Publication Date
9-14-2026
Digital Publisher
Digital Commons at St. Mary's University
Description
Teaching marketing involves more than helping students learn disciplinary concepts and frameworks. It also involves developing processes of inquiry that prepare students to analyze complex situations, interpret evidence, exercise judgment, and make thoughtful professional decisions. As marketing practice continues to evolve, marketing education must similarly reconsider how courses, assignments, and learning experiences prepare students for professional practice (Grewal et al., 2025). Lonergan’s Generalized Empirical Method (GEM) offers one framework for structuring this process of inquiry. Lonergan, writing as a philosopher, theologian, and educator, initially described the underlying pattern of conscious operations as the transcendental method. In his later work, he increasingly used the term Generalized Empirical Method (GEM) to emphasize that empirical inquiry encompasses not only external experience but also the internal operations of consciousness through which individuals understand, judge, and decide (Lonergan, 1972/2017, 1985). Because GEM identifies a general structure of human inquiry rather than a method specific to any one discipline, it can be adapted to the questions, evidence, and practices of particular fields.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Collection
San Jose - Lonergan Chair in Catholic Philosophy
Format
docx
Medium
Manuscript
City
San Antonio, Texas
Document Type
Article
Included in
Educational Methods Commons, Marketing Commons, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons