Abstract
Marketing student internships are widely discussed in the literature, yet little has been published regarding the value of marketing faculty internships. In applied disciplines like marketing, faculty internships can bridge experience gaps between theory and practice and help provide critical information to keep the curriculum current. Unfortunately, politics can manifest itself as one barrier to academic engagement with the business community. To explore this potential problem, we first test a model that measures the influence political party combined with political ideology has on three Contempt-Anger-Disgust (CAD) outcome measures common in psychology literature. We model a statistically significant political backdrop that may present challenges to the development of marketing faculty internships in practitioner settings in the first section. The second part of this analysis presents crosstabulated results of practitioner opinions for a series of eighteen items remaining in our survey. Based on our results, marketing faculty members should consider benefits that can accrue from internship opportunities in the private sector. Despite some doubt and concern, and regardless of their individual politics, approximately seven out of ten practitioners express positive views toward having a marketing internship for faculty members at their workplace.