Abstract

The globalization of the marketplace and how this process is shaping the cultural characteristics of people around the world is arguably the most critical issue facing international marketing managers today. Powerful forces such as capitalism, global communications, marketing, and transnational cosmopolitanism are interacting to dissolve the boundaries across national cultures and economies, and in the eyes of many, accelerating the emergence of a homogeneous 'global consumer culture'. Others have countered that globalization serves to reactivate and strengthen national and ethnic identities; in other words, rather than suppressing cultural differences, globalization may actually promote them. Still others have argued that globalization is reducing the homogeneity of consumer behaviors within countries, while increasing communalities across countries. Despite the widespread discourse on this topic, there is a scarcity of studies that have simultaneously considered both global and local cultural influences on consumer behavior, and a complete lacking of a way for measuring how individuals acquire and become a part of this emerging global consumer culture. This absence is all the more glaring, given that culture exerts the broadest and deepest influence on consumer behavior. The extant acculturation studies have generally focused on culture change occurring within the narrow context of minority-culture ethnic groups (usually immigrants) adapting to the alternative host cultures, and not from the broader perspective of how a deterritorialized, global culture shapes local cultures, consumers, and their behaviors, around the world. The first major contribution of this dissertation concerns the development and validation of a multidimensional scale for the measurement of acculturation to global consumer culture, via a series of qualitative and quantitative studies. The second major contribution is the articulation of theoretical framework for assessing the selective, contextual nature of both global and local cultural influences on an array of consumer values and behaviors. Survey data was gathered from respondents in eight countries to test the proposed model and associated hypotheses. The findings demonstrate that both ethnic identification and global-culture acculturation are multidimensional, selective, and contextual processes, in that the acquisition of new cultural characteristics and the maintenance or loss of traditional ones varies from trait to trait and from situation to situation