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Beyond Acculturation: Multiculturalism and the Institutional Shaping of an Ethnic Consumer Subject

Beyond Acculturation: Multiculturalism and the Institutional Shaping of an Ethnic Consumer Subject Prior consumer research has investigated the consumer behavior, identity work, and sources of ethnic group conflict among various immigrants and indigenes. However, by continuing to focus on consumers’ lived experiences, researchers lack theoretical clarity on the institutional shaping of these individuals as ethnic consumers, which has important implications for sustaining neocolonial power imbalances between colonized (immigrant-sending) and colonizing (immigrant-receiving) cultures. We bring sociological theories of neoliberal governmentality and multiculturalism to bear on an in-depth analysis of the contemporary Canadian marketplace to reveal our concept of market-mediated multiculturation, which we define as an institutional mechanism for attenuating ethnic group conflicts through which immigrant-receiving cultures fetishize strangers and their strangeness in their commodification of differences, and the existence of inequalities between ethnicities is occluded. Specifically, our findings unpack four interrelated consumer socialization strategies (envisioning, exemplifying, equipping, and embodying) through which institutional actors across different fields (politics, market research, retail, and consumption) shape an ethnic consumer subject. We conclude with a critical discussion of extant scholarship on consumer acculturation as being complicit in sustaining entrenched colonialist biases. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Consumer Research Oxford University Press

Beyond Acculturation: Multiculturalism and the Institutional Shaping of an Ethnic Consumer Subject

Journal of Consumer Research , Volume 45 (3): 18 – Oct 1, 2018

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References (66)

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
ISSN
0093-5301
eISSN
1537-5277
DOI
10.1093/jcr/ucy019
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Prior consumer research has investigated the consumer behavior, identity work, and sources of ethnic group conflict among various immigrants and indigenes. However, by continuing to focus on consumers’ lived experiences, researchers lack theoretical clarity on the institutional shaping of these individuals as ethnic consumers, which has important implications for sustaining neocolonial power imbalances between colonized (immigrant-sending) and colonizing (immigrant-receiving) cultures. We bring sociological theories of neoliberal governmentality and multiculturalism to bear on an in-depth analysis of the contemporary Canadian marketplace to reveal our concept of market-mediated multiculturation, which we define as an institutional mechanism for attenuating ethnic group conflicts through which immigrant-receiving cultures fetishize strangers and their strangeness in their commodification of differences, and the existence of inequalities between ethnicities is occluded. Specifically, our findings unpack four interrelated consumer socialization strategies (envisioning, exemplifying, equipping, and embodying) through which institutional actors across different fields (politics, market research, retail, and consumption) shape an ethnic consumer subject. We conclude with a critical discussion of extant scholarship on consumer acculturation as being complicit in sustaining entrenched colonialist biases.

Journal

Journal of Consumer ResearchOxford University Press

Published: Oct 1, 2018

Keywords: ethnic consumer; acculturation; multiculturalism; neoliberalism; neocolonialism

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