Morris B Holbrook, one of his colleagues, wrote of him that he shared insights with younger members of that faculty “in a spirit of generosity seldom encountered in academia.”[3] He previously taught as senior lecturer at what is now Cranfield University from 1962 to 1967.
[4] This experience was to influence his subsequent academic study; he was part of the last generation of business school professors to have worked extensively in industry.
As a consultant he had many clients, including Shell, British Petroleum, Interpublic, IBM, Nestlé, Chester Barrie, Kidder Peabody, Citicorp and the International Labour Office.
Thirdly, O’Shaughnessy has been a significant advocate of interpretivist approaches to marketing and consumption phenomena, and highly critical of mechanistic models of how decisions are made.
His was a broad canvas, introducing into academic marketing, often for the first time, concepts and theories from an extensive range of social sciences and philosophy.
He argued that the social sciences represent different perspectives which provided additional windows onto a problem but they seldom individually offered sufficient explanations.
[6] Quoting Abraham Kaplan, he often joked that academics trained in a specific social science tradition were like a small boy given a hammer who finds "that everything he encounters needs pounding.
Morris B. Holbrook wrote of his “brilliantly compendious, beautifully integrated books” which, together with his conversation, “burst with intellectual energy, creative impulses, and unbounded curiosity.”[8] In general he stood against the over-rationalisation of our understanding of decision-making.
A restless rebel against intellectual provincialism of business schools, John O’Shaughnessy's work has emerged as a useful corrective to un-interrogated paradigms, norms and habits within the discipline.