical tools for engaging with these tensions deliberately rather than reproducing them unconsciously. DAfSM integrates institutional logics theory to diagnose competing pressures, institutional work to specify how actors create, maintain, and disrupt disciplinary structures, and reflective equilibrium as a method for iteratively navigating tensions that resist permanent resolution. Drawing on philosophical accounts of knowledge as socially situated and contextually grounded, the framework distinguishes structural exclusion from paradigmatic exclusion as two analytically separate mechanisms through which Global South and community knowledge is marginalised within the discipline. An illustrative application to the African Social Marketing Association (AfSMA) demonstrates the framework's diagnostic and generative capacity across identity, educational, and epistemic domains. The paper contributes a theoretically grounded framework that moves beyond mapping disciplinary tensions to enabling strategic engagement with them, with transferable implications for applied disciplines facing analogous contradictions between institutional legitimacy and transformative capacity.