Marketplace Canada: Some Controversial Dimensions

Karl Burak was a solicitor in North Vancouver, B.C.

Shapiro and Heslop have compiled an eminently marketable textbook comprised of essays about current controversial and engrossing subjects related to the marketplace of Canada. The students who use this work have the rare opportunity to learn and analyze basic aspects of marketing in Canada by studying such contemporary issues as the Crow rate, advertising directed at children, electronic point-of-sale systems, the Westinghouse Canada takeover, and the Sears-Hudson’s Bay merger — subjects that stimulate and encourage thought.

The organization of the contents is sensible. There are three perspectives: consumers, industry, and politics — in short, the basic elements of the marketplace; the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of the market place. In this form the text is ideal for instruction. It affords an opportunity to develop a curriculum that follows the pattern of the book, with relevant additions and supplements, while it maintains a logical direction. The essays themselves, by capable authors, follow an imperative formula of statements, questions, discussions, and conclusions. The result is a functional text, debate-oriented, provocative, and educational.

The tone is basically historical, objective and analytic. The essays are free of strong opinion and distorted views. They report the relevant facts, ask questions, pose arguments, draw conclusions, and ask more questions. None of the essays answers all the questions; every essay challenges the student to form opinions and find his own answers. The answers will be well founded, given the careful scholarship that underlies the work.