For the 25th anniversary of Economic and Business Studies at the UOC, professors Pacheco-Bernal and Jiménez-Zarco reflect on the way in which technology has influenced the disciplines of marketing and market research, both in terms of their evolution and their scope. They also present challenges linked to these disciplines and faced by organizations at a key moment of digital transformation. For marketing, technology has provided a before and after. Basic concepts that currently determine the core of the discipline emerge and are consolidated as technology places new tools, devices, channels and even environments within our reach. Marketing is going from the field of short-term sales to building and maintaining, in real time, complex and lasting relationships with a strong emotional component between agents of various natures and with varying interests. In terms of market research, the potential offered by the development of new technologies in understanding consumers, while it has not eclipsed more traditional market research, has modified the panorama with regard to the quality and quantity of the information obtained and the breadth of methodological options for gathering data. In the midst of the digital era, the integration of data coming from various sources and the use of hybrid methodologies enable the sector to anticipate trends and better understand market behaviour.

In the last twenty-five years – from 1996 to 2021 – a series of actions have marked the evolution of the economy: from transformations linked to new information and communication technologies to the Covid-19 pandemic, among other things, through to the financial and economic crisis of the second half of the first decade of the 21st century. In this article, we look at the impact of events in the last twenty-five years on economics teaching, whether this is evolving alongside the economic reality or not, what has given rise to a mismatch between economics and the social and economic reality. To analyze this, in the first section, we will tackle the social mission of the “economist” in the sense of being teachers of highly diverse collectives, and in the second section, we will reflect on the evolution of economics teaching at University. The analysis leads us to conclude that, although economics teaching has varied over time, it has not undergone substantial change in recent decades. The lack of diversity of thinking in economics curricula joins forces with a lack of diversity among prominent thinkers and professionals to often translate into an incomplete view explaining the complex economic reality and an interaction with other disciplines, particularly social sciences.

The technologies based on artificial intelligence and robotics are one of the leading challenges facing us now with regards to the future of human work. The so-called Industry 4.0 is placing various business models in doubt, transforming training requirements for the system of production, and is progressively impacting on the distribution of profit.

The Spanish labour market provides a good example of how this new wave of technological change can have an impact on the levels and especially the structure of employment. A growing polarisation can be seen in labour demand and employment opportunities in accordance with educational levels and the various effects of labour imbalance, which are principally attributable to the characteristics of a dominant production model that is intensive in tasks of a routine nature but not particularly active in the incorporation of emerging technologies.

This article analyses the concept of industrial revolution, from its origins at the end of the 19th century up to the current excitement surrounding a supposed Fourth Industrial Revolution. Despite being an idea that is firmly embedded in the Western cultural imagination and in the field of academics, numerous historiographic, economic and sociological studies carried out in recent decades have deeply questioned it. In this article we will explore, on the one hand, its most widely-known deficiencies – which for many make it a spurious concept, loaded with erroneous suppositions and an obsolete vision of technological development - and, on the other, some of the ideological and political effects of its use.