Marketplace Justice in Marketing Systems: A Macromarketing Conceptualization

This article develops marketplace justice as a macromarketing framework for evaluating exchange at the level of marketing systems. Building on longstanding research on system organization, social responsibility, distribution, sustainability, and quality of life, it integrates established justice concerns into five interdependent dimensions: access, transparency, procedural protection, distributive balance, and developmental contribution. A critical realist, interpretive, and normative conceptual approach situates these dimensions within the institutional conditions of exchange. The framework treats justice as a system-level ethical condition whose dimensions cannot be assessed as independent or fully substitutable attributes. It distinguishes marketplace justice from adjacent ideas such as transactional fairness, consumer welfare, and corporate responsibility while acknowledging their overlap, especially with structural accounts of distributive justice. The article explains how deficiencies in one dimension can limit the ethical significance of strengths in another and outlines implications for market legitimacy and longer-term human, ecological, and more-than-human well-being.