ORCID Profile
0000-0002-8977-6088
Current Organisation
Monash University - Caulfield Campus
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Publisher: Emerald
Date: 15-05-2020
Abstract: The consumer acculturation literature argues that reconstituting familiar embodied practices from the culture of origin leads to a comforting sense of home for consumers who move from one cultural context to another. This paper aims to extend this thesis by examining further dimensions in migrant consumers’ experiences of home culture consumption. This paper analyses data gathered through multi-modal depth interviews with Southeast Asian skilled migrants in New Zealand through the conceptual lens of embodiment. Building on Dion et al. ’s (2011) framework of ethnic embodiment, the analysis uncovers home culture consumption as multi-layered experiences of anchoring, de-stabilisation and estrangement, characterised by convergence and ergence between the embodied dimensions of being-in-the-world, being-in-the-world with others and remembering being-in-the-world. This paper underscores home culture consumption in migration as an ambivalent embodied experience. Further research should investigate how other types of acculturating consumers experience and negotiate the changing meanings of home. Marketers in migrant-receiving and migrant-sending cultural contexts should be sensitised to disjunctures in migrants’ embodied experience of consuming home and their role in heightening or mitigating these disjunctures. This paper helps contribute to consumer acculturation theory in two ways. First, the authors show how migrants experience not only comfort and connection but also displacement, in practices of home culture consumption. Second, the authors show how migrant communities do not only encourage cultural maintenance and gatekeeping but also contribute to cultural identity de-stabilisation.
Publisher: Springer Singapore
Date: 2020
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 25-02-2020
Abstract: This article aims to understand how young Korean women respond to the changing ideals of K-beauty, a form of gender imagery embodied by Korean pop celebrities, when such ideals become exported as global cultural products. The findings reveal that K-beauty is characterized by three paradoxical themes: manufactured naturalness, hyper-sexualized cuteness, and the ‘harmonious kaleidoscope’. When we unravel these paradoxes further, we observe that they provoke unsettlement and ambivalence among young Korean women, who shed light on the acculturative labors of concealment, selective resistance, and compliance that permeate the field of K-beauty. We argue that through these new layers of women’s work, the paradoxes in beauty are re-domesticated, the globalizing Western dictates are brought into alignment with neo-Confucian cultural ideology, and a new hybridized hegemonic regime of feminine beauty becomes established.
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 14-09-2015
Abstract: – This paper aims to understand the elements of bridging practices enacted by Asian immigrant consumers and exploring how these practices constitute reverse acculturation within immigrant-receiving Western cultures. – A practice theoretical perspective was deployed in concert with a hermeneutic analysis of two-part depth interviews with 26 Southeast Asian immigrants in New Zealand. Multi-modal methods and open narrative reflexivity were deployed to improve depth and trustworthiness. – Participant narratives revealed three intertwined elements of bridging practices: articulations (involving sayings and meanings), performances (involving embodied social activities and material artefacts) and contestations (involving tensions and anxieties). Bridging practices create shared social spaces and facilitate the intensification of intercultural translation. – Bridging practices provide a partial view of wider “circuits of practice” (Magaudda, 2011) which cumulatively constitute reverse acculturation. Future research is needed to show how bridging practices serve as resources for transforming the consumption practices of local consumers in Western cultures. – This study advances consumer acculturation theory in three ways. First, this study identifies a key practice of intercultural translation between Asian and Western consumer cultures. In particular, this study shows that intercultural translation occurs not only through ethnic economies but also in a erse range of private and public sites. Second, in addition to local consumers’ practices (Sobh et al. , 2012), this study highlights the role of immigrant consumers’ practices in reverse acculturation, thereby providing empirical evidence for Luedicke’s (2011) conceptual model of intercultural adaptation. Third, in addition to the influence of acculturating agents on immigrant consumers (Askegaard et al. , 2005 Peñaloza, 1994), this study demonstrates how immigrant consumers themselves can act as acculturating agents.
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 24-05-2023
Abstract: This study conceptualizes a form of luxury consumption in which luxury brands collaborate with unconventional non-luxury partners. These unconventional luxury brand collaborations are growing in popularity among Chinese luxury consumers of the post-1990s generation. Luxury brands are exploring new branding strategies due to the growing commercial importance of Chinese luxury consumers. An in-depth qualitative study informs this paper. Interviews with young adult luxury consumers self-identifying as Chinese reveal a growing interest for luxury brands that collaborate with odd partners in social media and online culture. Unconventional collaborations between luxury brands and non-luxury partners catalyze shifting meanings of luxury through the following juxtapositions: ephemeral instead of timeless , trendy rather than inaccessible , and playful in contrast with traditional . First, young Chinese consumers construct luxury meanings through ephemerality, like digital possessions, social media fame and fleeting experiences. Second, luxury meanings emerge in trendiness among social media influencers and online culture rather than in the seemingly inaccessible taste regimes of the upper class. Third, younger consumers appreciate fun, rebellious and over-the-top aesthetics in luxury brands. The study contributes to the nascent field of unconventional luxury by conceptualizing how unusual, odd and unexpected collaborations constitute new forms of luxury consumption. The shifting meanings of luxury consumption that this study conceptualizes raise new opportunities and challenges for luxury brands. One of such is the release of limited collections with non-luxury partners seemingly at the opposite spectrum of design, image and values. Moreover, the study adds nuance to the understanding of luxury consumption among young Chinese consumers.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 13-07-2023
DOI: 10.1177/02761467231188005
Abstract: Toxic practices are anti-social interactions that result in a breakdown of communication between consumers. We draw on in-depth interviews, netnography, and insider experience in the context of online gaming to describe the technological configurations that embed the neoliberal logics of competitiveness, in idual responsibilization, and entrepreneurialism. Taken together, these embedded logics craft the toxic consumer subject as the dominant way of inhabiting online spaces. Overall, this study illustrates how technocultures align consumer subjectivity to market logics that erode consumer wellbeing.
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 06-2010
DOI: 10.1108/03090561011032306
Abstract: This paper aims to provide a theoretical analysis of contemporary brand communication for technology products, focused on how the human body functions as a metaphorical and communicative device, to shed insight into how technological brands make their products understandable, tangible, and attractive in interesting ways. An interdisciplinary conceptual review and analysis focuses on issues of metaphor and the body in marketing research and social theory. This analysis is discussed and applied to the communication of technological brands. The paper argues that to successfully communicate technological brands requires interdisciplinary insights in order to understand consumption contexts. It proposes an analytic framework for practice and research focused on visual communication for technology brands and products, and demonstrates how advertising both creates and contributes to culture. Researchers need to understand that a sole focus on the advertising system needs to be supplemented by an understanding of how the symbol of the body in technology advertisements is reflective and productive of meaning in socio‐cultural discourse. Brand researchers need to add to the prevailing advertising as persuasion model to encompass representation and culture in brand communications. The paper contributes to understanding how basic visual forms, such as the human body, are employed in technology product marketing. It challenges marketers and researchers to broaden their conception of branding and marketing communications to one more consistent with an image economy.
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 11-07-2017
Abstract: This paper aims to explore how marketplace-enabled performances help reconstitute masculinity in the context of transnational mobility. Grounded in consumer acculturation theory, this paper draws on theories of gender performance to inform a hermeneutic analysis of depth interviews with skilled migrant men. To navigate experiences of emasculation, participants performed three remasculation strategies: status-based hypermasculinity, localised masculinity and flexible masculinity. This study offers insights for the design of migrant settlement policy. Further research should investigate the remasculation strategies of low resource migrant men. This paper makes two contributions to theories of gendered acculturation. First, while studies of acculturation as a gendered performance have shown how marketplace resources support the gendered identity projects of female migrants and the children of migrants, this paper provides the missing perspective of skilled migrant men. Beyond acting as “resistant” cultural gatekeepers of their family members’ gendered acculturation practices, first-generation migrant men emerge as creative, agentic and skilled negotiators of countervailing gender regimes. Second, transnationally dispersed families, migrant communities and country of origin networks emerge not only as acculturating agents which transmit gender regimes but also as audiences which enable the staging of remasculating performances.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2018
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-2021
Abstract: The international expansion of Korean popular music (K-pop) reflects the increasing dislocation of cultural globalization from Western centers, spurred by the rise of cultural, economic, and political institutions within different regions. This study adopts a translation theory perspective on how the meanings of such cultural products from the “periphery” become transculturally intelligible. In this endeavor, we analyze the role of online fan-generated paratexts in translating the global consumptionscape of K-pop. We reveal how translation practices enable cultural understanding and reinscribe transcultural identity politics, inverting and unsettling “traditional” center-periphery dynamics. Fan translation practices emerge as a key node in processes of cultural globalization, underscoring the role of consumer-as-translator and situating cultural globalization not only in localized spaces but also in the mediated transcultural space of the paratextual field.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 27-12-2018
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2022
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-09-2020
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 03-04-2023
DOI: 10.1093/JCR/UCAD022
Abstract: Countervailing discourses of cultural appreciation versus cultural appropriation are fueling a tension between the ethnic consumer subject, who views the consumption of cultural difference as a valorized identity project, and the responsibilized consumer subject, who is tasked with considering the societal impacts of such consumption. Drawing on an extended qualitative investigation of international K-pop consumers, this study illustrates that this tension spurs consumers to pursue self-authorization—the reflexive reconfiguration of the self in relation to the social world—through which consumers grant themselves permission to continue consuming cultural difference. Four consumer self-authorization strategies are identified: reforming, restraining, recontextualizing, and rationalizing. Each strategy relies upon an amalgam of countervailing moral interpretations about acts of consuming difference, informing ideologies about the power relationships between cultures, and emergent subject positions that situate the consuming self in relation to others whose differences are packaged for consumption. Findings show notable conditions under which each self-authorization strategy is deployed, alongside consumers’ capacity to adjust and recombine different strategies as they navigate changing sociocultural and idiographic conditions. Overall, this study advances understanding of how consumers navigate the resurgent politics of marketized cultural ersity in an era of woke capitalism.
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 13-04-2015
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 12-06-2021
DOI: 10.1177/18393349211022047
Abstract: Combining leisure, travel, and voluntary work, volunteer tourism’s popularity as an alternative travel option is undeniable. Yet postcolonial critiques plague the marketplace and those involved in these aiding efforts. In this article, which is based on consumer interviews involving a photo-elicitation component, we reveal increased presence of consumer reflexivity over neo-colonial aspects of the marketplace in comparison with the findings of past studies. However, great variability marks these consumer responses and the majority attempt to justify the potential harm of their activities abroad to cope with the ambivalence felt about such contradictory outcomes. We suggest closer attention be paid to decolonization theory as an approach to delivering these volunteering interventions in a more holistic and sensitive manner.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 23-07-2022
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 24-09-2018
Abstract: While theories of complex service systems have advanced important insights about integrated care, less attention has been paid to social dynamics in systems with finite resources. This paper aims to uncover a paradoxical social dynamic undermining the objective of integrated care within an HIV care service system. Grounded in a hermeneutic analysis of depth interviews with 26 people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) and drawing on Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of capital consumption to unpack dynamics of power, struggle and contestation, the authors introduce the concept of the service labyrinth. To competently navigate the service labyrinth of HIV care, consumers adopt capital consumption practices. Paradoxically, these practices enhance empowerment at the in idual level but contribute to the fragmentation of the HIV care labyrinth at the system level, ultimately undermining integrated care. This study enhances understanding of integrated care in three ways. First, the metaphor of the service labyrinth can be used to better understand complex care-related service systems. Second, as consumers of care enact capital consumption practices, the authors demonstrate how they do not merely experience but actively shape the care system. Third, fragmentation is expectedly part of the human dynamics in complex service systems. Thus, the authors discuss its implications. Further research should investigate whether a similar paradox undermines integrated care in better resourced systems, acute care systems and systems embedded in other cultural contexts. Contrasted to provider-centric views of service systems, this study explicates a customer-centric view from the perspective of heterosexual PLWHA.
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 12-08-2019
Abstract: This paper aims to propose LARPnography as a more holistic method to probe the emergence of plausible futures, drawing on embodied embedded cognition literature and the emerging consumer practice of live-action role-playing (LARP). Current research methods for probing the future of markets and society rely mainly on expert judgment (i.e. Delphi), imagery or simulation of possible futures (i.e. scenario and simulation) and perspective taking (i.e. role-playing). The predominant focus on cognitive abstraction limits the insights researchers can extract from more embodied, sensorial and experiential approaches. LARPnography is a qualitative method seeking to immerse participants within a plausible future to better understand the social and market dynamics that may unfold therein. Through careful planning, design, casting and fieldwork, researchers create the preconditions to let participants experience what the future may be and gather critical insights from naturalistic observations and post-event interviews. Owing to its interactive nature and processual focus, LARPnography is best suited to investigate the adoption and diffusion of innovation, market emergence phenomena and radical societal changes, including the rise of alternative societies. Different from previous foresight methods, LARPnography creates immersive and perceptually stimulating replicas of plausible futures that research participants can inhabit. The creation of a fictional yet socio-material world ensures that socially constructed meaning is enriched by phenomenological and visceral insights.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 18-05-2023
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 10-04-2017
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to explore the capital-based benefits which arise when acculturating immigrants perform touristic practices, and how these shape their tourism and migration experiences. Grounded in consumer culture theory, this paper draws on theories of capital consumption to inform a hermeneutic analysis of multi-modal depth interviews with Southeast Asian skilled migrants in New Zealand. Domestic touristic practices offer three types of capital-based benefits, enabling consumers to index economic capital, accrue social capital and index cultural capital. Additionally, the quest for capital emphasises iconic forms of tourism and supersedes concerns about commodification. This paper demonstrates the important role of touristic practices not only in short-term mobility, but also for long-term migrants. Further research should investigate how capital shapes the touristic practices of other types of mobile consumers. Understanding the capital-based benefits of touristic practices in acculturation informs the design of migrant settlement policy and the managerial staging of touristic experiences. While theorists of liquid modernity have largely treated tourism as a discrete type of mobility, this paper reframes tourism as a key acculturation practice. In contrast to dominant conceptualisations of tourism as a quest for cultural authenticity, this paper reconceptualises tourism as a quest for capital. Finally, while previous studies have focused on how capital constrains acculturation outcomes, this paper explores how a consumption practice enables the expression and accumulation of capital.
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 09-11-2015
Abstract: – The purpose of this paper is to identify a need to incorporate Asian perspectives in theories of food consumption and marketing. – This editorial discusses the mutually recursive relationship between food and culture in Asian markets, offers an integrative summary of the special issue and develops several key themes for future research. – Food consumption plays a central role within Asian cultures and markets. Thus, understanding Asian perspectives and contexts provides an important complement and contrast to current theories of food consumption and marketing that have been primarily sited in North American and European contexts. In particular, the complex multiplicity of Asian consumer cultures creates dynamic heterogeneity within Asian food markets. – Although food consumption plays a central role in Asian consumer cultures, extant theory regarding Asian food consumption and marketing is still in its infancy. We highlight important developments in this area that suggest a path for future work. – The authors make three contributions to the literature on food consumption and marketing. First, while engaging with these questions, this issue points to the importance of Asian cultural perspectives into the marketing literature on food consumption. Second, through the articles of this special issue, we trace the relationships between food consumption practices, marketing practices and cultural multiplicity in Asian contexts. Finally, we draw the threads together to provide directions for future research in this area.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 25-06-2022
DOI: 10.1177/02734753221103998
Abstract: Teamwork skills are important contributors to classroom learning outcomes and graduate employability. Although much has been reported in the literature about the components and characteristics of effective marketing student teams, less is known about how such knowledge is conceptualized and cultivated by frontline marketing instructors. This study applies a perspective of tacit theory to in-depth interviews with frontline instructors in undergraduate marketing courses. Our findings, summarized in a framework of adaptive cultivation of effective teams (ACET), highlight how instructors perceive effective teamwork as a dynamic interaction between three interwoven components of team effectiveness (team composition, team member behavior, and team culture) and adjust their interventions across these components. Overall, this study uncovers instructors’ tacit theories of cultivating effective marketing student teams, and how these tacit theories impact in-class practices.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 26-01-2022
Abstract: Much of the extant literature on esports consumption has characterized esports consumers as striving for mastery of their gaming skills, with a focus on professional esports players. Through a hermeneutic analysis of the esports literature, insider immersion, and in-depth interviews, this study applies a qualitative research design to illustrate the various journeys that non-professional esports consumers embark upon that incorporate multiple consumption practices. We advance the axes of ‘skills versus culture’ and ‘serious versus casual’ as ways to dimensionalize different consumer journeys. We also demonstrate that consumer journeys in the esports field are fluid, with consumers moving across the different dimensions according to their broader life context.
No related grants have been discovered for Angela Gracia B. Cruz.