Ver artículo

Consumer acculturation is on the rise and of interest to consumer researchers (Askegaard, Arnould, and Kjeldgaard 2005; Chytkova 2011; Dion, Sitz, and Remy 2011; Fernandez, Veer, and Lastovicka 2011; Oswald 1999; Peñaloza 1994; Vihalemm and Keller 2011). Although this research stream’s overarching goal is “to understand and conceptualize the various forces that define, allow, facilitate, or complicate consumer acculturation under specific cultural conditions”(Luedicke 2011, 238), prior studies have predominantly focused on the micro-processes of individual migrants’ cultural adaptation. A few notable exceptions include works on how migrants succumb to institutional domination (Üstüner and Holt 2007) or escape from it by using the market as a form of empowerment (Üstüner and Thompson 2012).

Hence, previous research has devoted surprisingly little attention to the role of macro-institutional variables. In line with this year’s conference theme, this session aims to unpack various institutional forces that make a difference in migrants’ market acculturation through four mature empirical studies (see Appendix 1 for project overview). The papers investigate how different institutional forces (market-mediated ethnic myths, market agents’ imagined ethnic communities, political mergers, and multicultural environments) lead to different manifestations of nostalgia, commonly defined as “a sentimental longing for the past”(Holbrook and Schindler 1991). The authors then examine how these forms of context-driven nostalgia impact various migrant groups’ market acculturation practices and experiences. Collectively, the projects show that different …