Community development : an emergent marketing system perspective

This paper argues that emergent concepts of marketing system are oriented with structural approach appropriate to examine community development. Structured marketing system, in purpose, emerges from isolated individual transactions, develops into clusters or groups with increasing complexities embodied in multi-level exchanges between individuals and groups. Such complexities in turn create new knowledge and skills that offer trade opportunities, and at one stage present socioeconomic benefits to individual, group and the community at large. Ethnographic research applied in this study examines the influence of marketing system, as an emergent concept, and delves into the multi-facet approach of community development.